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This is the book that criminology students have been waiting for. Written in a lively and conversational style, it introduces and familiarizes students with a set of basic notions which are essential to the study of crime and its control. The book explains the background to the ideas that underpin current debates about crime. It explores the interplay between philosophical and criminological theories to provide a stimulating and insightful overview of the subject. It offers students a fresh way of thinking about crime, giving them an opportunity to develop their understanding and to hone their

It has become increasingly difficult to speak or even think social or legal justice in an age when words have left their moorings. Perhaps images are more stable than words; maybe images and imagery possess a certain viscosity,even a sensory quality, which prevents them from evaporating. This maybe is what this book is about. The contributors to this collection explore the issue of how the Imaginary (images, imagery, imagination) has a role in the production and reproduction of visions of legal and social justice. It argues that visions of justice are inevitably bounded. Boundaries of visions of justice, however, are also imaginary. They emerge within imaginary spaces, and, as they are imaginary, they are inherently unstable. The book captures an emerging interest (in the humanities and social sciences) in images and the visual, or the Imaginary more broadly. This collection will appeal to scholars and students of social and legal theory, visual culture, justice and governance studies, media studies, and criminology.

An often heard phrase these days is 'There is something about this chaotic 21st century of ours .'. The phrase is usually uttered when the current US government administration has sent out yet another (self-)contradictory statement, or when it launches another direct attack on the law (e.g. international law) and its institutions (e.g. the ICC). In this contribution an attempt will be made to outline the contours of this 'something'. This 'something' is not just present in the realm where government administrations operate. It lies at the heart of a new form of life which has become predominant in recent decades in globalizing culture: the life of aspiring, radicalizing sovereigns. This 'something', then, could the called the end of Law. In an age of aspiring and radicalizing sovereigns the Law, indeed law in all its forms and shapes, has become not just an irrelevance, but a nuisance and embarrassment as well. One of the manifestations of this irreverent sovereign attitude is the growing inability to accept waste, that is, an inability to live with all that generates waste (i.e. Law), and an inability to live with all that is waste. Waste, i.e. the accumulation of spent potential, is not what the aspiring, radicalizing sovereign wants. The sovereign's desires are all about conserving all potential. Although this new form of life -i.e. sovereign life that has withdrawn (from) waste- has become manifest only very recently, i.e. well into the 21st century, it had, in a way, been predicted by the novelist Don DeLillo in his novels Mao II and Underworld. The themes and images in both novels -DeLillo's only novels published during the 1990s- will be at the core of this contribution.

In 1970 the Dutch philosopher and psychiatrist Jan Hendrik van den Berg announced the end of classical psychoanalysis. In an age without taboos, the mere idea no longer made sense to van den Berg. In the same year Mark Rothko's stark Chapel in Houston, Texas, was completed at the point in the painter's life when he had exhausted his experimental attempts to visualize sovereign, superhuman life. Both events are not completely unrelated. Both mark the point in Western culture when radical sovereign aspiration gained its final momentum. The year 2016 marks the point when this Luciferian aspiration achieved hegemonic dominance to occupy the core of cultural life. We are now in a position to look back on Rothko's Chapel and ask ourselves if, in this newly dawned Age of Light, there still is, as the painter seems to have suggested, a dark side, a zone of inner, hidden depth, and if, contrary to van den Berg's prediction, it still makes sense to psychoanalyze the Luciferian moment. This article reflects on these questions.