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🪵 The Threshold

Crime fiction's birth shifted attention from confession and execution to investigation

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tagsja-picks, xref, causal_relationships, trade, singleton, category/causal-relationships
aliases@foucault_discipline_1975, loc. 124

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Crime fiction’s birth shifted attention from confession and execution to investigation

Evidence

The great murders are not for the pedlars of petty crime. While, from Gaboriau onwards, the literature of crime follows this first shift: by his cunning, his tricks, his sharp-wittedness, the criminal represented in this literature has made himself impervious to suspicion; and the struggle between two pure minds – the murderer and the detective – will constitute the essential form of the confrontation. We are far removed indeed from those accounts of the life and misdeeds of the criminal in which he admitted his crimes, and which recounted in detail the tortures of his execution: we have moved from the exposition of the facts or the confession to the slow process of discovery; from the execution to the investigation; from the physical confrontation to the intellectual struggle between criminal and investigator. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 124

Categorization

  • XREF: Connects to Foucault’s broader thesis about power shifting from spectacular public punishment to invisible surveillance and disciplinary tracking — the same move 1984’s telescreens literalize. — connects to: Execution sites and torments mirrored the crime’s form and setting — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 97; New crime literature dispossessed common people of their criminal glory — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 124

Broader Connections

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