Gabriel Tarde, along with Durkheim and others, set the foundations for what is today a common-sense statement in social science: crime is a social phenomenon. However, the questions about what social is and what kind of social phenomenon crime is remain alive. Tarde’s writings have answers for both of these capital and interdependent problems and serve to renew our view of them. The aim of this article is to reconstruct Tarde’s definition of crime in terms of genus and specific difference, (...) exploring his criminology as a case of his general sociology. This procedure shows that Tarde succeeded in creating a comprehensive theory of crime and criminals founded not only on his most well-known concept, imitation, but also on his equally important concepts of invention, opposition, social logic and social teleology. For Tarde, crime is a complex phenomenon related to criminal inventions, criminal propagations, the production of penal laws, the execution of controls and punishments, and the collective reactions to all these. (shrink)

In this article culture is understood as the ensemble of systems of classification, assessment, and interaction that establishes a basic community of values in a given social field. We will argue that this is made possible through the institution of fundamental prohibitions understood as mythical points of closure that set the last frontiers of that community by designating what crime is. Exploring these theses, we will see that criminal transgression may be thought of as the actualization of a rigorous otherness. (...) This otherness, however, is nothing but the culture itself in its extreme vectors, its contradictions, and residues. From there we will differentiate three types of crimes: paroxysmal, archaic, and impossible. And we will conclude that the criminal question it is not a ‘social problem’ among others. Rather, it is a fundamental crossroad where the very constitution of any culture is at stake. It is the question of the beginning and end of the societal order and its subjects. (shrink)

El texto analiza los principios fundamentales en torno a los cuales Gabriel Tarde construye su aproximación a la vida social. Esta perspectiva, elaborada hacia fines del siglo XIX, se encuentra notablemente descentrada tanto respecto de los holismos como los individualismos que dominaron las ciencias sociales y las humanidades durante el siglo siguiente. Una de las principales razones de ello es que su punto de partida filosófico no fue Kant, Hegel o Marx, sino Leibniz. Tarde elabora una teoría social (neo) monadológica. (...) Es decir, produce una concepción infinitista de lo social articulada en torno auna ontología y una epistemología de los infinitesimales y sus conceptos asociados. Esto es lo que se propone mostrar el presente trabajo. (shrink)

Esquizo-análisis y micro-política, economía libidinal, microfísica del poder: tales son los nombres Deleuze y Guattari, Lyotard y Foucault asignaron a sus respectivos abordajes del campo socio-histórico y de la subjetividad. En el presente trabajo nos proponemos reconstruir los rasgos principales del enfoque metateórico general que, entendemos, configuran estos abordajes. Dada la escala microscópica en la que se propone trabajar, y dado el rol que en él juega el concepto de línea o flujo, sugeriremos caracterizar a este enfoque como paradigma de (...) la diferencia infinitesimal. Buscaremos mostrar que se trata de uno de sus conceptos básicos, y lo utilizaremos como vía de acceso a su sintaxis. Veremos que es un operador clave en el rechazo de las tradicionales alternativas individuo-sociedad, naturaleza-cultura, política-economía-sociedad, y en la producción de una imagen radicalmente relacional de lo social, lo político y lo subjetivo. (shrink)

El trabajo presenta una lectura general del posestructuralismo y lo describe como unconjunto heterogéneo de teorizaciones acerca de lo social, lo político y lo subjetivoque tuvieron al estructuralismo, al freudismo y al marxismo como referencias complejas.Proponemos caracterizar al posestructuralismo por sus operaciones de “atravesamiento” de estas referencias y distinguir en el desarrollo de sus investigaciones dos grandes etapas: una vinculada a la afirmación de la diferencia radical y la crítica a las concepciones totalizantes de sistema, y la otra ligada a (...) la reconceptualización de los sistemas como multiplicidades o no-todos. En este trabajo, examinaremos principalmente la primera etapa, y solo esbozaremos algunos elementos claves para la comprensión de la segunda. (shrink)

This article explores the relationships between crime, collective responses to it, and the social production of so-called great criminals. It argues that crime, especially sexual and violent crime, produces significant imbalances in individuals habitually subject to instrumental actions, identitarian thinking and positive law. These imbalances are emotional as well as cognitive and, under certain conditions of communication, can generate states of multitude, that is, collective states linked to an intense affectivity and to the prevalence of mythic or symbolic thinking. These (...) states reach their limits and become condensed in the mytho-historical figure of the great criminal. In this sense, great criminals are a function of such multitudinous states: points of imputation that concentrate and catalyze the affective imagination unleashed by collective effervescence. (shrink)