근대적 범죄학의 계보학

A Genealogy of Modem Criminology in Caleb Williams and Political Justice

In this paper, I explicate the way Caleb confronts the contemporary apparatus of discursivity of criminality and the way he overcomes the apparatus. While being pursued by his master Falkland, Caleb is captured by the apparatus of security which imprisoned supposedly dangerous individuals, beggars, vagrants, criminals, etc. Caleb, who disguised himself as an Irish beggar, is arrested by the police precisely because he is regarded as a supposedly dangerous person. In order to evade the police, Caleb uses his disguise, a fiction or impersonation that resists the controlling police system and then finally succeeds in deceiving it, revealing its incompleteness. With the advent of the apparatus of security, there also emerged modem criminal law which aimed to prevent the future crime of supposedly dangerous individuals. In the scene of disguise and examination, therefore, Caleb who is supposed to be a beggar must explain that he is not a beggar in order not to be sent to a workhouse. In addition to this scene where he has to explain who he is, the first trial scene also presents how the truth-regime of criminality works by forcing him to defend himself against the suspicion of theft. In a court, he fails to defend himself and thus he is wrongly confined in a prison. Toward the end of the novel, however, Caleb comes to realize the way the contemporary truth-regime operates and he starts to tell a truth which challenges the fabricated truth of his crime. Resisting this truth-regime of criminality which provides an imperative to him, "Defend yourself," he produces his own counter-narrative, his own truth-telling. In a word, through counter-narratives in Caleb Williams and Political Justice, Caleb and Godwin reveal the internal deficiency of the contemporary criminal law and its truth-regime of criminality.