Introduction: The act of casting out

For the citizens of ancient Athens exile was, for a time, an integral component of democracy. The ritual expulsion of specific individuals was an institutional provision against the excessive accumulation of power and the persistent threat of tyranny. In its most modern form, exile, or "residency ban" as it is politely designated is now used by municipalities as a desperate reaction against sexual deviancy. The comparative use of exile indicates, respectively, understood notions of power through identifying distinctive notions of undesirable behavior. Exile is an exegesis, a demonstrative explanation of norms through the manipulation of proximity. It is an act of spatial distinctions, the delineation of the sacred here from the profane there. This mode of punitive arbitration has remained constant; the profane individual is subjected to expulsion. Exile still casts out the undesirable, but what, precisely, constitutes the undesirable has changed considerably. It is the characteristics and types of individuals exhibiting a prohibited existential intransigency that has changed over time.

At the modern site of exile, where the individual, the state, and the sacred/profane dyad are conjoined we witness a revaluation of the concept of power. Exiled individuals are identified as powerful by the apparatus of a state that is unable to subdue them. The mode of power is determined by the individuals selected for banishment as they manifest behavior deemed unsuitable. For the Athenians, individual power was a specific instrumentality of political and economic resources. Modern individual power, as characterized by those to be exiled, is pointedly contradictory and antithetical to the Greek notions. As such it is no longer potential tyrants that remain the object of exile. The modern form does not, for example, exile legislators who exceed the norm for duration in office. Instead, it is the sexual offender, the individual nearly bankrupt of political power that is the target of contemporary ostracism.

Exile is a symptomatic node of political discourse, as are all the varied forms of punishment. It is through these nodes that the state reveals itself in a display of vulgarity. In the space of penal violence the discourse of the individual, shaped by norms through the instrumentation of the state, is exposed. Although Michel Foucault argued in Discipline and Punish that war between the state and the individual had long ended with the state as clear victor free to reshape the individual through the processes of discipline; it may be that the exile represents vestigial remnants of that original war. It is at the site of exile, perhaps more than at the site of death itself, that the state reveals its failure. The exile is the actor beyond compliance, insufficiently disciplined, and improperly conditioned. Through a sentence of exile the state asserts the margins of acceptable individuality, indicating that which is considered powerful.

Friedrich Nietzsche expounds upon revaluation, the dialectical inversion of signification, by describing the transformation undergone by the concepts of "good,""bad," and "evil" in The Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil. The idea of "good" had once been associated with power and nobility, but as Nietzsche (2003, pp 13 and 17) maintains, the weak, in their seething ressentiment of the strong revaluated "good" to signify "weakness,""wretchedness." Similarly, the term "poor" came to signify "holy" (Nietzsche, 1966, p 108). Likewise, individual power itself is revaluated at the site of conflict between state discipline and individual incorrigibility. Exile becomes the dramatic presentation of a mythical narrative created to mediate this dialectical transformation.

In the following essay, I will offer a brief summary of the history and functionality of the practice of ostracism. Next, I will offer an interpretation of the mythical content inherent to this ritual practice of Athenian exile. The role and function of myth will be described in order to allow a comparison between ancient and contemporary models of exile. Finally, by contrasting ancient thought on the practice of ostracism with the modern residency ban I will offer a comparison of ancient and contemporary notions of power. The movement of this essay will, at times, oscillate between ancient and contemporary forms of exile. By placing the practices of the two eras next to one another, my aim is to demonstrate that what a society expels is a function of its vision of power.

Ostrakaphoria: Ancient notions of exile

At some point between 417 and 416 B.C., the Athenian politician Hyperbolus arranged for an ostrakaphoria (ritual of expulsion). Having assumed a role of leadership following the death of Cleon, his objective was to persuade the "Ekklesia" (voting assembly) to expel either one of his principal political rivals, Alcibiades or Nicias (Raubitschek, 1955). These individuals were formidable adversaries, not merely for Hyperbolus, but for each other as well. By calling for the ostrakaphoria, Hyperbolus hoped to remove at least one of his political obstacles (especially Alcibiades), and thereby enable a more concentrated effort against the remaining opponent. Thucydides (1972, p 580) describes Hyperbolus as "a wretched character," in addition to being "a thoroughly bad lot and a disgrace to the city." Disparagements against the origins of his birth and his general "worthlessness" were widely circulated (Androtion, 1994, p 70). He was "the butt of standard jokes directed against demagogues" (Fuqua, 1965, p 165). He even earned a particular place of ridicule in the plays of Aristophanes.¹ However, Hyperbolus was also considered somewhat popular despite his uncomplimentary qualities (Rhodes, 1994).

