Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Judge and Punish: The Penal State on Trial
| Author | Giuseppe Maglione |
| Date | 01 April 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474520939058 |
| Published date | 01 April 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
References
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Knowledge. The British Journal of Criminology 60(3): 493–518.
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punishment in contemporary social and political systems. The Modern Law Review 78(2):
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Harry Annison
Southampton University, UK
Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Judge and Punish: The Penal State on Trial (trans.
Lara Vergnaud), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018; 210pp.
(including index). ISBN: 9781503605787, $25 (pbk)
Geoffroy de Lagasnerie’s ‘Judge and Punish: The Penal State on Trial’ is a tour de
force into the criminal trial’s symbolic economy, violence and political logic.
1
The starting point is the consideration that the courtroom is a ‘magnifying glass
of our inscription within the legal order and our submission to its authority’ (p. 13)
and deciphering its nature and functions equates with uncovering our condition as
legal-political subjects. From this angle, the book pursues three interlinked aims:
to demystify, in a Bourdieusian sense, the trial’s self-enforcing perceptual frame-
works (how the trial construes reality), to expose its bare violence (how it forces
people to be something else from ‘what they are’) and to denounce and contest its
political rationale (how it instantiates our position as political-legal subjects).
Finally, the book provides a ‘left-libertarian’ (p. 19) and rather counterintuitive
alternative to the trial’s violence.
The first two chapters spell out the book’s conceptual apparatus and research
objects.
The author aims to take a ‘step back’ from, that is, to problematise, the under-
standing of law epitomised by Michel Foucault’s suggestion to look at power as a
‘positive’ force (p. 13). In fact, we should (return to) look at the repressive side
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