Bionic Bodies, Posthuman Violence and the Disembodied Criminal Subject
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Bionic Bodies, Posthuman Violence and the Disembodied Criminal Subject Sabrina Gilani1 Accepted: 6 November 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
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. Keywords Bionic bodies · Corporeality · Criminal law theory · Embodiment · New materialism · Posthumanism
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. In the way that these offences are structured, how they are adjudicated, we are given the impression that the body is a natural, * Sabrina Gilani [email protected] 1
School of Law, University of Sussex, Brighton, Sussex BN1 9RH, UK
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pre-given, incontestable feature of human existence. That there is a realness to the body, a materiality that underpins all historical, socio-cultural interpretations of it, and which is independently and intimately implicated in the experience of violence. Whether bodies are recognised as Black or White, male or female, citizen or noncitizen, there is a realness to violence, we believe, that pre-exists the law. There are things violence can do to our bodies, does do to our bodies, which demand criminal legal intervention. With this in mind the criminal law sets itself the task of limiting the body’s exposure to violence and punishing it when it occurs (Ashworth and Horder 2013, p. 237). Operating on the assumption that there is an ahistorical, natural, passive material body—the biological body—the criminal law imputes to its experiences a shared morality (Ashworth and Horder 2013, p 35). On this basis, all humans, given our shared biological history, are believ
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