The Autobiographical Subject and the Death Penalty

E. S. Burt

The first year of Jacques Derrida’s two-year seminar on the deathpenalty is unabashedly abolitionist. Indeed Derrida’s position forabolition is almost a confession of faith: he affirms belief in andagreement with a worldwide tendency to abolish the death penalty,progress that he calls irreversible and inevitable. A sentence to death hasalready been handed down on the death penalty and it is irrevocable;it is only a matter of time before the death sentence against deathsentences is carried out. Viewed as a performative, the seminar proposesto accelerate what it shows is sure to take place.

The pattern of recent events in the U.S., one of the countries in theworld where the death penalty is still most practised, seems to confirmDerrida’s assessment of a tendency towards abolition. As the DeathPenalty Information Center website shows, besides the repeal of thedeath penalty in seven states in the past decade, between 1996 and2012, there was a 75% decrease in the number of death sentencespassed, and a sharp drop in the number of executions carried out.1

It is true, however, that it takes many strokes of the pen to abolishin a federation what a single stroke can do away with in a statewith a uniform statute. It is also true that the U.S. has reversedcourse on the matter more than once: most famously, in 1976, fouryears after the Supreme Court had struck down death penalty statuesacross the land, reforms in the system and new statutes allowed itto be reinstated in state after state. There is reason for optimism,however, in that the attacks being levelled on the death penalty in theU.S. at the present moment come from many different quarters andare based on a welter of arguments that fuel and reflect a growingpublic unease. They include but are not limited to the problems

The Oxford Literary Review 35.2 (2013): 165–187DOI: 10.3366/olr.2013.0068© Edinburgh University Presswww.euppublishing.com/olr

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of arbitrariness in application that led to the 1972 Supreme Courtdecision.

Some of these arguments are economic — in 2012, in the midst ofa bad economy, California nearly passed a proposition to replace thedeath penalty with life without parole that appealed strongly to votersworried about the spiralling costs to the state of prosecuting deathpenalty cases and housing the condemned on death row. The economicargument cuts both ways: concerns about the ability of the Americanlegal system to provide poor defendants with adequate representationare at a new height. Some arguments are utilitarian, decrying thedeath penalty as a poor means to dissuade from crime. Others arepractical: sodium thiopental, the first of the drugs in the favoureddeadly cocktail of lethal injection, is all but unavailable, and the makerof propofol, a drug proposed to replace it, has announced it will notallow the drug to be sold for executions.2 Other arguments are moralor religious: some cite the sanctity of human life and others find capitalpunishment — no matter the method — in itself cruel and unusual.Some worry about miscarriages of justice which capital punishmentmakes irremediable: the National Registry of Exonerations recentlyreleased a report showing that two out of the fifty-eight prisonersexonerated between March 2012 and March 2013 had received a deathsentence. Numerous attacks are levelled against the system in any oneof its parts: they find the definition of capital crime too broad, or notethe disproportionate number of the poor, the mentally incompetent,blacks and Latinos on death row. Pointing out a less-often discussedpattern of capriciousness, on 6 April 2013, the NY Times ran a pieceabout an Arizona report that highlighted the arbitrariness of decisionsto prosecute death penalty cases. In one case cited, a man sits ondeath row as an accessory to a murder for which its three mainperpetrators did not receive even life sentences. The article blamedAmerica’s plea bargain system, which, when coupled with inadequateresources, leads prosecutors to pursue wildly discrepant sentences forequivalent crimes. With eighteen states now having abolished the deathpenalty, and executions having taken place last year in only nine states,it seems the United States might be approaching a tipping point andrealising in its corner a step towards the worldwide end of the deathpenalty that Derrida believed was underway. In the light of Derrida’s

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abolitionist stance, the question arises what deconstructive argumentshe contributed to help speed up the inevitable.3

