'Unless One Thinks, Unless One Changes This Structure'
Jacques Derrida, trans. Peggy Kamuf, The Death Penalty, Volume I
University of Chicago Press, 328pp, £24.50, ISBN 9780226144320
reviewed by Niall Gildea
The Death Penalty, Volume I is the third of Jacques Derrida’s seminars, or ‘teaching lectures’, to be translated into English, following Volumes I and II of The Beast and the Sovereign (the seminar series which directly followed Derrida’s Death Penalty seminar) in 2011 and 2012, respectively. In all cases, these translations have arrived very shortly after the publications of the French volumes. The present text records the first year of Derrida’s seminar on the Death Penalty at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales from December 1999 to March 2000; Derrida also gave versions of the seminar at UC Irvine (in the springs of 2000 and 2001) and NYU (in the autumns of 2000 and 2001).
The Death Penalty, Volume I is consistent with many of Derrida’s published political writings in that its principal artery is a salvo against good conscience; this animus it shares with, inter alia, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Of Hospitality, Politics of Friendship and Specters of Marx. Although it is apparent that Derrida himself opposes the death penalty, he is careful not to situate himself straightforwardly in a genealogy of ‘abolitionism’ because of an uncertainty, even a suspicion, pertaining to what precisely that genealogy wishes to abolish. Abolition would be attended by a qualitative shift in thinking only if it were also to question, along with the death penalty itself (as spectacle or otherwise), the conceptual architecture, or scaffold, upon which capital and indeed corporal punishment stand. To this end, the interest behind both pro-death penalty and abolitionist discourses is what interests Derrida here (this double interest is his own formulation); of these two discourses, the greater part of Derrida’s critique focuses on seminal texts of abolitionism in its various historical instantiations – principally those of Cesare Beccaria, Victor Hugo, and Albert Camus.
This more difficult, even counterintuitive, approach is typical of Derrida’s political writings: he states his desire to avoid the seminar becoming ‘just another discourse, and a discourse of good conscience, among people who, like us after all, will never be or believe they will never be executioners carrying out the sentence, or sentenced to death'; he cites approvingly an anti-abolitionist outburst of Baudelaire’s (one of his ‘terrifying excesses or missteps’) because he recoups from it a perceptive observation about abolitionism’s sham disinterest: ‘his mistrustful gesture strikes me as always and indefinitely necessary with respect to the concealment or the hypocrisy that animates and agitates the defenders of just causes’; and his overarching aim, ‘the impossible task of this seminar’, is to rescue, from the politicking historically coupled with abolitionist discourse, its ethical energy – the real distinction between advocacy and opposition vis-à-vis the death penalty – and hence ‘to break this alliance, this symmetry between abolitionism and anti-abolitionism where finally each of them needs the other.’
The first abolitionist case study is Beccaria’s influential 1764 treatise, On Crimes and Punishments. Derrida observes that this text, disconcertingly, is at its most persuasive as an abolitionist discourse when it calls for abolition as a means of instituting ‘something crueller, perpetual penal servitude, with chains and beatings’, rather than the single punitive moment of killing. What such a position indexes (and this is a point which obviously resounds, ugly, in contemporary carceral and penal polemic) is that the death penalty is somehow not cruel enough, is insufficiently faithful to the extremism which has engendered it. The fantasy is to get as close as possible to a repeated killing, one which the victim can experience, reflect upon and learn from – even if, paradoxically of course, its perpetuity renders such a specious pedagogic inflection pointless except as fuel for the good conscience of the law. In certain cases, then, what abolitionism resists is not the death penalty tout court, but the death penalty’s sense of having done with the other. To keep the condemned one as barely-alive as possible: is this more humane than the lightning-quick ‘slight coolness on the neck’ effectuated by Joseph Ignace Guillotin’s invention? The question is never of the ‘humanity’ of the death penalty (for Derrida, this position is insupportable beyond any doubt), but of the inhumanity of its alternatives – which, in many cases, are not simply alternatives but also variants. This mistaking of complicity for opposition is what Derrida targets when, finally, he avers that his seminar on the death penalty is about breaking the alliance, symmetry and reciprocity which link militant-abolitionist and anti-abolitionist traditions, which is a symmetry insofar as both presuppose the necessity of a strict equivalence between the crime and the retribution; the two traditions are equivalent apropos the trope of equivalence. According to Derrida, we should always ‘heed’ the fact that the authentically abolitionist movement is, or would be, crucially discontinuous, even and especially with itself. This auto-interruption of responsible abolitionism is crucial to the trajectory through which Derrida’s seminar concludes. Abolitionism must be motivated by an interest in the exposure of human lives to the future with all of its incalculable and undecidable force; it cannot, therefore, have an agenda determined a priori or a vision to realise. Only if characterised by such risky intimacy can abolitionism break with the divinely-inspired fear of and respect for indemnity which motivates the argument for the death penalty; if not, ‘as long as there is “God,” belief in God, thus belief period, there will be some future both for the supporter of the death penalty and for his abolitionist opponent: both for the agent of the death penalty and for the militant abolitionist’.
