The death penalty
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The death penalty
（The seminars of Jacques Derrida / edited by Geoffrey Bennington & Peggy Kamuf）
University of Chicago Press, c2014-
- v. 1 : cloth
- v. 2 : cloth
- Other Title
-
Séminaire: La peine de mort
Available at / 10 libraries
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Kanazawa University Library研究室
v. 1 : cloth135.5:D438:12000-24424-6,
v. 2 : cloth135.5:D438:22000-23452-6 -
Tokyo Metropolitan University Library独文
v. 1 : cloth/135.5/D63d/110003300275,
v. 2 : cloth/135.5/D63d/210005177060 -
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Note
"Originally published as Séminaire: La peine de mort, vol. 1 (1999-2000). c2012 Éditions Galilée"--T.p. verso (v. 1)
"Originally published as Séminaire: La peine de mort, vol. 2 (2000-2001). c2015 Éditions Galilée"--T.p. verso (v. 2)
Includes bibliographical references and indexes
Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg (v. 2)
Description and Table of Contents
- Volume
-
v. 1 : cloth ISBN 9780226144320
Description
In this newest installment in Chicago's series of Jacques Derrida's seminars, the renowned philosopher attempts one of his most ambitious goals: the first truly philosophical argument against the death penalty. While much has been written against the death penalty, Derrida contends that Western philosophy is massively, if not always obviously, complicit with a logic in which a sovereign state has the right to take a life. Haunted by this notion, he turns to the key places where such logic has been established - and to the place it has been most effectively challenged: literature. With his signature genius and patient yet dazzling readings of an impressive breadth of texts, Derrida examines everything from the Bible to Plato to Camus to Jean Genet, with special attention to Kant and post-World War II juridical texts, to draw the landscape of death penalty discourses. Keeping clearly in view the death rows and execution chambers of the United States, he shows how arguments surrounding cruel and unusual punishment depend on what he calls an "anaesthesial logic," which has also driven the development of death penalty technology from the French guillotine to lethal injection.
Confronting a demand for philosophical rigor, he pursues provocative analyses of the shortcomings of abolitionist discourse. Above all, he argues that the death penalty and its attendant technologies are products of a desire to put an end to one of the most fundamental qualities of our finite existence: the radical uncertainty of when we will die. Arriving at a critical juncture in history - especially in the United States, one of the last Christian-inspired democracies to resist abolition - The Death Penalty is both a timely response to an important ethical debate and a timeless addition to Derrida's esteemed body of work.
- Volume
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v. 2 : cloth ISBN 9780226410821
Description
In the first volume of his extraordinary analysis of the death penalty, Jacques Derrida began a journey toward an ambitious end: the first truly philosophical argument against the death penalty. Exploring an impressive breadth of thought, he traced a deeply entrenched logic throughout the whole of Western philosophy that has justified the state's right to take a life. He also marked literature as a crucial place where this logic has been most effectively challenged. In this second and final volume, Derrida builds on these analyses toward a definitive argument against capital punishment. Of central importance in this second volume is Kant's explicit justification of the death penalty in the Metaphysics of Morals. Thoroughly deconstructing Kant's position which holds the death penalty as exemplary of the eye-for-an-eye Talionic law Derrida exposes numerous damning contradictions and exceptions.
Keeping the current death penalty in the United States in view, he further explores the "anesthesial logic" he analyzed in volume one, addressing the themes of cruelty and pain through texts by Robespierre and Freud, reading Heidegger, and in a fascinating, improvised final session the nineteenth-century Spanish Catholic thinker Donoso Cortes. Ultimately, Derrida shows that the rationality of the death penalty as represented by Kant involves an imposition of knowledge and calculability on a fundamental condition of non-knowledge that we don't otherwise know what or when our deaths will be. In this way, the death penalty acts out a phantasm of mastery over one's own death. Derrida's thoughts arrive at a particular moment in history: when the death penalty in the United States is the closest it has ever been to abolition, and yet when the arguments on all sides are as confused as ever. His powerful analysis will prove to be a paramount contribution to this debate as well as a lasting entry in his celebrated oeuvre.
by "Nielsen BookData"
