Как се упражнява наказателната власт в българското общество: социологическа диагноза
How Penal Power is Exercised in Bulgarian Society: A Sociological Diagnosis

Summary/Abstract: The article offers a genealogical and archeological study on the historical metamorphoses of the exercise of penal power in modern Bulgarian society. This sociological analysis traces the varying modalities that power relations constitute, specifically, the constant tension and exceptional effacement of the difference between two opposite poles: power as justice and power as repression; law and terror; government coercion and civil disobedience; prohibition and resistance; universal justice and special courts; legal sanctions and security measures; imprisonment and arbitrary arrest; prison for reeducation and camps for destruction. This means that the social dividing line between legitimate and non-legitimate violence (institutionalized violence that is legitimated by the law and exercised by the state, as opposed to exceptional, excessive and concentrated violence as a non-legitimate use of force to attain certain goals; so that, if legitimate violence is called “justice”, then non-legitimate violence is a continuation of justice using “terrorist” means) becomes mobile, reversible and is effaced. In concrete historical situations, these opposites form a hybrid field whose poles cannot be differentiated, where power as law and power as repression are practically indistinguishable, and where Power-governance (the prevalent type of power in the modern age), consisting in a set of actions exercised upon other actions and in the management of the conduct of other subjects, has been suspended. Freedom and resistance, viewed as conditions of the possible exercise of Power-governance, have disappeared; their place has been taken by full determination, where the only thing left is all-encompassing and concentrated violence.

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