ABSTRACT

The article explores the political, theological, and literary significance of civil death (mors civilis) in early modern England and claims the relevance of this doctrine for our thinking about incarceration today. Civil death makes explicit the state’s capacity to render a criminal inanimate before the law, stripping him of not only rights and possessions but also the capacity to will. Civil death’s seventeenth-century theorists claim that civil death does not only come after a crime as punishment, however; it also precedes it as cause, the criminal’s will having been rendered dead by sin in order for the crime to have been committed in the first place. After exploring the genealogy of civil death, I analyze how this doctrine affected the literary representation of imprisonment and revolt in John Milton’s oeuvre, especially Samson Agonistes (1671). Milton’s play both diagrams the imprisoned Samson’s experience of civil death and illustrates how it can be transformed it into an instrument of revolutionary resistance. I conclude with a brief demonstration of how the dehumanizing effects and revolutionary possibilities of civil death persist today.

摘要

这篇文章探讨了公民死亡的政治、神学和文学意义（mors Civilis）在现代早期的英格兰，并声称这一学说与我们今天对监禁的思考有关。民事死亡表明国家有能力在法律面前使罪犯无生命，不仅剥夺了他的权利和财产，而且剥夺了他的意志。17 世纪的民事死亡理论家声称，民事死亡不仅发生在作为惩罚的犯罪之后；它也先于它作为原因，犯罪者的意志已经被罪杀死，以便首先犯下罪行。在探索了民事死亡的谱系之后，我分析了这一学说如何影响约翰·弥尔顿 (John Milton) 的作品，尤其是参孙·阿戈尼斯特 (Samson Agonites)中监禁和反抗的文学表现(1671)。弥尔顿的戏剧既描绘了被监禁的参孙的民事死亡经历，又说明了如何将其转化为革命抵抗的工具。最后，我简要说明公民死亡的非人性化影响和革命性的可能性如何持续存在。