ABSTRACT
The essential problem for the development of legislation and explanations of crime and criminal behaviour in the postmodern condition nevertheless remains the difficulty of making any objective claims for truth, goodness and morality. Postmodernism appears contemptuous of the possibility of developing an objective normative – moral – order that human beings can translate into enforceable norms or laws. Jacques Lacan understands psychoanalysis as a process in which there are four major discourses: the discourse of the master the university the hysteric; and the analyst. Anarchist criminologists thus launch aggressive and ‘unreasonable’ critiques against law and legal authority because they argue that the latter institutions undermine human community and diversity. Anarchist criminologists thus seek to blur and explore the boundaries between crime and political resistance. The ideas of Lacan centre on Freudian concepts such as the unconscious, the castration complex and the ego, with the focus being on the centrality of language to subjectivity.
