Sovereignty, Cruelty, and the Death Penalty

Abstract

This chapter explores the implications of the thought of survival in Derrida for rethinking political practice, looking in particular at Derrida’s very late work from the late 1990s and early 2000s on sovereignty and the death penalty. The chapter maps out the deconstructive contestation of the death penalty undertaken in this period, one which, it shows, proceeds by mobilizing survival as a critical concept undercutting the phantasm of something “worth more than life” found at the heart of the theological-political logic of the death penalty. Freud is shown to provide key deconstructive resources in this project, via his thinking of cruelty and a drive toward mastery. The chapter ends by showing why the death penalty is not a mere “case” or “example” of deconstruction’s normative purchase. It shows that the death penalty in fact represents the crucial point of entry for a deconstruction of the political generally, insofar as its dominant configurations are fundamentally theological, bound up with the fantasy of superlife. In conclusion, it argues that this makes possible deconstructive engagements with contemporary political concepts and practices well beyond those Derrida himself took up and beyond those commonly associated with the logic of sovereignty.