SOIGNER ET PUNIR. UNE FICTION LITTÉRAIRE DE SAMUEL BUTLER COMME GRILLE DE LECTURE CRITIQUE DU TRAITEMENT PSYCHO-MORAL DES DÉLINQUANTS SEXUELS AUJOURD’HUI
CARRIING AND PUNISHING

Summary/Abstract: In Erewhon, a critical counter-utopia of the Victorian society of his time, the writer Samuel Butler describes a society in which disease is condemned as a crime, and crime treated as a disease. The author offers a heuristic reflection on individual responsibility and its uses in the government of crime or illness. Drawing both from this literary - and especially political - example and from an empirical research in sociology focused, among other things, in the medical care of pedophiles, this paper questions the way in which convicted sex offenders are incited by the justice system to present their deviance as a moral fault while acting in control of themselves and their drive. Within the systems designed to treat conduct disorders, sex offenders must remain the most authentic to themselves otherwise they will not benefit from any sentence adjustment. To do this, these systems intend to develop their feeling of self-efficacy, their self-confidence, the ability to communicate, their empathy. To carry out these therapeutic mediations, are used, for example, psycho-corporal techniques inspired by psychodrama, relaxation but also sports practice to explore the relation to the body, etc. This injunction to work on oneself is also an opportunity for the therapist to exercise a biographical supervision of the convicted person. Thus, is at stake in these systems a power with both subjugation and subjectivation impacts – a paradoxical process if any – whose political dimension must be analyzed. Referred to his affects in a totally depoliticized dimension, the convicted sex offender is in fact caught up in technologies of power ignored as such which annihilate any possibility of resistance.

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