Abstract
This paper situates Derrida's two-year seminar on The Death Penalty within the new thinking of life he often insists lies at the heart of deconstruction. Derrida argues that the philosophical tradition is fundamentally unable to conceive of a principled opposition to the death penalty because within its system, the latter is both the quasi-transcendental condition of possibility of law in general and the very ‘proper of man’—the sacrificial machinery that makes human life inviolable. Against this tradition, Derrida advances the love for life as the principle on the basis of which the first true philosophical opposition to the death penalty must be founded. I analyze this position from the perspective of the performativity with which Derrida ‘declares’ it. This allows us to see that he identifies life, reconceived as survivance, as the performative self-relation of life's love for itself.
Published Version
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