Introduction

‘‘Every sin is the result of a collaboration,’’ claimed Seneca, observing that sin is both a cultural and an intersubjective process. Seneca’s pointed formula implies both cultural performances that maintain normative order and a collusive, furtive will to resist that order. Sin is, to be sure, a rhetorical construct*/but it is also a resource. It is simultaneously social and surreptitious. Above all others, the seven deadly sins have become emblematic for understanding many of the practices of everyday life (sometimes vaunted, sometimes reviled). Some have gone so far as to claim that the seven deadly sins illustrate the excesses and abuses of Western society as a whole (Lyman). With this in mind, we take as a starting point in this special issue that sin has long held a firm grasp on our cultural imagination. Internal battles between good and evil are at the very heart of most of our storytelling; external battles between good and evil comprise the bulk of our tales of history. The discourse and imagination surrounding the seven deadly sins is particularly dramatic because the stakes are drawn so high. As a product of Christian guides to proper living, the seven deadly sins are constructed as offenses against God’s will that lead to certain damnation and the death of the soul. They are literally deadly. These are the sins of anger, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride, and sloth. 1 The seven deadly sins are tied to personal behavior and decorum, articulating prohibitions concerning human desire. In his Inferno, Dante explains that the seven deadly sins are all failed relationships to love, articulated within the three relational categories of perversion, insufficiency, or excess. Whether understood as emotions or actions, as directed at self or other, or as spiritual or social matters, the seven deadly sins routinely enact relationships that cut to the heart of the onto-epistemic labors of performance. The contributors to this issue all engage Dante’s typology in one way or another to perform sin through perversion, insufficiency, and/or excess (of style, of topic, of method)

Perversion · Psychoanalysis · Philosophy · Psychology · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

• Rituals of Harm

  Open Access•Ina Goel•Behavioral Sciences & the Law•2025

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• The Seven Deadly Sins

  James Aho, James A Aho et al.•Contemporary Sociology A Journal…•1979

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• The Seven Deadly Sins

  Michael Palencia-Roth, Michael Palencia‐roth et al.•Sociological Analysis•1979

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