Hyperbolus' efforts to secure his position would ultimately turn against him. Alcibiades and Nicias keenly recognized their mutual peril and understood that any immediate gain created by vanquishing the other to exile would be nullified by a victory for Hyperbolus. The rival factions coalesced, and conjured the necessary votes to ostracize their common enemy – Hyperbolus (Fuqua, 1965). His ignominious status provoked the Athenians to reflect upon whether ostracism, normally reserved for the "traditional landed elite", had been used appropriately (Forsdyke, 2005, p 171). Nevertheless, Hyperbolus was expelled for a period of 10 years. He ultimately arrived in Samos and, six years following his expulsion from Athens, was executed by Samian oligarchs. His body was thrown into the sea (Thucydides, 1972).

History and mechanics of the Ostrakaphoria

Brought into law circa 508 B.C. the first ostrakaphoria did not occur until approximately 20 years following inception (Stanton, 1970). In essence, the ostrakaphoria was an annual ritual of Athenian democracy during which the voting population could select an individual from within the community to be exiled. Although some dispute remains on the precise date of the drafting of the law and the reasons for the apparent discontinuity, its first implementation, against Hipparchos, seems to have occurred in 488 B.C. (Kagan, 1961). During the era in which the practice occurred there were "fewer than twenty ostracisms, of which only nine are certain" (Ibid., p 401). After 417 B.C., with the exile of Hyperbolus, the institution of ostrakaphoria was abandoned by the citizens of Athens who concluded the practice had been "degraded by its use on such a worthless individual" (Androtion, 1994, p 154).

As part of a democratic procedure, the act of legally banishing a person from Athens did not readily lend itself to convenience. However, the possibility always remained that the institution could be corrupted to the level of personal vendetta or "the envy and jealousy natural to a democracy" (Plutarch, 1998, p 49). However, as A.R. Hands notes: The law of ostracism was so framed that it could not be simply and directly brought into action by an individual person, however desirous to see a particular opponent ostracized (Hands, 1959, p 69).

Two stages were required for any citizen of Athens to be expelled. First, a "probolai", or complaint, had to be carried out to determine if sufficient cause existed for a vote (Christ, 1992). This first part was essentially a referendum to establish if the demos would entertain the ostrakaphoria. The subsequent vote would determine those to be purged (Hands, 1959). Although no debate was permitted in either the initial referendum or during the actual vote to determine ostracism, Hignett (1952, p 165) notes the intervening period as one that "opened the way in a later age to sinister intrigues."

Once the ostrakaphoria had begun, names of "candidates" were conveyed through their inscription on pottery shards called "ostraka" (Vanderpool, 1949). Six thousand votes were needed to complete the voting, though, as Hands notes it is unclear if this was required as a "quorum or the minimum effective vote against a particular candidate" (Hands, 1959, p 72). Measures such as limiting access around the agora were undertaken in order to minimize the possibility of duplicate voting (Dillon and Garland, 2000). The ostraka were first counted to ensure the quorum had been reached, and then sorted by name to determine which candidate would be ostracized (Plutarch, 1989). Unlike the Athenian trial, a vote in favor of ostracism did not precede a sentencing phase. The vote was final and the sentence was generally uniform. Although there are indications suggesting the possibility of some deviation, the standard duration of ostracism was one decade (Vanderpool, 1952). Individuals ostracized by the community received a 10-day respite for finalizing any outstanding business within the city. Furthermore, once banished from Athens, an individual was permitted to continue receiving income from holdings still within the city (Dillon and Garland, 2000).

Exile as a democratic institution

Though in a marginal number of cases, such as that of Hyperbolus, the ostrakaphoria became a vehicle for interpersonal quarrelling, the motivation for its general application appears to have had the end of securing institutional or community welfare. Indeed, scholars, both ancient and contemporary, concur that ostracism was most widely employed to thwart the ambitions of individuals with tyrannical aspirations. Plutarch contends that the practice was never implemented against the poor. Instead, its usage remained restricted not merely among, but apparently as the site of conflict between members of the upper class "whose overbearing insistence upon the prerogatives of birth had aroused invidiousness (Plutarch, 1989, p 21)". Even Hyperbolus, regardless of calumnious rumors cast against his birth, could hardly be counted among the poor.

