ABSTRACT
Crime fi ction, a widely successful source of popular passion and mass recreation, and an evergreen topic of academic analysis, one of the few surviving branches of spontaneous – rather than professionalized – literacy, is the effect of a preference for the irreversible one-off event. More than any other type of deeds, crime mesmerizes, captivates, ‘thrills’. This is so courtesy of a specifi c quality of its subject matter: the quality of being beyond repair, the impossibility of undoing the deed. The culture of crime fi ction is the use of crime as a theme that allows us to touch this impossibility (= the ‘real’, in Lacan’s (2008) fanciful, yet – moderately – enlightening terminology). The enabling condition to which the crime fi ction genre can be traced, the generative principle of the literary dispositive, the ‘fact of pure crime fi ction reason’ (Immanuel Kant shakes his head), is in the fact that it is now too late , that nothing can be done to put that which has happened once again back in the state before, that there is no power left that would enable one to re-naturalize the de-naturalized, no way to re-enter the paradise after the expulsion. The inadmissible but undeniable upshot is the enjoyment of one’s being expelled. Crime fi ction humiliates its reader by way of making her confess her guilty enjoyment.
