The Death Penalty, Volume I (Volume 1) (The Seminars of Jacques Derrida)

This book is worth getting for the first session of the seminar alone. Derrida challenges his readers, who likely are against the death penalty (I certainly am), by showing that the argument against the death penalty always turns on its application (cruel and inhuman) not on the principle of the death penalty. He "begins before beginning" by giving a highly original and illuminating close reading of several passages from Exodus and addresses the contradictions between the commandment though shalt not kill and the death penalty for several offenses that follow in the judgments that supplement the decalogue. His larger argument (p. 32-33) is that the question "What is the death penalty?" or the question "what is the essence of the death penalty?" must be addressed historically and indirectly. Aligning Socrates, Jesus, a ninth century Islamic philosopher, and Joan of Arc, Derrida shows that in each case, the person put to death transgressed a religious offense, heard another voice (of the gods or of God) considered to be foreign and threatening. The death penalty plays out not only in a theater, a spectacle with witnesses, as Michel Foucault argues in  Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison , but in a religious and political context. The problem with arguments in favor of abolishing the death penalty (and Derrida deeply wants to see the death penalty abolished), the problem is that arguments in against the death penalty and for it are governed by the same structure. There is no anti-theologico-politico structure, no atheologoico-politico structure. What needs to be understood is that the structure admits of another voice, a counter-message that cannot be heard, that has to be suppressed in a moment that is always tele-technical (hence the numerous films in which the telephone plays a crucial role--will a stay of execution be granted at the last minute? For Derrida the suspension of this moment is crucial. In over just one page (p. 32-33), Derrida show that the question of the death has to be addressed through another question: what is the theologico-politico structure in which we will find the death penalty? In second half of the first session, Derrida discusses the fate of the corpse, a fate possibly worse than the death penalty, in the moment in the Gospel of John when Jesus says "do not touch me" to Mary Magdalene (he appears before he goes to heaven as "mort vivant." In the second session, Derrida returns to Carl Schmitt's  Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political  and asks "what is the exception?" and "how is the exception related to cruelty?" (and Derrida also asks "what is cruelty?") (See Derrida's earlier discussion of Schmitt in  The Politics of Friendship (Radical Thinkers)  After the first two sessions, Derrida focuses mainly on Victor Hugo's writings on the death penalty ( The Last Day of a Condemned Man (World's Classics) ) and Albert Camus' "Reflections on the Guillotine" ( Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays ). Characteristically, however, Derrida brings in many other works along the way. The last two pages are awe-inspiring. Derrida concludes the death penalty will survive even if it is abolished. This is a bracing, deep, and very accessibly written book. Anyone interested in the death penalty should read it, in my view, along with two books Derrida cites,  Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty  and  The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech

Derrida gives a brilliant analysis of a very difficult topic and how it defines much of our philosophical thinking and what it means to be human.