Criminal punishment emerges when a law has been broken. Social punishment, such as ostracism, attempts to account for transgressions that occur when no crime has been committed. It was notoriety and the achievement of superfluous power that demanded the possibility of exile into the calculus of daily life. Plutarch (1989, p 23) states that those whose reputation was "considered to be a bit above the rest" were conceivably the objects of an ostrakaphoria. For Aristotle (1996, pp 82 and 123), it was a means for "disabling the most prominent citizens" whose "superiority is a cause of revolution." In The Politics he emphasizes that the accumulation of excessive power by any individual should result in that person being "sent clean out of the country" (Ibid., p 136). Plutarch (1989 and 1998), in Life of Aristeides and Themistocles maintains that the ostracism of an individual was not intended as a form of punishment for criminal behavior. Instead, he characterizes it as the indulgence of a collective jealousy to witness a spectacle of "humbling the eminent" (Plutarch, 1998, p 49). Although on the surface expulsion from the polis would appear as the quintessential punishment, the indicted individual is not actually charged with a crime. For ostracized individuals, the transgression is only their potentially excessive influence and power.

Ostracism emerges in a city where "tyranny is seen as a potential danger that may lurk undetected in seemingly innocent citizens and everyday political actions" (McGlew, 1993, p 187). Yet in a city–state with a population of only several thousand free citizens, exile was inextricably linked to the knowledge of a finite, manageable, set of individuals. Through the ritual of ostrakaphoria it becomes apparent that Athenians held a collective fear of the unusually powerful within their midst. Thus while encouraging the cultivation of virtuous behavior and personal arête, they delineated a nebulous limit at the ceiling of acceptability. Although the precise measure of excessive power was probably as unclear to the citizens of Athens as it remains now, it must be assumed that individuals whose grand political or social ambitions could be sustained by their personal resources might generate a suspicion centered upon any power in excess of the individual norm.

Reifying the self

Exile is a ritually bounded form of punishment. Accordingly, the use of exile both articulates and transforms society (Forsdyke, 2005). In varying degrees of visibility rituals present myth. While Claude Levi-Strauss (1963, p 232) suggested there was dispute concerning the ontological priority of ritual over myth or myth over ritual, the "interrelation" between the two is extensive. Emile Durkheim (1995, p 79), for example, portrayed ritual as being "nothing other than myth in action", suggesting the appearance of ritual is to transport a myth. And whereas the function of ritual may be to present myth, the latter serves a vital cultural function. Levi-Strauss (1963) argues that myth exists to resolve contradictions within an ideological system. Myth, he says gives human beings the illusion of understanding the universe (Levi-Strauss, 1978).

Athenian notions of exile may have engendered a kind of structural harmony between the legal and the cultural. Serving as both guide and explanation, myth provided the necessary cultural context for the permissibility of the ostracism. Additionally, myth served in mediating the ideological contradictions created by the ostrakaphoria. Myth, therefore, provides both the cultural basis to employ this form of punishment and to reconcile the irregularities it creates.

Legend tells us that Zeus had thwarted the machinations of his ambitious father Cronos, who had ingested his own offspring in order to maintain power (Grant, 1962). Zeus defeated the domineering Titan, forcing him to vomit the Olympians he had swallowed, and then banished him. Analogously, the Athenians would expel their own potential tyrants. It was, for the ancients, the appropriate punishment for excessive power. In order to prevent the polity from being consumed by its patriarch, the tyrant must be divested of the source of his power. Relatively secular, corporeal ritual, nonetheless, faintly incorporates the preternatural in mythical narrative. Myths created by Athenians found their representation within Athenians and Athenian institutions.

