The Crime of Writing : Narratives and Shared Meanings in Criminal Cases in Baathist Syria
AUTEUR
Zouhair Ghazzal
INFORMATIONS
Collection : CP 38
Presses de l’Ifpo 2015
ISBN 978-2-35159-710-1
586 p.
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Sommaire
Cases by chapter 1
Prologue 5
From the primal scene to the crime scene 6
Plan of the book 25
Acknowledgments 28
Transliteration 32
Chapter 1. The political economy of crime 35
- The civic foundations of the new post‑Ottoman legal order 35
- This is not good enough to stay 46
- Criminalizing the economy 52
- Bailouts of so‑called credit collectors 59
- What happened to the personality? 71
- The old sultanic order and the new civic virtues 79
- Why the demonstrability of crime has become that importan 83
- The blueprint of undecipherable statistics 91
Chapter 2. What would stand as enough evidence? 101
- What is enough evidence? 105
- The aura of witnessing 108
- Memory, time, and forgetting 110
- Between performance and morality: why direct interrogation is all that matters 110
- The crime of writing The unspoken honor 115
- The unveiling of the mute ground of discourse 117
- Wither Oedipus? 131
Chapter 3. There is no crime where there is madness 143
- What happened? 145
- The insane shepherd‑who‑writes 148
- The criminal case as a legal artifact 161
- Is he competent to stand trial? 167
- Was he insane? 176
- My client is known to be an idiot 177
- Writing insanity 179
- The accused is now in a borderline state 183
- Common understandings and misunderstandings 188
Chapter 4. Auto-biographies: Self and Other in Confessional Criminal Narratives 195
- Matters of fact 198
- Autobiographical confessions 201
- Crime or suicide? 210
- Anatomy of a confession: the unwritten law of abuse 222
- I admit that I was abusive towards my teenage daughter, but does that make me look like a criminal worthy of incarceration? 22
- All those silent observers 233
- The father’s gaze and the daughter’s guilt 239
Chapter 5. The death penalty, torture, and due process 245
- So that they may become a lesson to others: why the death penalty still matters 245
- When does torture become commonplace? 248
- The death penalty is too little for people like that 251
- Let’s keep everything in secret 256
- Contents VII You must become independent 268
- Torture and its limits 273
- Torture as the obscene supplement of Law 293
- There is something wrong with my wife’s sexuality 295
- That which we dare not speak about 299
- Strong mother, weak son‑in‑law 303
- The semantics of love and sexuality 304
- They spoke too much, or too little 306
- Selective use of language, key‑wording, and language games 310
- That immoral thing 311
- When the Law enjoys itself 312
Chapter 6. The problem of recipiency in honor killings 317
- From “murder” to “honorable killing” 320
- My husband and my mother were not lovers 324
- Rethinking recipiency in honor killings 329
- Negotiating sexual freedom 336
- Struggling with motive 337
- Swingers: unconventional hedonistic lives, and the exchange of sexual partners 339
- The price of sexual freedom 340
- Oedipus unbound 341
- Documenting the indescribable 349
- Triple rapes 352
- Denying the facts, finding the truth 359
Chapter 7. When punishment is left to the judiciary: Kin wars between shared meanings and law 365
- How did you do such a thing? 368
- Are you kin affiliated? 371
- Potential victims 378
- The crime of writing Parsing the narrative threads 380
- Relatives are always a surprise 382
- Murder and the dynamics of kinship 384
- Witnessing the everydayness of kin, violence, and sexuality 386
- Wouldn’t it have been simpler? 387
- The kin who surprise us 388
Chapter 8. A danger to society: they must therefore all disappear 391
- Arson and matricide: the daughter rehabilitates the law 394
- The violence of the mute woman and the power of speech 401
- The emergence of the criminal spectator 407
- I tempted him with some money 412
- I saw my divorcée lying down with her new fiancé 421
- Shameful sex in the vicinity of the husband’s corpse 425
- Tales of sexual jouissance 430
Chapter 9. The place of third parties in land crimes 435
- Honor, kin, land, and modernity 436
- The landed aristocracy 439
- Anatomy of a murder scene 441
- The return of the repressed 444
- The mantle of the father 447
- Right‑of‑passage 456
- Typology of a police report regarding the relatedness of the assailants: how local relations of power are interpreted and processed 459
- Keying into the kinship database 461
- Mitigated (cross‑)examinations 461
- The political economy of land and crime 464
- They had abused of their relationship to society 471
- Murder always implies a third party 473
Chapter 10. Photoshopping the president: Men at work in the age of socialism 479
- A crook should know how and when to quit 479
- A crook who went too far 489
- Accounts, reflexivity, and indexical expressions 499
- Why is such a metamorphosis important? 500
- Petty thefts and pernicious crack habits 510
- How dangerous were they? 518
Chapter 11. Le moment de conclure 525
- Relevant penal code articles 541
- Glossary 547
- Bibliography 553
- Index 559