Unheimlichkeit: alienated and integrated identities and criminal existence(s)

This essay argues that we should reinterpret Merton’s retreatist category by using Heidegger’s notion of unheimlichkeit (uncanniness) which relates to the claim that our consciousness and sense-making are grounded in our own openness to finitude. It will also make use of Heidegger’s concept of Dasein which relates to the uncovering of a primal nature of Being (Sein). When we do this we note how the existential potential of this category are at once released from the bonds of an overly objectivised Sociology and open to the possibility of a richer understanding of action and motivation within this class of persons. It argues that we should make Durkheim compatible with Marx. This is if one allows that the empirical basis for Durkheim’s ‘social condition’ is as set out by Marx. Durkheim was preoccupied by the micro-level of analysis and Marx with wider economic conditions of the nineteenth century. Merton was tied up with detailing the America of his day and with individualized goal-setting and means-ends rationality. By employing the concept of unheimlichkeit in relation to Merton’s work we open up a new form of explanation able to understand the psychic and existential striving for meaning, that Heidegger terms Dasein.

Issue title: Existential dimensions in the socio-legal sphere