Zeus' rectification of his father's evil provides an appropriate model of resolution. An ostracized tyrant equates to a nascent Cronos, whose power bore the potential to consume his subordinates and inferiors. The congregations of Athenians collectively deliberating in the ostrakaphoria are as a metaphorical Zeus, reenacting his triumph through the act of redefining proper virtue. The myth of Cronos' exile served to reconcile the contradiction of a culture that seemed to hold virtue and the excess of virtue (as in tyranny) as being constituted by the state. If one's virtue was facilitated by the state, one's ambition toward tyranny may also have been a product of the state. As Socrates argues repeatedly to Crito the individual was "begat from the state" (Plato, 1998, pp 109–110). It is the city and its democratic laws that provide the necessary freedoms and constraints for one to corrupt the youth or exploit their ambitions of accumulating tyrannical power. The myth of Cronos' defeat and exile, created by Athenians, resolved the contradiction of the curtailing of power by a culture that also glorified individual achievement as it simultaneously served as behavioral counsel for Athenian institutions of justice.

Automatic Ostraka: The means of contemporary exile

As a consequence of several recent and highly publicized cases of sexual predation, local governments in the state of Florida and elsewhere began passing the so-called "residency ban" measures. Floridian cities such as Coral Springs (2005), Davie, DeBary (Davis, 2005), Deerfield Beach (2003), Jacksonville (2005), Oviedo (2005), Miami Beach (National Public Radio, 2005), New Port Richey (Koslow, 2005), Winter Park (2005), and others have adopted such measures. Designed specifically to target individuals categorized by the state legal system as "sexual offenders," the ordinances effectively expel from city limits any person convicted of specific sex crimes.

Although not explicitly worded as exile, the ordinances create a restricted area around places such as "schools, daycare centers, parks, playgrounds, and school bus stops" that are so large as to essentially preclude the entire city in most cases. Miami Beach, for example, prohibits sex offenders from maintaining residence within 2,500 feet from a school or similar edifice. At the time the ordinance was enforced, there were six public schools and 30 "highly utilized and passive use Municipal Parks" (no information was provided regarding the number of school bus stops, or playgrounds that were distinct from parks). Furthermore, a brief survey of commercial establishments produced 13 daycare enterprises. Given the number of prohibited zones, in Miami Beach alone approximately 3,700 square miles are now effectively banned to sex offenders.² The city of Miami is 35 square miles (City of Miami, 2004). The ban would legally restrict all of Miami Beach "excluding two tiny neighborhoods" (Kofman, 2005). That there is sufficient vacancy or public tolerance in these neighborhoods allowing them to become sexual offender ghettos is unlikely. Cities, such as Oviedo, Mount Dora, and Melbourne have established similar restrictive zones, and are far smaller than Miami Beach.

This most recent form of exile departs significantly from the notion held in ancient times. There is no individual assessment to determine the rightfulness of exile. There is no apparent cessation of the exile implicit to residency bans. Moreover, the exile is consecutive or even subsequent upon any penalty imposed by the state. For example, an individual who has already completed a prison sentence now remains subject to the stringencies of a residency ban. All that is required is the approval of a city council to effectively restrict residency within the territorial limits of a municipality. Indeed, the measure prevents registered sex offenders from relocating to a city with such a ban in place, but also compels sex offenders already residing in that area to leave.

An individual need not commit an additional sex crime or crime of any sort to be subjected to exile. Only a prior conviction of a sex crime on a victim under 16 is required.³ Laws pertaining to residency bans are not enacted concurrent to the original punishment but are compounded upon them ex post facto.⁴ They are conceived of in a hypothetically preemptive fashion predicated largely upon the assumption of sex offender recidivism. As Mayor David Dermer of Miami Beach expressed his view, "there is a very, very strong likelihood that the crime will be committed again by the perpetrator, a very high recidivism rate." The opinion expressed by Mayor Dermer is not definitively supported by findings of the United States Department of Justice.⁵

The efficaciousness of such measures is doubtful. In terms of engendering community safety, residency bans are ineffectual. These measures are premised on exiling those who have already committed a sex crime, and can in no way account for those who are not registered as sex offenders. Moreover, the ancient form of exile was predicated on the concept of creating a distance between the potential tyrant and his or her source of power. This cannot be accomplished with the contemporary form of exile. The sex offender cannot be removed from what is arguably their only source of power – their sexuality. Proximity, in the age of the Internet, is dramatically increased. Sex offenders are able to circumvent the barrier of geopolitical territory by residing in a virtual landscape (CNN, October 6, 2007).