For after all, argument, not advocacy, orients the seminar. Itstwenty-one sessions, presented in the context of Derrida’s teaching atthe Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales and the Universityof California, Irvine, constitute years nine and ten of a decade-long critical inquiry grouping such motifs as the secret, testimony,hospitality, perjury and pardon under the general title ‘Questions ofResponsibility’. In examining the texts of the philosophical and literarytradition on the death penalty, Derrida repeatedly comes up againsta lack of any serious abolitionist philosophy, remarking that one hasto turn to literature for a sustained abolitionist discourse.4 The DeathPenalty Seminar presents as an inquiry into the reasons for philosophy’sdeficiency that seeks to make up for it by proposing a philosophicalargument against the death penalty. Among all the reasons — religious,moral, practical, economic, juridico-legal — for putting an end to thedeath penalty, Derrida aims to set some deconstructive argumentsthat take on the right to life and state sovereignty, considered withCarl Schmitt as its right to make exceptions to laws against killingby inflicting death on its members or sending them off to war. Theargument concerning us here will be related to the individual’s right tolife as redefined by Derrida to become what we could call a hauntedsubject’s right to (live) her own death.

Within the context of Derrida’s examination of the future of thedeath penalty, it makes sense to ask about an autobiographical sideto the seminars, found both in some personal memories and in someplaces where an I’s testimony or belief is taken up as troublingthe opposition between individual and state interests. Confessionaldiscourse at least doubly supplements philosophical argument in thecontext of the death penalty. In the first place, autobiography stagesan I that considers how its private beliefs, practices, interiority andexperience harmonise with the state’s decisions, so as to bring out thestakes for the subject in the scenes of execution. In one paradoxicalinstance found in Rousseau’s Social Contract, Derrida notices that,after having established the state’s right to execute, and while arguingstrenuously that the sovereign should almost never exercise the rightto pardon, Rousseau takes most of it back, in an autobiographicalfootnote saying that his heart pleads against him, that only one who

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is not in need of pardon himself can argue against the granting ofpardons. In confession find expression all the guilty desires and blood-thirsty fascinations, second thoughts, regrets, revolts, relentings orrepentings on the death penalty of one who listens to the heart’smurmuring of its reasons against the conclusions to which reasondrives him. In Kant’s more systematic philosophy, there is no directconfession, yet Derrida finds evidence of Kantian remorse in variousplaces, including in a gap between the rigorous prescriptions of thedeath penalty arrived at in the theory and their equally rigorousimpracticability. For Kant, what makes us worthy to be called human isthat we can value something more than life, and that means that whereone does not do so, where one shows oneself an animal, the deathpenalty is called for. But, specifies Kant, by the same token it has tobe a humanitarian death, a death that measures up to the high dignityof the human. Speculates Derrida, no such humanitarian putting todeath is possible by Kant’s standards. The most rigorous death penaltyargument is made and brought to ruin by its proponent’s very rigor. Inshort, autobiography provides a compendium of arguments untappedby philosophy where the subject’s returns onto the state decision forthe death penalty can be made.

In the second place, the excurses into autobiography in the seminarprovide a definition of the subject on whom the death penalty mightbe visited. As the brief summary of the discussion on Kant aboveshows, notions of what is the human, what are the rights, what is theguilt and what the responsibilities of a human subject are very muchat the center of arguments over the death penalty, so that a look atthose definitions would be critical in the assessment of the chances forsurvival of the death penalty itself. Autobiography is a good place tostart to re-think the subject as the subject of the death penalty in away that might provide a basis for a principled abolitionist argument.The self-reflexive turn of the subject onto itself in a Cartesian-styleprocess of self-doubt and self-analysis is necessary to redefine what issubjectivity — definition that must underpin arguments for and againstthe death penalty.

