Abstract
This article contributes to recent existentialist interventions in critical criminology (see Lippens and Crewe 2009) and offers the existential concept of ‘event’ as a guiding image for critical victimology. Whereas existential criminologists have examined crime and wrongdoing, very little attention has been given to victimization. I utilize the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Claude Romano to offer a critique of existing approaches to victimization within mainstream criminology and develop an evential analytic to understand the event of victimization. This paper brings together existential philosophy and victimology to offer an alternative approach to victimization. I engage with the ‘problem of number’ in conventional victimology and offer a critique of quantitative approaches to victimization based on the unsubstitutability and singularity of existence. Through a discussion of selfhood and embodiment from an evential standpoint, this paper moves beyond existing victimological approaches to identity. I also consider the relationship between victimization and trauma. In the final section of the paper I carve out an alternative research agenda through a discussion of bearing witness and events of victimization.
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Notes
Romano uses ‘his’ and ‘her’ interchangeably throughout his texts. The use of the masculine is not intended, in any way, to imply that evential hermeneutics is reserved for male or masculine advenants.
Accordingly, birth is the primordial event according to which the human being is given or advents.
On a broader societal level, Rose (1999) has shown how numbers are integral to the problematizations that shape what is to be governed, to the programmes that seek to give effect to government and to the unrelenting evaluation of the performance of government that characterizes modern political culture. On the darker side, Rose (1999) notes that numbers played an important role in the Nazi Germany policy of killing those whose lives were deemed not worth living which was justified by detailed calculations about the costs to the German Reich of maintaining the mentally ill and others deemed socially unfit.
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Aimee Campeau, Nicolas Carrier, Charlie Gibney, Robyn Green, Ronnie Lippens, Justin Piche, Kevin Walby, Sandra Walklate and Andrew Woolford for comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.
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Spencer, D. Event and Victimization. Criminal Law, Philosophy 5, 39–52 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-010-9108-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-010-9108-3