This de facto, hypostatic symbiosis of historical and present abolitionism and anti-abolitionism comes about, Derrida hypothesises, because the death penalty has determined all philosophical capacity for thinking about death qua object, inasmuch as death means the death of one, the death of the other. The calculability of and in death, that is, derives from the possibility of the death penalty. And this possibility of the death penalty ‘begins where I am delivered into the power of the other, be it the power of the other in me.’ Calculation is constitutive of a relationship to an other which would dominate and which would denominate: ‘There must always be a judgment, a verdict, and the subject of it must be a personal, nameable subject, answerable to his or her name.’ Hence, for Derrida, ‘A genocide […] does not therefore partake, sensu stricto, literally, of a logic or of the concept of condemnation to death.’ This is because what genocide suspends or outright abandons is precisely the pseudo-rationalistic, taxonomic and procedural discourse and praxis of the death penalty.
So the death penalty is a special case of killing – one which is shot through above all with calculation. Calculation is a faculty or technology with which Derrida takes issue across his corpus: among other things, it atrophies the yet-to-come, à venir, or messianic, into a set of programmable and programmatic outcomes. Gerhard Richter has written brilliantly on Derridean mourning as a deconstruction of calculation and calculability, illustrating that what exceeds calculation are affirmation and responsibility for the other (see Richter, ‘Acts of Memory and Mourning: Derrida and the Fictions of Anteriority’); this seminar sees Derrida candid on the question of why such a deconstruction is indispensable for a responsible notion of our lives, and those of others: not knowing the hour of one’s death ‘is an essential trait of my relation to death’. Knowing just that I and we will die, and partaking equally of this (non-)knowledge, are as far as humanity and humaneness should go; this is the condemnation to die. The condemnation to death, however, entails knowledge of when the condemned will die, to within a second. Not only does this allege a mastery of time, it is for Derrida nothing less than chronocidal: to put an end, in programmatic fashion, to a person’s life is to kill time itself insofar as open futurity is an essential dimension of life’s vitality. The guillotine, ‘reducing time to the nothing of an instant, to the nothing but an instant, […] kills time.’ The instant of execution – no matter what the specific technical means – is the instant marked by the decision that there is no yet-to-come. Execution means to carry faithfully into actuality something that was planned – it acknowledges no future: ‘When the anticipation of my death becomes the anticipation of a calculable instant, there is no longer any event to come, nothing to come, no longer any other, even no more heart of the other, and so forth.’
This precision is why the cruelty specific to the death penalty is perhaps integral not only to philosophy’s capacity for thinking about death, but to the sine qua non, in the modern age, of philosophy’s capacity for thinking its own competence: Kant’s categorical imperative. In the fifth session of his seminar, Derrida speaks with undisguised scorn for Kant’s anti-abolitionism, before allowing Nietzsche to take the fight to Kant in the sixth round. At the heart of Kant’s position is the conviction that since murder and the death penalty are formally equivalent, a penal logic which observes such equivalence – a talionic system – most reflects the natural state of things, is hence most free from extrinsic interest, and thus must tack most closely to the disinterested path of the categorical imperative. It is striking how influential this argument, shorn of its philosophical rigour, remains in contemporary thought; this is a banal point, and not one that Derrida makes. Instead, he returns to it all of its philosophical respectability, showing how and where it has become installed at the heart of modern western thinking. Broadly, this describes the Derridean treatment itself, and the principal achievement of the death penalty seminar is to indicate how his approach uniquely helps us to engage with such a singularly vexed history.