We have offered some reasons that Derrida might find it useful toinclude autobiographical passages in a seminar on a public topic. Butwe have now to stop to ask a question: how can Derrida have anythingto confess about the death penalty? Quite early in the seminar, Derrida

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declares that neither he nor his listeners are likely to have any directexperience of it. At the end of the twentieth century in France whereDerrida first gave the seminar and where the death penalty had beenabolished in 1981, that was a fairly safe prediction. It was perhaps lesssafe in the U.S., where he gave the same seminar in 2001. But still,it was safe enough: his listeners were students and faculty, a universitypopulation not often represented on death row, perhaps not so muchbecause they are law-abiding and virtuous as on account of race andclass privilege.5 So the confessional side is somewhat surprising, becauseit is a topic with which as representative member of the university,Derrida has little direct experience. This is no Dernier jour d’uncondamné, in which Hugo imagines a condemned man telling his lastday. It is not Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol, in which an anonymousprisoner shares the emotion of other inhabitants of the jail at anexecution carried out in their midst. Nor is it the account of a first-hand witness to a condemned man’s ordeal, like the one found in SisterHelen Prejean’s Dead Man Walking. Derrida’s first autobiographicalmotive comes precisely from the absence of direct experience: the Ifeels called upon to confess its guilt at being exempt from the deathpenalty for all the wrong reasons. The poet Baudelaire, a somewhatparadoxical advocate for the death penalty, points an accusatory fingerat middle-class abolitionists, who he says have a personal interest in itsabolition. If they want to abolish the death penalty, it is because theyare guilty and deserve it.6 Just so, Derrida’s reminder that he belongsto a class all but exempt from the death penalty, with no ostensibleinterest in the topic, treats that lack of interest as evidence of guiltyparticipation in a system of justice that makes death row a matter forcertain classes, races — even, in the U.S., certain sections of the countryor counties — while excepting others.7

The guilt of belonging to a class of subjects all but ineligible for thedeath penalty can be seen to explain partially Derrida’s inclusion of amemory that comes out of nowhere to reveal after all a personal stake.As he starts into a reading of a passage by Jean Genet about an executedman named Weidmann, Derrida breaks off to remember that he toohas a personal association with Weidmann’s death, that as a child inAlgiers, he saw a picture of Weidmann and became aware of whatcapital punishment meant. One effect of the memory is to testify tothe I’s role in the death penalty, as that of child observer removed from

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the role of condemned man and even direct spectatorship, since he sawWeidmann’s picture in a newspaper and did not witness the publicexecution, which took place outside a Versailles prison in France. Sothe I confesses his personal implication in a class of onlookers, removedfrom the scene, as one of those who come to knowledge of the deathpenalty through the newspapers as what can happen to others. Whilecoming into youthful consciousness about the death penalty as a featureof public life, possibly feeling the fascination of the severed head,8 theI comes to know about the death penalty as inflicted by a sovereignpower on a condemned man. Derrida’s memory supplements the lookof a philosopher, who would think of capital punishment in termsof state sovereignty, by a discourse admitting the guilty interest of asubject in the scene of execution, both as a participant in the socialsystem and also as consciousness (coming into awareness, brought tostartled recognition of the preeminent role of the head, the paternal,the oedipal, the medusal). There is a certain premonitory power to thescene, which shows the budding philosopher with attention alreadyfixed on elements whose preeminence he will later work to dislodgeand displace. Here is the passage:

The first time that, as a child, before the last world war, I learnedfrom the press in Algiers that something like the death sentenceexisted, that the condemned one was made to wait, and that hewas made to wait and to hope for the sovereign presidential pardon,and that one morning, at dawn, one proceeded to decapitate him,well, the one condemned to death was named Weidmann. I can stillsee his image, the image of his photograph in L’Echo d’Alger. Now,Weidmann is the first word, the first word and the first proper namein Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet, a book that was publishedright after the last world war — the end of the worldwide war afterwhich there arose a vast, increasingly worldwide movement — andthis is why I always underscore the word ‘worldwide’ [mondial] —and numerous worldwide declarations with universal pretentionsagainst the death penalty: appeals, declarations, or decisionscondemning condemnation to death, and finally heard here, forexample in Europe, and not there, in other parts of the world, inparticular, in the U.S. So, a fragment of Our Lady of the Flowerswas published right after the worldwide war, in 1944, and the whole