Even beyond the virtual world of the Internet the conditions of contemporary exile depart drastically from those of the ancient version. For instance, there is nothing to prevent sex offenders, exiled from living within a particular municipality, from returning to their former places of residence in order perpetrate crimes (one might even argue that the residency ban provides an incentive to do so out of spite). No walls separate cities with residency bans from areas in which sex offenders reside. The cities of Oviedo or Miami Beach have no means to keep out those they consider undesirable. Moreover, as these polities are not discrete entities their expulsion of sex offenders is likely to either compel other polities toward considering similar residency bans, or draw the ire of those which do not.⁶

Because of the rapidly dwindling space available to individuals subject to the residency ban, de facto colonies of sex offenders have arisen. A number of sex offenders in the city of Miami have been forced into homelessness, seeking shelter under a bridge that lacks electricity, water, or any reasonable protection from the elements (Zarrella and Oppman, 2007). In St Petersburg, Florida, the Palace Mobile Home Park, apparently situated outside of the area included in the residency ban, has become a destination for exiled sex offenders from all over the state (Phillips, 2007). Because the prevalence of the residency bans preclude all but a few remaining spaces, sex offenders are becoming increasingly concentrated into visibly segregated urban appendices. The residency ban has the effect of inaugurating a new era of the ghetto. The logical progression is a marginalized segment of the population with the potential to be continuously exiled into these ghetto colonies.

Visions of Socrates

In ancient and modern thought there are norms concerning the appropriate accumulation and utilization of power for both individuals and groups within various spheres. Whether economic, martial, or political in nature the power actors wield is strictly governed and the subject of apparatuses of discipline. The sex offender may be one of the few sites remaining beyond the apparatuses of discipline. It is the body of the sex offender that remains as a place of war between the state and the individual. The failure of the state to successfully discipline by preventing specific modes of sexuality poses a threat to state sovereignty. Once again the threat is dealt with by acting forcefully upon the body. Despite prison, various forms of therapy, and censure of all sorts, the contemporary notion of a sexual predator is fundamentally one of compulsive recidivism. Efforts by the state to beget reform are often met with a loud, noisy failure. It is due to this immutability of existence that the war between state and individual, a war between two unequal holders of power, continues at the site of aberrant sexuality. And it is the desperation to succeed that compels the modern exile.

Exile as dramatic action

The new form of exile is the antithesis of the ostrakaphoria. Contemporary exile, with its advocate polities lacking in discreteness, is bound to be inefficacious and pragmatically absurd. There are no practical edifices sufficient to prevent sex offenders from committing crimes. No policed roadblock, defensive wall, or moat separates one polity from the next.⁷ Nothing about the residency ban can reasonably guard against the as yet undiscovered and therefore legally unclassified sexual predator.⁸ In the absence of a practical outcome such measures as the application of modern exile are devised as a means of placating desperation. It is this sense of desperation, engendered by the failure of punitive means to adequately curtail recidivism, that is the genesis of social drama. As Victor Turner notes: Social dramas, then, are units of aharmonic or disharmonic process, arising in conflict situations (Turner, 1974, p 37).

With its efficacy subject to the strongest dispute, the greatest value served is that of a dramatic device. The use of exile in this contemporary form fulfills this role through its exhibition of metaphor.

It is the absurdity of the residency ban that emphatically alludes to something other than a sterile, rationally calculated punishment. The residency ban is akin to the original law pronouncing the creation of the ostrakaphoria. Unlike the Athenian law, the residency ban does not provide for an additional vote; exile is automatic. Even if a particular city is required to pass additional or repetitive measures, the residency ban ordinance is intended as a comprehensive pronouncement of punishment. As such, the law presents itself as a singular occurrence, but the condition of exile remains as a persistent (if not punctuated) dramatic condition. The exile produced by a residency ban incorporates its own mythical narrative of virtuous behavior, human nature, and justice.

A vendetta against corruptors

The Athenian form of exile finds close analogy with the triumph of the Olympians over the Titans and it was through the incorporation of this myth into political institutions that the Athenians were able to recreate themselves. The downfall of the Titans is the defeat of excessive power and the victory of moderation and law. Contemporary cities establishing residency bans can also point to antiquity for mythical analogies.

In some respects the narrative of Plato and Xenophon suggests that Socrates defeated the state through a kind of philosophical martyrdom.⁹ Put on trial for impiety and corrupting the youth, Socrates explicitly scorns accepting a sentence of exile, "For I know well that wherever I go, the young will listen to me when I speak, just as they do here" (Plato, 1998, p 91). He refused any attempt at escape, and deliberately chose a defense that "invited the jurors' ill-will and more or less forced them to condemn him" (Xenophon, 1990, p 49). And while he was ultimately convicted and executed by poison, his teachings persisted long after his death. Indeed, the teachings of Socrates, the dialectical Elenchus, formed the ethos for political criticism and challenging those in authority.

