Righteous Slaughter and the Phenomenology of the Assailed Self

Abstract

In his important text Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil Katz (1988) provides a powerful phenomenological description of the experience of crime, which is ontologically situated within the social world from which it emerges. As such, the experience of crime is viewed as neither the exclusive psychological artifact of a self-enclosed and finished rational actor or as the epiphenomenal conclusion of a process of a structurally imposed determinism (Katz, 1988). From this perspective, the experience of crime emerges from its specific co-constituted encounter with the social world that both constructs and is constructed by this intertwining of self and the world.

Citation

Polizzi, D. (2020), "Righteous Slaughter and the Phenomenology of the Assailed Self", Polizzi, D. (Ed.) Jack Katz, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 57-72. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-78756-072-720201006