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text in 1948, almost forty years, then, before the abolition of thedeath penalty in France: Our Lady of the Flowers, a book in whichthe imaginary hero, Our Lady, is sentenced to capital punishment;I say the imaginary hero because the first name and the first wordof the book, Weidmann, whose name and face I saw appear in thenewspapers of my childhood, Weidmann is the name of a real- lifecharacter, as they say, who was guillotined, and whose name echoedin everyone’s ears in France, all the way to Algeria, which was thenpart of France. (DP I, 28–9)

The lesson about the condemned man as one made to wait for adeterminate death, ‘to wait and hope for pardon’, had a fixed time andplace, just like the execution itself: it occurred ‘before the last worldwar’, in Algiers. Weidmann’s execution on 17 June 1939 was widelyreported — making its way across the Mediterranean to L’Echo d’Algerand across the Atlantic to the New York Times. Derrida’s memoryretrieves the referential information that would make it possible topin almost to the day the lesson the child, Jackie Derrida, born 15July 1930, received in the death penalty. But the memory itself isawakened by another text, this one read in the context of the seminar,Jean Genet’s autobiographical novel Our Lady of the Flowers. Thetestimony is thus mediated by two acts of reading: it presents anexecution, moment that comes with an indubitable time stamp, filteredthrough a newspaper report, as having a second, parallel existence inthe murkier duration appropriate to fiction (a novel appearing ‘partin 1944, and the whole text in 1948’, just ‘after the last war’). Theexecuted Weidmann is both an historical, ‘real life character’, and amythic being for Genet’s imaginary hero, Our Lady, while the lessonon the death penalty received by the boy in 1939 is doubled by thelesson on the death penalty given by his older self in 1999, as he recallsthe earlier lesson. One point made about this double existence of thesame event, testified to by the I through his double perspective, is thatthe supposedly fixed context was, as seen from the present, actuallyundergoing some seismic shifts so far as state sovereignty and the deathpenalty are concerned, shifts that were not understood by the child orthose around him, but that can be seen from the retrospective vantagepoint.

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One shift is in the immutability of a state in its form and reach.Algiers, where the child read the newspaper, is in ‘Algeria, which atthat time was part of France’ (DP I, 29) — at that time, but by now,at the moment of the seminar, Algeria has long since become anindependent state. It is not simply France whose borders will havebeen contested. Weidmann’s execution came a scant three months‘before the last world war’ when first Poland and then the rest of thestates of Europe would deal with threats to sovereignty. The wordDerrida accentuates in discussing both the war and the abolitionistmovement — ‘worldwide’ — is critical in underscoring that the war didnot bring simply the sovereignty of a few states, but the very idea ofsovereignty into crisis, insofar as declaring war and sending peopleoff to kill and be killed is one of the acts of a sovereign state. AsDerrida presents it, a ‘worldwide war’ is not declared by any state; as ifmodeling the vast, ‘worldwide movement’ of abolition that follows it,the worldwide war arises and increases its territory without stopping atthe borders for anyone to declare it, drawing states into the spreadingwar rather by contagion than sovereign decision. The lower-case ‘w’of ‘world war’ and ‘worldwide war’ helps make the point: for Derrida,world war is a common noun for a conflict that spreads without statedecision.

Although Derrida does not say so here, the French death penaltytoo is in transition: Weidmann’s execution, a first for the little boy,will turn out to have been the last of what we call ‘public executions’ inFrance (if one excepts from the public, as Derrida will not, the groupthat observes and officiates at executions within the prison precincts).One week after Weidmann’s death, according to some as a result of anexcessive public exposure, a decree went out from Edouard Daladier,at that time Council President and War Minister, that all furtherexecutions would take place away from the public eye.9 The newspapershad not published the news yet, but the dawn execution would actuallyhave marked a sunset for the public spectacle of the death penalty.The autobiographical subject, who as reader and self-reader is splitand not self-contemporaneous, registers all of these coming changes.Despite the I’s removal by virtue of age, place, class, and time fromthe execution, his relation to texts in their double and undeterminablestatus as report and fiction allows him to testify to the execution as acrisis moment. His testimony is precious not only for what it knows of

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the changes taking place, but also for the snapshot it shows of a subject,captured at a moment of learning, but as unaware as his epoch of thechanges in the wings. That conscious-unconscious subject clearly hasa role to play in a seminar under the umbrella title of ‘Questions ofresponsibility’, where responsibility in action is at stake.

