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

Derrida, Jacques

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226144321 ISBN 13: 9780226144320

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2013

Synopsis

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 overtly, 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 “anesthesial 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. 

About this title

About the Author:

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, and professor of humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of many books published by the University of Chicago Press. Peggy Kamuf is the Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She has written, edited, or translated many books, by Derrida and others, and is coeditor of the series of Derrida’s seminars at the University of Chicago Press. She lives in Los Angeles.  

Review:

“Those who attended Derrida’s seminars and saw him ‘live’ will have been struck by the contrast between his reputation as a “notoriously difficult philosopher” (to quote The New York Times obituary) and the articulate, focused presentation on display in his classroom. His commentaries on the nuances of a single sentence or word were legendary for their length and intricacy, but he never failed to foreground the fundamental stakes of the debates at hand and the central questions motivating the analysis. The result was a rare combination of erudition, argumentative dexterity, and a style of interpretation that made it clear that the real master in the room was the text at hand. . . . What is certain is that this Death Penalty volume offers a rich, innovative approach to a confounding topic. One can only hope that it will be broadly read and debated.” (Los Angeles Review of Books)

"The translation of the seminars, appositely enough, is itself the product, we are informed, of the 'Derrida Seminars Translation project workshops,' and it is both elegant and, insofar as its subject’s allusive and associative style permits, remarkably unequivocal." (Critical Inquiry)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0226144321
• ISBN 13: 9780226144320
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 312