The death of Socrates, then, is not the catastrophe of philosophy but a defeat suffered by the state. Exile would have been the defeat of Socrates, an acquiescence to state power over philosophy. Exile becomes the unrealized punishment for the corruptor of youth. The final political consequence of the trial of Socrates was not his death. Rather, Socrates became, to the state, the quintessential corruptor of youth, an intractable subverter of the disciplinary apparatus. Moreover, Socrates' principled rejection of the exile made available to him by Crito becomes integral to the myth of the trial. Through his "determination to die", Socrates deliberately escapes the ignominy of exile through the finality of death (Stone, 1988, p 186). Exile would have amounted to seeking the preservation of his own life at the cost of philosophical consistency. Despite the exhortations of Crito to escape, exile would have undermined his corruptive influence. Now, in modernity, through the narrative of the trial, exile remains as the unrealized punishment of sufficient potency to extinguish the pervasive manipulation of the corruptor. The state uses exile against the corruptors of youth as a memorial and revenge, as ressentiment, of its powerlessness and of its defeat at the hands of philosophy.

Revaluation

Exile is used in Athens and the Floridian municipalities to expel that which will not conform, that which resists the effects of discipline and the state: in both cases the powerful. But, paradoxically, in the latter case, the powerful is concomitantly the weak. For the Athenians, the powerful was politically and economically strong. Objects of exile now are generally politically and economically weak and exhibit strength only at the site of unremitting sexual deviation. The ancient notion of power was the mastery of politics, wealth, and a virile sexuality. Plato (1991, p 258 and 260) portrays the "tyrannic soul" as "poverty-ridden,""insatiable," and "maddened by desires and loves," as an individual who dispossessed of self-control "attempts to rule others." The tyrant is the individual replete with eros, in profound contrast to the aged character of Cephalus from The Republic of Plato who is characterized by the loss of sexual appetite escaping a "frenzied and savage master" and being rid of "very many mad masters" (Ibid., p 5).

In contrast, the object of contemporary exile is nearly bankrupt of political and economic power. Unlike their Athenian counterparts they occupy the nadir of the social order. And although the ancient and contemporary exiles appear to have held an excessive sexuality in common, there are subtle but nonetheless critical differences. Foremost, the tyrant was deviant by means of quantification. Pederasty in itself was not prohibited. To be sure, there were norms regarding the courtship of boys that amounted "to a whole cultural elaboration", but in itself the Greeks "accepted this pleasure as legitimate" (Foucault, 1985, p 214). Instead, it was the excessive appetite in conjunction with autocratic ambitions that might constitute sufficient grounds for qualifying as a tyrant. No such qualification of quantity pertains to current sexual deviancy. Individuals are categorized not by their excesses, but by their fundamental proclivities. Unlike the tyrannical soul of Platonic dialogue, the deviancy of a contemporary exile is necessarily contingent. It is the projection of sexuality on a highly specified object (the youth) that facilitates the categorization of abnormality. Modern individual power then is a near total absence of political and economic strength coupled with an irrepressible, highly contingent, reviled sexuality. In contrast to the ancients it is a total lack of influence in the public sphere coupled with a persistent demonstration of eros in the private sphere. Power is revaluated through exile from the strong and indiscriminately voracious to the weak and highly specialized.

Socrates is the epistemic breach where weakness becomes punishable by exile and it is at the point of our interpretation of Socrates that revaluation occurs. The corruptor has no power except through the medium of a youth (an object somehow less powerful than himself). It is through the vessel of the youth that the corruptor, ideationally in Socrates' case, or sexually in the modern era, wages war with the state. Socrates, despite his professed love of the state, was incorrigible. He waged war by interrogating politicians, poets, artisans and he sought the propagation of this war through the individuals whose weak speech he sought to make stronger, teaching them the disruptive power of philosophy. Likewise, the modern sex offender "refuses" change, denying the state its disciplinary program and rejecting conventional mores. It is their common intransigence that earns them punishment. It was the Socratic precedent that, placed in context of our mythical structure, allows for the revaluation of power. The molester is socially weak, yet resistant to all efforts of the state, and, as Michel Foucault (1978, p 93) argued "Where there is power, there is resistance." But for Foucault, resistance does not emanate from an exterior position; resistance is the consequence of subjection to power. The sexual offender is so thoroughly subjected to social power that his resistance becomes the source of an antithetical power. As Slavoj iek (1994, p 46) notes the sublime is that which is emptied of all value and significance, "the index of the failed 'synthesis' of Beauty and Purpose." That which is sublime is so thoroughly valueless that it becomes the "radical Evil" of a given symbolic order (Ibid., p 47).