Further analysis by Derrida complicates the truism that makesits absence from the scene of execution a matter for subjectivity ingeneral. For of course, the I as speaker and self-willed agent disappearsfrom the impersonal scene of execution, first in the executionerswho as representatives of the state enact its will and not their own,and even more clearly in the suffering body of the condemned. Anexecution cannot be told in the first person. One result is an absenceof testimony about — for instance — whether the punishment sufferedis, as American law prohibits, cruel and unusual. When describing theguillotine to the National Constituent Assembly in 1789, Dr. Guillotinpromoted it as a humanitarian invention that would eliminate sufferingby making death as swift as light. Dr. Guillotin is reported in theJournal des Etats-Généraux to have described the movement of thedeath machine thus, in a passage Derrida comments on at length: ‘Themechanism falls like a bolt of lightning, the head flies off, the bloodspurts out, the man is no more’ (DP I, 221).

Notice the rapidity of death, which Guillotin supposes to beinstantaneous and painless. In several stylistic remarks, Derridaunderscores the absence of any subjective testimony. He says that Dr.Guillotin talks about the moment of execution and the elimination ofpain in the third person:

. . . everything remains here in the third person: the subject of theutterance could not use any other person but the third person; hecould not say, for example: I am no more, you singular are no more,you plural are no more; he must, in the third person, speak of whathappens to one condemned to death, to a man as third man, as thirdparty [‘he, the man, is no more’]. (DP I, 221–2)

No one who says I is left to give the crucial testimony on‘what happens to one condemned to death’ or what the supposedlyhumanitarian death ‘feels like’. For Guillotin, the man already is nomore in the split second bolt of lightning at the beginning, and that is

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key in the depiction of the scene of impersonal punishment, which ismercifully free of suffering and focuses on the separation of head frombody as the moment making the passage of life to death that has alreadyoccurred visible to an audience. Any I’s present are watching eyes, notthose who could say how it was with them when the head flew offand the blood spurted out. In fact, however, as Derrida shows in somedifficult pages, the guillotine can and did sometimes dysfunction, andexcruciating pain was the result. Nor does he find it clear that wheredeath is swift, it is necessarily painless. He cites studies by scientists ofthe bodies of the executed that show physical evidence of an explosivepain even where no I gives voice to it. The idea of death’s instantaneityis also subject to deconstruction: Derrida explores no fewer than threedefinitions of when death arrives. The effect of these analyses is firstto bring even more sharply into relief the absence of any discursivesubjects from the stage where the death penalty is carried out, and theirplacement among the much-interested onlookers. For Derrida suggeststhat we subjects at a remove, in addition to the socio-political stakes ofour recognition of a guilty participation in the state ‘show’ of execution,have heavy psychological and epistemological stakes in the mirage thatDr. Guillotin makes so seductive. The audience seems to see the secondsplitting life from death, death delivered by a deus ex machina, a quasi-divine hand (Zeus throws lightning bolts), which reassures them notonly as to a unity of intention in the act and the ‘presence of a present’(DP I, 327), but also gives them a misleading certainty as to death: theythink they see ‘the misleading motif of a certainty without appeal, ofan alleged indubitability of death, as indubitable as the cogito for theexecuted prisoner’ (DP I, 224).10

