Crime, sovereignty, and the State: the metaphysics of global disorder

Contatto di riferimento: Antonio Schiavulli

Jean Comaroff (Harvard University)

This address explores the world-wide preoccupation with criminality in the early twenty-first century, a preoccupation strikingly disproportionate, in most places and for most people, to the risks posed by lawlessness to the conduct of everyday life. Ours in an epoch in which law-making, law-breaking, and law-enforcement are ever more critical registers in which societies construct, contest, and confront truths about themselves. I argue that, as the result of a tectonic shift of global scale in the triangulation of capital, the state, and governance, the meanings attached to crime and, with it, the nature of policing, have undergone significant change; also, that there has been a palpable muddying of the lines between legality and illegality, between corruption and conventional business – even between crime-and-policing, which exist, nowadays, in ever greater, hyphenated complicity. Drawing most immediately on material from South Africa and the USA, the lecture is an excursion into the contemporary Order of Things; or, rather, into the metaphysic of disorder that saturates the late modern world.