This volume represents the first collection of essays devoted exclusively to Jacques Derrida's Death Penalty Seminars, conducted from 1999 to 2001. The volume includes essays from a range of scholars working in philosophy, law, Francophone studies, and comparative literature, including established Derridians, activist scholars, and emerging scholars. These essays attempt to elucidate and expand upon Derrida's deconstruction of the theologico-political logic of the death penalty in order to construct a new form of abolitionism, one not rooted in the problematic logics of sovereign power. These essays provide remarkable insight into Derrida’s ethical and political projects; this volume will not only explore the implications of Derrida’s thought on capital punishment and mass incarceration, but will also help to further elucidate the philosophical groundwork for his later deconstructions of sovereign power and the human/animal divide. Because Derrida is deconstructing the logic of the death penalty, rather than the death penalty itself, his seminars will prove useful to scholars and activists opposing all forms of state sanctioned killing. In compiling this volume, our goals were twofold: first, to make a case for Derrida's continuing importance in debates on capital punishment, mass incarceration, and police brutality, and second, to construct a new, versatile abolitionism, one capable of confronting all forms the death penalty might take.
- Cover
- DECONSTRUCTING THE DEATH PENALTY
- Title
- Copyright
- CONTENTS
- Introduction. From Capital Punishment to Abolitionism: Deconstructing the Death Penalty
- PART I READING DERRIDA’S DEATH PENALTY SEMINARS
- 1. Beginning with Literature
- 2. A New Primal Scene: Derrida and the Scene of Execution
- 3. Always the Other Who Decides: On Sovereignty, Psychoanalysis, and the Death Penalty
- 4. The Death Penalty and Its Exceptions
- PART II DERRIDA AND HIS INTERLOCUTERS
- 5. Derrida at Montaigne: A Stay of Execution
- 6. “Bidding Up” on the Question of Sovereignty: Derrida between Kant and Benjamin
- 7. Calculus
- PART III EXTENDING DERRIDA’S ANALYSIS
- 8. A Proper Death: Penalties, Animals, and the Law
- 9. Figures of Interest: The Widow, the Telephone, and the Time of Death
- 10. Opening the Blinds on Botched Executions: Interrupting the Time of the Death Penalty
- PART IV DERRIDA AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN THE UNITED STATES
- 11. Furman and Finitude
- 12. The Heart of the Other?
- 13. An Abolitionism Worthy of the Name: From the Death Penalty to the Prison Industrial Complex
- List of Contributors
- Index
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