In this sense the sexual predator constitutes a political presence. The weaker they become (the more unable to control their own impulses), the more perverse, and therefore the more virulent from the view of the state. Put alternately, as sexual offenders decrease in political power (convictions, loss of rights, public humiliation), they increase in sexual power, and thereby both challenge and redefine political power: sexual predation, emptied of all social normalcy and tolerance, is an act of political resistance. Excluded from the realm of conventional politics, the sexual predator succeeds by means of perversion in defying the political norm and constructing an entirely separate source of power.

Concluding remarks: The drama of modern exile

Exile is a lens through which socially prohibited power can be viewed. In ancient thought ostracism was considered both a humane and decidedly democratic means of preempting tyrannical souls from gaining political power. And while ostracism may have been a meddlesome inconvenience to some, perhaps depending on the duration, others found it an altogether dreadful prospect. Sophocles (1994, p 69) suggests through the character of Creon that exile, along with death, is one "of two most awful dooms." It remained a prevalent, though rarely employed ritual, spanning just over nine decades of Athenian life.

In the modern era, exile is increasingly reserved not for the highest strata of society, but for the lowest. Legislation prohibiting convicted sex offenders from maintaining residency in certain polities began taking effect following a spate of highly publicized pedophiliac murders. The current form of exile is inefficacious: whereas the ancient form of exile effectively curtailed individual influence in a given polity, no provision of the current form sufficiently prohibits a sex offender from committing further crimes. Whereas the potential Athenian tyrant was largely separated from the means of transgression, the contemporary sex offender is only momentarily deferred.

In comparison to the residency bans, the United Kingdom has employed measures called anti-social behavior orders to deter certain forms of misdemeanor criminal delinquency. The behavior orders offer some measure of latitude in evaluating the risk posed by individuals. Specifically, a behavior order "contains conditions prohibiting the offender from carrying out specific anti-social acts or from entering defined areas" (Home Office, 2003). There are certain parallels in that they are explicitly conceived not to be "criminal sanctions and are not intended to punish the offender" (Ibid.). The enforcement of a behavior order can include "the power to exclude an individual from their home or other specified locality" (Dwyer, 2004, p 273).

Although, the parallels are striking there are also significant differences between the residency bans of the United States and the anti-social behavior orders of the United Kingdom. Foremost, the two measures are not deployed on symmetrical types of behavior; they aim at different kinds of individuals. Moreover, and more critically, the residency bans are enacted as a uniform code pertaining to all registered sex offenders regardless of when they committed their crime, or if they pose an additional threat. The anti-social behavior order requires a complaint to be made by local authorities, police forces, or landlords within a court. In other words, much like the ancient form of exile, the anti-social behavior order requires an evaluation to be made of the threat posed by an individual. The residency ban, adjudicates in one moment against an entire category of persons.

Whereas the residency bans offer no improvement in crime prevention, and only the desperate appearances of public safety by exiling an entire population writ large into segregated colonies, the behavior order may represent a better option. The crucial difference is the provision of judgment involved. Anti-social behavior orders are issued by judges after a complaint has been made. Rather than an ordinance issued by municipal authorities affecting all registered sex offenders, a procedure that examines the body of knowledge pertaining to the individual is preferable when considering both community safety and individual rights.

If, following Foucault, we might think of the exiled sex offender as beyond discipline, the behavior order might specify the individual sex offender as a field of knowledge to be understood, and perhaps disciplined. Clearly Foucault had concerns about the deployment of discipline, and I share these concerns. We can easily imagine the capacity for abuse in a system like the anti-social behavior orders, and if our solutions continue to emerge in the form of exile, then we will continue to face the same problems. However, implicit to the notion of discipline, with its deep concern for knowledge, is a component of understanding. I would choose understanding as a decidedly superior alternative in beginning to confront the problem of sexual predation than segregation, ostracism, and exile.

