TY - GEN
T1 - Survival of the Death Sentence
A2 - Coughlan, David
A2 - Diakoulakis, Christoforos
A2 - Huddart, David
A2 - Wijaya, Elizabeth
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - 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.Twenty-two countries officially recorded executions in 2013. A European Union boycott on the supply of drugs to US prisons has resulted in the compromised executions this year of Michael Wilson, Dennis McGuire, Clayton Lockett, and Joseph Wood. As Roudinesco observes, it may be that the death penalty will finally be abolished in the United States, for example, “not on principle but for contingent reasons” (155). Can a philosophy as such ever contest the legitimacy of the death penalty?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.Emerging from a seminar organised by the issue’s editors at the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) 2014, the essays collected here are first and foremost concerned with this haunting survival or afterlife of the death sentence in its varied dissimulations, disseminations, and figurations. Keeping in dialogue with other recent attempts to revisit the question of the death penalty in its political urgency and philosophical complexity, most prominently with the essays that comprise the issue of the Oxford Literary Review “Death Sentences” published in December 2013, this issue focuses on those “other turns in the condemnation to death,” whether it is cloning, archiving, race and constitutional law, or the unconscious, or contingency, or possession, or the revenant. Through innovative readings of a wide array of texts, it bears witness to enactments and reenactments, testimonies, memories, promises, prognostications, and decrees of death sentences, in literature, in film, and in life, tracing the disconcerting, ineradicable effects of the logic of a death sentence that remains to be abolished. Concerned with what survives, or is born of, a death sentence, this special issue protests against what Roudinesco describes as “the elimination of the very traces of the passage from life to death” (154), as if the death sentence occurred only once, and never again.
AB - 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.Twenty-two countries officially recorded executions in 2013. A European Union boycott on the supply of drugs to US prisons has resulted in the compromised executions this year of Michael Wilson, Dennis McGuire, Clayton Lockett, and Joseph Wood. As Roudinesco observes, it may be that the death penalty will finally be abolished in the United States, for example, “not on principle but for contingent reasons” (155). Can a philosophy as such ever contest the legitimacy of the death penalty?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.Emerging from a seminar organised by the issue’s editors at the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) 2014, the essays collected here are first and foremost concerned with this haunting survival or afterlife of the death sentence in its varied dissimulations, disseminations, and figurations. Keeping in dialogue with other recent attempts to revisit the question of the death penalty in its political urgency and philosophical complexity, most prominently with the essays that comprise the issue of the Oxford Literary Review “Death Sentences” published in December 2013, this issue focuses on those “other turns in the condemnation to death,” whether it is cloning, archiving, race and constitutional law, or the unconscious, or contingency, or possession, or the revenant. Through innovative readings of a wide array of texts, it bears witness to enactments and reenactments, testimonies, memories, promises, prognostications, and decrees of death sentences, in literature, in film, and in life, tracing the disconcerting, ineradicable effects of the logic of a death sentence that remains to be abolished. Concerned with what survives, or is born of, a death sentence, this special issue protests against what Roudinesco describes as “the elimination of the very traces of the passage from life to death” (154), as if the death sentence occurred only once, and never again.
KW - Death Penalty
KW - Survival
M3 - Special issue
SN - 1353-4645
VL - 22
SP - 1
EP - 114
JO - Parallax
JF - Parallax
PB - Taylor and Francis
ER -