Introduction: Survival of the Death Sentence

In “Death Penalties,” his dialogue with Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Derrida makes the startling observation that “never has any philosophy as such contested the legitimacy of the death penalty” (146). His seminars on the death penalty, which took place from 1999 to 2001, and the first volume of which was published in English in 2014, provoke us therefore to think again about the limits of punishment and pardon, of human and nonhuman, of sacrifice and betrayal, of life and death, of the nation and of the body, and, it can be argued, the limits and reach of philosophy itself.

Even while advocating a militant abolitionism, Derrida cautions that “Even when the death penalty will have been abolished, when it will have been purely and simply, absolutely and unconditionally, abolished on earth, it will survive; there will still be some death penalty. Other figures will be found for it; other figures will be invented for it, other turns in the condemnation to death, and it is this rhetoric beyond rhetoric that we are taking seriously here” (380). This “rhetoric beyond rhetoric” is what this issue takes seriously in its turn.