The Death Penalty, Volume I is consistent with many of Derrida’s published political writings in that its principal artery is a salvo against good conscience; this animus it shares with, inter alia, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Of Hospitality, Politics of Friendship and Specters of Marx. Although it is apparent that Derrida himself opposes the death penalty, he is careful not to situate himself straightforwardly in a genealogy of ‘abolitionism’ because of an uncertainty, even a suspicion, pertaining to what precisely that genealogy wishes to abolish. Abolition would be attended by a qualitative shift in thinking only if it were also to question, along with the death penalty itself (as spectacle or otherwise), the conceptual architecture, or scaffold, upon which capital and indeed corporal punishment stand. To this end, the interest behind both pro-death penalty and abolitionist discourses is what interests Derrida here (this double interest is his own formulation); of these two discourses, the greater part of Derrida’s critique focuses on seminal texts of abolitionism in its various historical instantiations – principally those of Cesare Beccaria, Victor Hugo, and Albert Camus.
This more difficult, even counterintuitive, approach is typical of Derrida’s political writings: he states his desire to avoid the seminar becoming ‘just another discourse, and a discourse of good conscience, among people who, like us after all, will never be or believe they will never be executioners carrying out the sentence, or sentenced to death'; he cites approvingly an anti-abolitionist outburst of Baudelaire’s (one of his ‘terrifying excesses or missteps’) because he recoups from it a perceptive observation about abolitionism’s sham disinterest: ‘his mistrustful gesture strikes me as always and indefinitely necessary with respect to the concealment or the hypocrisy that animates and agitates the defenders of just causes’; and his overarching aim, ‘the impossible task of this seminar’, is to rescue, from the politicking historically coupled with abolitionist discourse, its ethical energy – the real distinction between advocacy and opposition vis-à-vis the death penalty – and hence ‘to break this alliance, this symmetry between abolitionism and anti-abolitionism where finally each of them needs the other.’
The first abolitionist case study is Beccaria’s influential 1764 treatise, On Crimes and Punishments. Derrida observes that this text, disconcertingly, is at its most persuasive as an abolitionist discourse when it calls for abolition as a means of instituting ‘something crueller, perpetual penal servitude, with chains and beatings’, rather than the single punitive moment of killing. What such a position indexes (and this is a point which obviously resounds, ugly, in contemporary carceral and penal polemic) is that the death penalty is somehow not cruel enough, is insufficiently faithful to the extremism which has engendered it. The fantasy is to get as close as possible to a repeated killing, one which the victim can experience, reflect upon and learn from – even if, paradoxically of course, its perpetuity renders such a specious pedagogic inflection pointless except as fuel for the good conscience of the law. In certain cases, then, what abolitionism resists is not the death penalty tout court, but the death penalty’s sense of having done with the other. To keep the condemned one as barely-alive as possible: is this more humane than the lightning-quick ‘slight coolness on the neck’ effectuated by Joseph Ignace Guillotin’s invention? The question is never of the ‘humanity’ of the death penalty (for Derrida, this position is insupportable beyond any doubt), but of the inhumanity of its alternatives – which, in many cases, are not simply alternatives but also variants. This mistaking of complicity for opposition is what Derrida targets when, finally, he avers that his seminar on the death penalty is about breaking the alliance, symmetry and reciprocity which link militant-abolitionist and anti-abolitionist traditions, which is a symmetry insofar as both presuppose the necessity of a strict equivalence between the crime and the retribution; the two traditions are equivalent apropos the trope of equivalence. According to Derrida, we should always ‘heed’ the fact that the authentically abolitionist movement is, or would be, crucially discontinuous, even and especially with itself. This auto-interruption of responsible abolitionism is crucial to the trajectory through which Derrida’s seminar concludes. Abolitionism must be motivated by an interest in the exposure of human lives to the future with all of its incalculable and undecidable force; it cannot, therefore, have an agenda determined a priori or a vision to realise. Only if characterised by such risky intimacy can abolitionism break with the divinely-inspired fear of and respect for indemnity which motivates the argument for the death penalty; if not, ‘as long as there is “God,” belief in God, thus belief period, there will be some future both for the supporter of the death penalty and for his abolitionist opponent: both for the agent of the death penalty and for the militant abolitionist’.