Of course Derrida cannot provide first-person testimony as to thepain of the agonising body, as one place where doubts about the sharpdistinction between life and death would surface and a deconstructionwould start. But the testimony he provides from memory of anexperience he had with a sort of executioner in early childhood doescomplicate the truism that the I cannot testify to the body’s painat the scene of execution. This time, Derrida’s memory is sparkedby Le Premier homme, Camus’s unfinished, third-person fictionalisedautobiography. Camus tells a story in two parts about the dogcatcherof Algiers. In the first part, he describes a cart bearing a dogcatcheralways called ‘Galoufa’, whose every action is skilful and quickens to a

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crescendo as a ‘death’ takes place: Galoufa moves towards the animal ‘atthe supple, rapid and silent pace of a trapper’, then erupts in ‘a suddenburst of astonishing speed’, and puts his noose around the unsuspectingdog’s neck which, ‘suddenly strangled’, ‘making inarticulate groans’,would be ‘quickly’ dragged to a cart and thrown into a cage.11 In thesecond part, it recounts an insurgency by the children of Algiers whoband together to frustrate Galoufa and help the dogs escape. Here isCamus, cited by Derrida:

At least that is how things happened when the dog was not underthe protection of the neighborhood children. For they were all inleague against Galoufa. They knew the captured dogs were takento the municipal pound, kept for three days, after which, if no oneclaimed them, the animals were put to death. And if they had notknown it, the pitiful spectacle of that death tumbrel returning aftera fruitful journey, loaded with wretched animals of all colors andsizes, terrified behind their bars and leaving behind the vehicle atrail of cries and mortal howls, would have been enough to rousethe children’s indignation. So, as soon as the prison van appearedin the area, the children would alert each other. They would scatterthroughout the streets of the neighborhood, they too hunting downthe dogs, but in order to chase them off to other parts of the city,far from the terrible lasso. If despite these precautions the dogcatcherfound a stray dog in their presence, as happened several times toPierre and Jacques, their tactics were always the same. Before thedogcatcher could get close enough to his quarry, Jacques and Pierrewould start screaming ‘Galoufa! Galoufa!’ in voices so piercing andso terrifying that the dog would flee as fast as he could and soon beout of reach. Now it was the children’s turn to prove their skill assprinters, for the unfortunate Galoufa, who was paid a bounty foreach dog he caught, was wild with anger, and he would chase thembrandishing his leather rod. (DP I, 232–3)

Camus’s story is organised around a vivid spectacle divided betweenthe nightmare actor that makes the moment of death appear bychoking off the animals’ voices with his lasso and throwing theinert bodies into the cages, and the heroic figures of the children.While the children are not naturally benign — Camus has just shown

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them slamming garbage cans down on the heads of cats — theyare awakened to action by a Rousseauian-type pity and a Kantian-type respect: the ‘pitiful spectacle of that death tumbrel’ has rousedtheir indignation, their sense that the dignity of life is under attack.In Camus’s abolitionist argument, they counter-attack to save the dogs,driven by support for the side of life. Here is how Derrida representsand translates the two parts:

Camus recounts how, as a child, he saw other children try literally toguillotine cats (he calls these children ‘bourreaux’) and above all heremembers a mythical character, the name of a character that I myselfknew in my Algerian childhood; he was nicknamed with the mythicalname Galoufa (no doubt because the first person who fulfilled thisfunction was so named). And this Galoufa was a municipal employeewhose job it was to capture stray dogs and take them away. Camusdescribes very well, with faultless detail, all the operations of thesaid Galoufa, which I witnessed more than once in my childhood.(What’s more, when one wanted to frighten disobedient children,one threatened to call Galoufa.) And what is remarkable in Camus’sdescription, which runs for several pages that you can read withoutme (. . . ) is that he borrows from the rhetorical code of the Terror(Camus speaks of the ‘death tumbrel’) and the code of executions orthe eve of executions, strangling being one stage on the way to certaindeath. It is indeed a matter of arrest with torture and putting to deathby a bourreau, but this time the victims are neither men nor cats butundomesticated dogs, stray dogs in the streets of Algiers. I excerpt apassage and I can assure you, my childhood memory can attest [entémoigner], that Camus’s description is soberly and impeccably exact.(DP I, 231–2)

