Death Sentence: Capitals, American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) 2014 Annual Meeting

Description

"Death Sentence"

A capital sentence is a death sentence, a lawful determination that the State will put a person to death as punishment for a crime. With the 2013 publication in English of Volume 1 of Jacques Derrida’s The Death Penalty, this is an opportune time to discuss the death sentence, which demands thinking about the limits of punishment and pardon, of death and life, of human and non-human, of the self and State, of the body, and, it can be argued, the ends of philosophy itself.

This seminar seeks to consider the death sentence, and its place in theoretical, visual, and literary texts. What does the death sentence tell us of the value of life, or of the conditions of being, human or not? Moreover, this seminar is interested in considering the death sentence as text, or the pre-scribed text as death sentence. And how might one translate a death sentence? This would be a question not only of language, but of laws, jurisdictions, territories, and technologies. In an age of rendition and drones, we can ask if a death sentence is always declared, or if it often remains unspoken.

Period	2014
Event type	Seminar
Location	New York, United States, New YorkShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International