This de facto, hypostatic symbiosis of historical and present abolitionism and anti-abolitionism comes about, Derrida hypothesises, because the death penalty has determined all philosophical capacity for thinking about death qua object, inasmuch as death means the death of one, the death of the other. The calculability of and in death, that is, derives from the possibility of the death penalty. And this possibility of the death penalty ‘begins where I am delivered into the power of the other, be it the power of the other in me.’ Calculation is constitutive of a relationship to an other which would dominate and which would denominate: ‘There must always be a judgment, a verdict, and the subject of it must be a personal, nameable subject, answerable to his or her name.’ Hence, for Derrida, ‘A genocide […] does not therefore partake, sensu stricto, literally, of a logic or of the concept of condemnation to death.’ This is because what genocide suspends or outright abandons is precisely the pseudo-rationalistic, taxonomic and procedural discourse and praxis of the death penalty.
So the death penalty is a special case of killing – one which is shot through above all with calculation. Calculation is a faculty or technology with which Derrida takes issue across his corpus: among other things, it atrophies the yet-to-come, à venir, or messianic, into a set of programmable and programmatic outcomes. Gerhard Richter has written brilliantly on Derridean mourning as a deconstruction of calculation and calculability, illustrating that what exceeds calculation are affirmation and responsibility for the other (see Richter, ‘Acts of Memory and Mourning: Derrida and the Fictions of Anteriority’); this seminar sees Derrida candid on the question of why such a deconstruction is indispensable for a responsible notion of our lives, and those of others: not knowing the hour of one’s death ‘is an essential trait of my relation to death’. Knowing just that I and we will die, and partaking equally of this (non-)knowledge, are as far as humanity and humaneness should go; this is the condemnation to die. The condemnation to death, however, entails knowledge of when the condemned will die, to within a second. Not only does this allege a mastery of time, it is for Derrida nothing less than chronocidal: to put an end, in programmatic fashion, to a person’s life is to kill time itself insofar as open futurity is an essential dimension of life’s vitality. The guillotine, ‘reducing time to the nothing of an instant, to the nothing but an instant, […] kills time.’ The instant of execution – no matter what the specific technical means – is the instant marked by the decision that there is no yet-to-come. Execution means to carry faithfully into actuality something that was planned – it acknowledges no future: ‘When the anticipation of my death becomes the anticipation of a calculable instant, there is no longer any event to come, nothing to come, no longer any other, even no more heart of the other, and so forth.’
This precision is why the cruelty specific to the death penalty is perhaps integral not only to philosophy’s capacity for thinking about death, but to the sine qua non, in the modern age, of philosophy’s capacity for thinking its own competence: Kant’s categorical imperative. In the fifth session of his seminar, Derrida speaks with undisguised scorn for Kant’s anti-abolitionism, before allowing Nietzsche to take the fight to Kant in the sixth round. At the heart of Kant’s position is the conviction that since murder and the death penalty are formally equivalent, a penal logic which observes such equivalence – a talionic system – most reflects the natural state of things, is hence most free from extrinsic interest, and thus must tack most closely to the disinterested path of the categorical imperative. It is striking how influential this argument, shorn of its philosophical rigour, remains in contemporary thought; this is a banal point, and not one that Derrida makes. Instead, he returns to it all of its philosophical respectability, showing how and where it has become installed at the heart of modern western thinking. Broadly, this describes the Derridean treatment itself, and the principal achievement of the death penalty seminar is to indicate how his approach uniquely helps us to engage with such a singularly vexed history.