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Gothicism, typified by gruesome injury and trauma, and menacing shadowy figures, is a prominent feature of the discourses of public protection and vengeful punishment. Historically the gothic has dramatized a modern preoccupation with boundaries and their collapse. Today an increasingly complex series of networks and flows cross, undermine and remake the borders and boundaries of old. Important contemporary reconfigurations include the erosion of traditional distinctions between public and private spheres, between information and entertainment and between legal and extra-legal. Understanding this profusion of different kinds of border crossings requires the scholar to depart from the Eliasian equation of interdependencies with a ‘civilizing process’ associated with restraint, sympathy and tolerance. To understand the complexity of border crossings, experimentation is required with concepts that directly theorize the breaching of established spatial entities and categories, and that focus attention on the potent effects of flows, new connections and the in-between. One such concept is the notion of abjection, through which the powers of horror invoked by popular cultural representations, case law and penal practices are related to the horror of that which breaches borders. This article contributes an exploration of the visceral passions of contemporary penality in terms of Julia Kristeva’s assertion that, ‘according to the logic of separation, it is flow that is impure’.

When the call for justice comes through the grief-stricken plea of the mother of a murdered child, it carries a potent affective charge, levying an unassailable demand for our concern and commanding urgent action. Today we are regularly confronted with images of suffering and vengeful crime victims. What kind of response can be envisioned as just? This article stages some encounters arising from press photographs of mothers bereaved by violent acts of criminality. The reflections presented here pose a grave test to the theory of the face. How to respond to the face of the hater, and specifically to the black wrath of the mother of the murdered child? How is the passage from ethics to justice to be negotiated?

How can we catch the criminal? The history of criminology has had little to say about the place of scientific methods of criminal investigation in the discipline of criminology and in the redistribution of the power to punish that took place with the withdrawal of public execution. Thinking about this omission can act as a critical and reflexive exercise: why have we made a riddle of criminality ? Perhaps it is exactly the contours of this problem that mean that we consistently fail to catch the criminal. Perhaps there was never any mystery to be solved. I am currently preparing a paper on the identification of the criminal based on research conducted in the Archives de la Perfccture de Police de Paris and the Fonds Lacassagne in Lyon. My work in progress consists of a paper on psychoanalysis and crime 1906-39.3 Ginzburg's paper has appeared in several English translations, for example it forms the core of his Clues, Myths and the Historical Method (1989). Ginzburg is known to historians mainly for hisThe Quest and Warms, first Published in 1976. Work in the history of scientific methods of criminal investigation that has accepted Ginzburg's conjectural model includes Kahxszynski (1987) and Panchasi (1996). Forrester (1996) thinks around this debate in his paper on die genealogy of the case.

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