"I’M AGAINST THE DEATH PENALTY"

by Stefano Crosara

The death penalty has a time, its time in fact, the time of its death, will certainly come. Jacques Derrida , French philosopher and father of deconstructivism, is positive about this. On the 16th of November, in a crowded room of the Department of Philosophy of the University of Trieste, Derrida held a seminar entitled “Time and Death Penalty” the tenets of which seem to be this paradoxical trust in what we still don’t know (but can it be any different?) and this “preference for life”. “However,” Derrida adds, “if we will see the day when death penalty is abolished, that day will come as unexpectedly as death does, not like a death penalty”. Here then are two ways in which to relate with time, two manners of being in time without a common measure. On the one hand, the awareness we all have, albeit it might have us, that we are to die one day, at some point in the future. On the other hand, the condemned man’s exact knowledge, the precise consciousness of how much he has left to live and when he will die. Between these two expressions which connect living to dying, says Derrida, there is a clear line sharply separating them. On this line, or rather on this “cutting edge”, which involves time and knowledge about time, runs the difference between those who are doomed to die and those who are sentenced to death.
With the death penalty - an act of sovereignty - the State, the Prince or the Dictator claims an extraordinary power of calculation: the right to determine when life expires. The President, the Governor or the Judge, who hold the right to grant pardon, the right to forgive and thus to make exceptions, are meant to know and be able to calculate the time of death, the moment which abruptly puts an end to the other’s finitude. This is what makes Derrida indignant. This, he says, is the offence given to life and to its time: it’s not its interruption, nor its end, but the presumption and cruelty of giving it a deadline and of having the right to put an end to its principle of indetermination. Nothing happens to us any longer if the clear certainty of the moment of death intervenes in life, in the end which is always to come. If living means everything that can happen to us, the death penalty kills us before shedding our blood. It suppresses the possibility that something may happen to us anticipating everything. This is the abuse that has no possible moderation. Even though the gruesome spectacle is taken away and concealed for reasons of decency and death is administered through carefully “humanised” procedures reducing the pain to a brief moment (such indeed was the opinion of dr. Guillotin who believed in a “humanitarian machine”, in an “egalitarian instrument”) this does not diminish the cruelty. “There is no measuring cruelty” Derrida remind us “it would be very hypocritical of us to think so”.
Everything, then, takes place as if suppressing someone softening the moment of their end, with an anaesthetic for example, could avert from the death penalty any suspicion of serving some other hidden interest or desire. For the anti-abolitionists the argument is always that of absolute disinterest and of the imperative of justice, beyond any empirical interest. The killing is not done for the satisfaction of observing it, nor for vengeance but for justice. Yet those who are against the death penalty run the risk of reviving the same cruelty in the precise moment in which they affirm they consider life the supreme value, one which cannot be traded. On this very friable ground develops one of the most important and delicate passages of Derrida’s argument. This is where the critical conscience needs to be fully alert and suspicious. Derrida is an abolitionist and yet he wonders: “what is the secret and hidden interest that lies behind these two arguments of absolute disinterest?”. In other words, what happens when abolitionists unfold their argument and say: the death penalty, apart from being unjust, is also ineffective, better a sentence of forced labour? This is how, Derrida reminds us, a champion of abolitionism such as Cesare Beccaria expressed his views. Cruelty multiplied, warns the philosopher, who at this point brings together some of the threads of his argument: in this way, he says, credit is given, by both sides, to the belief ( a “mad belief”, an act, as Nietzsche sustained, that “simulates belief but does not believe in it”) in a principle of pure equivalence between the damage and the reparation, between the wrong and the pain and the punishment, between a life taken and taking another life to compensate for the loss. Only within this logic can the principle of replacing that which is irreplaceable function: to believe in this is to “believe in a fictitious equivalence which does not exist but allows for this exchange”. This permits us to grant ourselves the right to a compensation “obtained as a psychical and symbolic refund for the damage suffered”. Thus an economic law, the law of the market, irrupts into the issue of the death penalty, raising all the questions once again and complicating the act, that is always interested, by which we take position against, but also for, the death penalty. Perhaps, Derrida says “it is now a matter of finding a different figure for the interest”. When asked the maybe inevitable question of how to decide, he answers. “I can only say I prefer life, starting with my own life.
I am against the death penalty”, he concludes, “but the issue of its abolition is not a closed discourse, its a matter which seeks itself, which is still looking for itself”.