The Inmate's Two Bodies

Survival and Metamorphosis in a Moroccan Secret Prison

Bibliographic Data

ID5003274
AuthorsZakaria Rhani (0000-0002-1357-7285, Mohammed V University, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume120
Issue120
Pages183208
Publication date2019-12-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueRevista crítica de ciências sociais/Revista crítica de ciências sociais (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0254-1106 • E-ISSN: 2182-7435
PublisherOpenEdition (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.4000/rccs.9884
OpenAlexW2995145153
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited23

Tazmamart is not an ordinary prison. It is a system of secret detention that challenges the Foucauldian model and its rationale is best understood outside a universal paradigm of modernity. All rational forms, all the proceedings, the choice of place of detention, the organization of the cells, and the policy of rationing are driven by the will to undo life. The prisoners either die or transmute to survive. This paper reports the experience of one of the survivors who, compared to his fellow inmates, narrates his bodily metamorphosis in confounding and unparalleled terms, with the purpose of grasping his experience of becoming in its intertwining with a theory of becoming. His own metamorphosis, I argue, is concomitant with a radical “revolutionary” act that transfigures the meaning and the relation to confinement and to the world, thereby converting suffering into joy, bodily death into a transcendent corporeality, madness into wisdom, and total seclusion into cosmic amplitude – a universal being

Aesthetics · Criminology · Epistemology · Imprisonment · Political science · Prison · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Law · North African History and Literature · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Psychology

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