Derrida’s comments on the description of Galoufa are extensive andconcern the ritualistic, repeated side of the performance. His commentson the children’s part in the story are confined to a reminder thatjust previously these children were torturing cats, and a parenthesis,presumably based on a personal memory, about the use to whichparents put the dogcatcher: ‘(What’s more, when one wanted tofrighten disobedient children, one threatened to call Galoufa.)’ Thesecomments cast suspicion on the noble motives and bring out the fearunder which the children are operating, as they seek to wrench mastery

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over life and death away from Galoufa. To save the animals, Pierreand Jacques imitate Galoufa, ‘hunting down the dogs’ and utteringblood-curdling cries that terrify them so they will run off, whileGaloufa, ‘wild with anger’ chases the heroes, ‘brandishing his leatherrod’ (DP I, 233). One result of the boys’ action is to direct ontotheir own bodies the attention of the executioner and to revealone psychically plausible possibility, that far from deterring criminalbehaviour, the threat of capital punishment can tempt the subject totake hold of his destiny, to act as if he were master and to precipitatea situation he sees as inevitable. Very early in the seminar, underthe theme of fascination with the theater of the guillotine (DP I, 59passim), Derrida asks about the role of the death penalty as a deterrentand raises such a possibility. The boys really do not know what theyare doing: perhaps it is in thinking to save the dogs that they terrorisethem and call the executioner down on themselves; perhaps it is forthe thrill of a simulated experience of a fascinatingly certain and quickdeath that they are in point of fact condemning Galoufa — who livesfrom the bounty he gets from picking up the dogs — to the long anduncertain death of starvation. Their fascination with the moment ofdeath that Galoufa presents to them sets off a rash of imitative activityin which each action increases the uncertainty as to whether theyare trying to preserve life or — through their mechanically repetitiveactivity of simulation — are operating under the spell of a death drive.Supporters of the right to life who are supposedly moved by the moralfeelings of pity and indignation, they are not just inexpert but aredoing things for contradictory and dubious motives. Under the lightshed by Derrida’s supplementing memory, the scene provides reasonto doubt the difference Galoufa represents between life and death, andthe alleged unity of action and intention that underwrites the sceneof giving death. Through autobiography, Derrida recalls a fictional,idealising side to the story of the heroic children, and by so doing,brings out a grey area in action where the difference between desiringlife and desiring death is no longer sharp.

The longer and more interesting part of Derrida’s comment onCamus’s third-person narrative is concerned with Galoufa and his swiftchoking-off of the dogs’ voices. Derrida intervenes in the first personseveral times to say in effect: yes, I remember, that was true, there wasa dogcatcher who really was called Galoufa, who drove about in a cartwith a noose at the end of a rod, and whose operations were exactly

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those of an executioner. In every sense the scene Camus describes isexactly what did happen in Algiers when I was growing up. Derrida’smemory attests first that the picture Camus makes, while it could looklike that of a mythical type or stock character, was actually a portraitof an historical being. Hired on in the 1910’s to catch dogs under thenickname Galoufa, a city employee still roamed the streets in the 1930’sunder the same name. Camus’s rhetoric is that of the Terror, andthe dogcatcher’s movements are a choreographed ritual; but, Derridainsists, ‘I witnessed more than once’ the events Camus describes. Hisdiscursive acts of witnessing (affirming, attesting to, swearing to) thetruth of lived participation in the ritual are worth noting, for they bringout the engagement of the speaker, which Derrida has in fact translatedfrom a spectacle into a scene of language. Since the scene is one of thechoking off of voice, the attestation has the effect of calling attentionto a place where the death penalty shows up symptomatically in style,as Derrida earlier noted — namely, to places where the first persondiscourse alternates with a third person to narrate an unnarratable endof narrative voice.

