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12 Crime Media Culture 3 (2016)

handle is hein.journals/cmctre12 and id is 1 raw text is: Article S Crime Media Culture 2016, Vol. 12(1) 3-15 Paul Nizan: Conspiracy and the © The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions contemplation of crime sagepub.co uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI 10.1177/1741659015596113 cmc.sagepub.com OSAGE Vincenzo Ruggiero Middlesex University, UK Abstract Paul Nizan (1905-1940) is also known in France as the 'impossible communist', for his long- term allegiance to the Party and the abrupt cancellation of his membership, in the late 1930s, following the Nazi-Soviet pact. This paper discusses a number of his writings, focusing particularly on his best known novel, The Conspiracy, where a revolutionary cell plans illegal political action. Conflict, nihilism, suicide and betrayal are among the topics stemming from the novel, which will be examined from a criminological perspective. The analysis will primarily address 'cultural' aspects of crime and refer to notions such as 'thrill' and 'seductions of crime' among others. These notions, it will be argued, require some revision in the face of the imagined or actual criminality described in the novel. Keywords Conflict, nihilism, suicide, betrayal Introduction Fiction can be used as a tool for the communication of sociological meaning and the elaboration of criminological analysis. A legendary figure in criminology, Howard Becker (1995), after leaving us his magnificent legacy around the labeling of outsiders, has studied the social and ideological aspects of literature. He was fascinated by how the boundaries between academic disciplines can be made permeable and fuzzy, as was the author he studied, Antonio Candido, who resisted specialization and mixed imagination and observation, science and art. Some authors have left legal for literary studies to build explanatory bridges between the mentalities of law and fiction (Dolin, 2000). Others have simply used fiction to discuss sociological and criminological notions while 'telling stories' (Dow, 1980; Ruggiero, 2003; Forti, Mazzucato and Visconti, 2012). Encouragement to 'take stories seriously' may emerge from the reading of Aristotle's (1995) Poetics, where we find that the difference between a historian and a poet is not that one writes prose and the other verse. The real difference, in Aristotle's view, is that the former tells what happened, while the latter what might happen. For this reason poetry, and for that matter fiction, are more scientific and serious than history, as they tend to give general truths, whereas history Corresponding author: Vincenzo Ruggiero, Middlesex University, The Burroughs, London NW4 4BT, UK. Email: V.Ruggiero@mdx.ac.uk

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