ABSTRACT
The pleasure of punishment changed character with the passage to modernity. The chapter discusses some key indicators, as well as available interpretations of the transformation. The first thing to note is the gradual disappearance of pleasure from public sight. Available historical research suggests that observable signs of pleasure at executions sites – laughter, cheers, drinking, merriness – became more infrequent in the nineteenth century, compared to the preceding two centuries. Another indicator of change was that pleasure lost its former innocence in moral philosophy. Pleasure became problematic: suspicious and socially inappropriate. A comparison between Bentham and Kant, on the one hand, and Nietzsche and Freud, on the other hand, reveals that pleasure replaced anger as the most disruptive passion in the context of punishment. At the same time, the long silence on the modern pleasure of punishment was initiated in social science. In the influential accounts given by Durkheim, Elias and Foucault, pleasure was seen to be strictly confined to the pre-modern period, when the enjoyment was shamelessly expressed at the scaffold. Alternatively, modern pleasure of punishment was treated as an obscure side-effect of power, and made to disappear on conceptual grounds. Given the prevailing problematic of subject formation, pleasure was redundant.
