The Pathological Axis

Abstract

The celebrated sociologist Erving Goffman reminds us that it was the Greeks who ‘originated the term stigma to refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier’ (1968: 11), some ‘special discrepancy between virtual and actual social identity’ (ibid. 12–13) that acts as a sign of a ‘tainted, discredited’ self (ibid. 12), the realisation of something ‘defiling’ within (ibid. 18), which leads not only to feelings of ‘shame’, but also ‘self-hatred and self-derogation’ (ibi.). Indeed, it was Goffman who presented us with the classic contemporary analysis of stigma as a social and a psychological process, but it was the Czech novelist Franz Kafka who left us with the most visceral and affecting evocation of stigma in the operation of his combined torture and execution ‘apparatus’, as described in his short story In the Penal Colon. (1992 [1919]). In this typically minimalist tale the outer stigma is a ‘sentence’, both a judicial sentence and a literal sentence of words articulating this judgement, inscribed into the flesh of a prisoner through the slow, excruciating action of a set of glass needles. Strapped to a table and subjected to this mutilation over a period of 12 h as the needles cut deeper and deeper, the sentence becomes a spectacular means of executing criminals, presumably as an example to others, but it is also a means of exposing a truth about the criminal, his sentence, and not just to others but also to himself as he is, in fact, unaware of what his sentence is and must ‘decipher it with his wounds’ (1992 [1919]: 137).