Dr. Marc Angenot
Professor of French Language and Literature
McGill University

Divergent Reasonings and Dialogues of the Deaf : Why Do We Often Find Others "Irrational" ?

Divergences de raisonnement et dialogues de sourds. Pourquoi trouvons-nous souvent les autres « irrationnels » ?

My intention is not to expose conclusions but to question the dynamics of rationality and social discourses, which are at the core of my latest book – to be published in Paris in a few months – entitled Dialogues de Sourds, Dialogues of the Deaf. A questioning which can be summarized as followed: Why Do We Often Find Others “Irrational”? “ We judge ourselves reciprocally in the same way: we, and the others, think of each other as fools”. This is how Saint Jérôme describes the polemics between pagan and Christians. Indeed, Jérôme was right at least on one score: when they talk about Christians, the pagan polemicists refute them in the name of Reason; however, they would never have imagined that these absurd people, these fanatics animated by feelings of hatred towards life, blinded by their gods, could have understood them. […]
There is nothing more blurring, and polemical than the words “Irrational” and “Rational”. They are words which only become meaningful only in polemical contexts because we can identify what they point at…

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Dr. George Pavlich
Professor of Law and Sociology
University of Alberta

"On The Subject of Criminal Identification"

     From within crime-obsessed cultures, it is difficult to entertain that one of criminal law’s constitutive subjects – ‘the criminal’ – betrays a complex, but entirely contingent, lineage. It emerges out of discourses striving to fix (often under the guise of scientific discovery) the criminal’s distinctive (essential?) ontology. Most significantly, that subject is posited as a central figure in the development of criminal identification technologies designed to prevent crime by scientifically identifying ‘habitual criminals.’ This paper will focus on several discourses in nineteenth century Britain that provide conceptual foundations for the habitual criminal subject to be ‘identified’ recursively by ‘scientific’ criminal identification technologies (e.g., Bertilllon’s Anthropometry and Galton’s Composite Criminal Portraits).  What are the implications of that subject’s formation for contemporary criminology, as well as our continued efforts to govern through ‘crime’ and forensically defined ‘criminals’?

George Pavlich is a Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Alberta. He has published widely in the areas of socio-legal studies, social theory and law, criminological theory, governance studies and restorative justice. He is the author of Justice Fragmented: Mediating Community Disputes Under Postmodern Conditions (Routledge, 1996), Critique and Radical Discourses on Crime (Ashgate, 2000) and Governing Paradoxes of Restorative Justice (GlassHouse Press, 2005). He has co-edited several collections, including Rethinking Law, Society and Governance: Foucault’s Bequest (with G Wickham, Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2001) and Sociology for the Asking (with M Hird, Oxford University Press, forthcoming). He has delivered several keynote addresses, and recently participated in a British Academy symposium inaugurating a new journal (Philosophy and Criminal Law, Springer), for which he is an International Advisor.

(For information about Dr. Pavlich and his work, please visit his website)