The drama of modern exile is constructed around the myth of the modern incorrigible sex offender, obscuring the revaluation of power. The myth suggests that transgression is followed by confinement, attempts at rehabilitation, release back into society, and, inevitably, recidivism. This narrative, suggests the failure of society to fully modify human beings, to effectively discipline them and prevent the corruption of youth. On the one hand is the failure or inability to socialize an individual (impotency of the massive resources of the state: schools, police, laws, prisons), and on the other is the potency of the individual with unyielding proclivities even in the recognition of the self as "sick". The individual wages war with the state through its marginalized sexuality. The myth thus attempts to reconcile the apparent contradiction of an impotent state with an individual made potent by means of sexual perversion.

In response to an explicitly political problem, the accumulation of excessive power in certain individuals, the Greeks deployed an explicitly political solution. Inversely, we appear to be deploying the same political solution, but for a problem with no clear political origin. The difference between ancient exile and the current form is the substitution of political power with sexual power: the Greeks expelled the influential; we expel the libidinous or lascivious. From this we can infer that the Greeks feared the powerful individual for their potential to become tyrannical. We fear the individual with virtually no social power. We fear the individual with unusual sexual virility that, short of physical mutilation, cannot be repressed.

Notes

¹ In a nearly prescient sense, the Chorus in the play "Peace" describes a jubilant scene of "hunting Hyperbolus out" (Aristophanes, 1962, p 226).

² With a radius of 2,500 feet from any prohibited area: r² determining the area in square footage for 49 establishments. Calculation produces 19,625,000 square feet, divided by 5,280 feet, equals 3,716 square miles.

³ Thus, an individual registered as a sex offender who may have been paroled for years is subject to the residency ban.

⁴ I thank the reviewers for reminding me that this was actually the same condition of ancient exile as well. Ostracism took place outside of criminal penalty as a matter of social and political judgment. Accordingly, the residency ban occurs after the criminal penalty. A registered offender who has not committed a crime in years is subjected to exile.

⁵ The general finding of the report entitled "Recidivism of Prisoners Released in 1994 (Department of Justice, 2006)" found that "67.5% were rearrested for a new offense" within three years. Prisoners with the greatest likelihood of rearrest were those previously convicted of largely non-violent, economic crimes (larceny 74.6%, burglary 74%, transfer of stolen property 77%), while the category with the lowest rate of rearrest included those previously convicted of sexual assault (41.4%). Additionally, the Department of Justice (2003) also finds that of 9,617 classified sexual offenders released in 1994, 5.3% were rearrested for committing sex crimes within three years of release. Finally, although sex offenders were "four times" more likely than non-sex offenders to be arrested for an additional sex crime, they were less likely to be rearrested for any crime in comparison with non-sex offenders.

⁶ Florida Mayors Don Slesnick and Jim Naugle, of Coral Gables and Fort Lauderdale respectively, expressed public support for residency bans so as to prevent their cities from becoming a "repository for sexual predators chased out of other communities" (Grimm, 2005).

⁷ Police in Coral Springs, FL, a city that prohibits residence within "two thousand five hundred feet of any school, designated public school bus stop, child care facility, family day care home, park, playground or other place where children regularly congregate" (City of Coral Springs, Ordinance No. 2005–110), recently arrested a known sex offender for assaulting a 13-year-old child. The arrested individual had provided authorities with a different home address (Moskovitz, 2006b).

⁸ Police in Deerfield Beach, FL, a city with a residency ban (City of Deerfield Beach, 2003), arrested a city firefighter for downloading child pornography (Moskovitz, 2006a).

⁹ It is well worth noting that the charges of impiety and corruption levied against Socrates, whose pestering of Athenian society had occurred long enough before the trial to be enshrined in Aristophanes The Clouds, are thought to have been considered an effort to make a scapegoat after defeat in the Peloponnesian War. However, what is crucial to this analysis is the mythical narrative we have inherited pertaining to the trial.

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Acknowledgements

Foremost, I thank Leslie Paul Thiele at the University of Florida for his apparently limitless help. I also thank Susan Niedermeyer at the University of Central Florida, Tom Pope, David Ramsey of Baylor University, and my referees for their helpful insights and suggestions.