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 Cortés. 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.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780226410968
Publisert
2018
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Vendor
University of Chicago Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter