Derrida, the death penalty, and the theologico-political

Abstract

With The Death Penalty, Volume 1, Jacques Derrida begins his own philosophical discourse on the death penalty, across 22 sessions of his ‘‘Death Penalty Seminars.’’ For Derrida, ‘‘discourse . . . in its philosophical systematicity’’ means thinking as ‘‘deconstruction . . . of everything with which it [the death penalty] is in solidarity— beginning with a certain concept of sovereignty—of its entire scaffolding (and likewise, of the discourse on what is called ‘the animal’).’’ As always with Derrida, we recall that ‘‘to deconstruct’’ is not to destroy; it is to trace the complexities within which a focused theme, topic or event is inscribed, and so unravel that complexity, allowing new, often unexpected, insights to emerge. This deconstruction of everything in solidarity with the death penalty will entail a critique of the theological, or better, in Derrida’s language, of the ‘‘theologicopolitical apparatus’’ in which the death penalty is inscribed. In short, one cannot condemn the death penalty philosophically without challenging the ways theology helps underwrite it. Before I say how this works for Derrida, let us make sure we grasp the momentousness of the text we have before us. Theology Today 2015, Vol. 72(1) 100–108 ! The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0040573614563884 ttj.sagepub.com