Storia della paranoia. Repressione e disciplinamento di crimini immaginari

This book retraces paranoia as a neglected but structuring principle of Western legal history. Its wager is that what we now call paranoia is better understood as a juridical rationality of suspicion, historically determined and institutionally organised, in which interpretation prevails over proof, plausibility over evidence, and the sign over the act, so that guilt is constructed prognostically and punishment assumes a preventive function. A first, genetic part reconstructs the psychiatric genealogy of paranoia across nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and French debates, isolating not a medical doctrine but a model of intelligibility. A second, analytical part tests it on the so-called imaginary crimes (the monster, the cannibal, the witch, the sodomite, the vagabond, the suicide) figures through which criminal justice learned to anticipate danger, create culprits without proof and justify sanction on symbolic grounds. Moving between psychiatry, criminal policy and legal history, it offers a genealogy of punitive techniques (bodily marking, confinement, registration) reaching to today's algorithmic surveillance.