Bionic Bodies, Posthuman Violence and the Disembodied Criminal Subject

Sabrina Gilani

doi:10.1007/s10978-020-09284-6

Abstract

This article examines how the so-called disembodied criminal subject is given structure and form through the law of homicide and assault. By analysing how the body is materialised through the criminal law’s enactment of death and injury, this article suggests that the biological positioning of these harms of violence as uncontroversial, natural, and universal conditions of being ‘human’ cannot fully appreciate what makes violence wrongful for us, as embodied entities. Absent a theory of the body, and a consideration of corporeality, the criminal law risks marginalising, or altogether eliding, experiences of violence that do not align with its paradigmatic vision of what bodies can and must do when suffering its effects. Here I consider how the bionic body disrupts the criminal law’s understanding of human violence by being a body that is both organic and inorganic, and capable of experiencing and performing violence in unexpected ways. I propose that a criminal law that is more receptive to the changing, technologically mediated conditions of human existence would be one that takes the corporeal dimensions of violence more seriously and, as an extension of this, adopts an embodied, embedded, and relational understanding of human vulnerability to violence.

Highlights

A theory of the body is curiously absent from the criminal law on violence
Of the paper I explain how death and injury, as material-discursive constructs, firstly, opens up new, non-anthropocentric, channels of thinking about homicide and assault; secondly, why this thinking is crucial given the emergence of bionic bodies; and lastly, how we might imagine criminal violence using the insights of posthuman theory and new materialism
Bionic bodies only bring to light this continuing tendency of the criminal law to discern the human from the nonhuman, to privilege one set of material experiences and ways of being over others, and to make judgments about human existence and identity based on criteria which enable its own version of the ‘human’ to be universalised

Summary

Introduction

A theory of the body is curiously absent from the criminal law on violence. It is remarkable that the law of homicide and assault, offences that are so intimately connected with bodily experience, never question the body in condemning violence and prohibiting its commission. Of the paper I explain how death and injury, as material-discursive constructs, firstly, opens up new, non-anthropocentric, channels of thinking about homicide and assault; secondly, why this thinking is crucial given the emergence of bionic bodies; and lastly, how we might imagine criminal violence using the insights of posthuman theory and new materialism.

Results

Conclusion