Strangled articulation characterises the narrative in the way thatDerrida speaks of Galoufa. Notice the proliferation of terms thatinvolve calling, recalling, or speaking the name Galoufa in the passagerepeated below, all of which are conjugated in the third person inDerrida’s discussion, and related to Camus’s use of description anda conventional code. They are offset by a discourse in which the Itestifies:

Camus remembers [rappelle] a mythical character, the name of acharacter that I myself knew in my Algerian childhood; he wasnicknamed [on le surnommait] with the mythical name ‘Galoufa’(no doubt because the first person who fulfilled this function wasso named [s’appelait ainsi]). And this Galoufa was a municipalemployee whose job it was to capture stray dogs and take them away.Camus describes very well, with faultless detail, all the operationsof the said [dudit] Galoufa, which I witnessed more than oncein my childhood. (What’s more, when one wanted to frightendisobedient children, one threatened to call Galoufa.) And what isremarkable in Camus’s description, which runs for several pages thatyou can read without me (. . . ) is that he borrows from the rhetorical

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code of the Terror (. . . ) and the code of executions or the eve ofexecutions (. . . ). I excerpt a passage and I can assure you,my childhood memory can attest [en témoigner], that Camus’sdescription is soberly and impeccably exact. [Emphasis added]

The name Galoufa four times punctuates Derrida’s discussion;each time he sets it by some method in quotation marks, as aname mentioned or repeated, pronounced perhaps, but never usedor proffered by the first person, also four times in evidence as I.Probably, we are told, in one place where the shift from I to role isparticularly remarkable, there once was a ‘first person’ named Galoufa,and his name has been borne ever since by whoever steps into hispart. As for the first person I, who won’t say the name Galoufa in hisown discourse, who goes so far as to mime a discursive disappearance(‘pages that you can read without me’) in the name of letting Camus’sthird-person description with its exactness and code of the Terrortake over, it nonetheless keeps resurfacing to insist on its participationand knowledge of the operations: ‘I knew’, ‘I witnessed’, ‘I excerpt’,‘I assure’, ‘my (. . . ) memory can attest’. The effect of this divisionof labor, where the scene described has to be told and its chieffigure named in the third person, even as the I returns repeatedly towitness to remembering the operations of that figure, works to translatethe problematic signified of the strangled dogs into the signifyingdiscourse. The I that cannot voice its death, says its choking by therepeated insertion of the name Galoufa into various sorts of quotationmarks (Galoufa, ‘this Galoufa’, ‘the said Galoufa’, ‘threatened (. . . ) tocall Galoufa’) — in short, by a skillfully brandished pen that inserts amark to divide the living from the dead, the ‘I swear that I remember’from the third person reporting the strangling of voice over the nameGaloufa.

The point of the translation of the described spectacle into theregister of an autobiographical narrative is at least double: (1) It rendersproblematic the singularity of the death exemplified in Camus by thechoking off of the voice of each individual dog. The operation ofchoking off is familiar to I, who has assisted ‘more than once’ at it inthe past, and is assisting at it once more in the deictic shift into and outof first person discourse. Choking to death is as frequent and everydayan occurrence as the move from talking in the first person to talking

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about ‘the first person (. . . ) so named’. (2) It makes the distinctionbetween the first person who suffers execution but cannot testify to itand the third person who delivers and talks about it problematic. Somesense of what it is to suffer death is attached to an I that resuscitatesto remember having its voice strangled by the looping of a brandishedpen, just as some sense of what it is to act as executioner is attached tothe act of marking, repeating and repurposing in the terms of a coded,impersonal language. It is no accident that Derrida should make useof autobiographical discourse to say ‘what happens to one condemnedto death’ (DP I, 221), because autobiography has ceaselessly to takeon the problem of whether the I is determined by or determines themodels it uses to say its experience, and thus whether it is spoken orspeaking, victim or executioner.

Derrida’s memory of Galoufa takes up a certain intimate experiencehe has of death as a writer about the self. Whereas the spectacleof execution aims to alleviate anxieties about agency and to presentscenes where instantaneity and self-presence are depicted as certain, inDerrida’s memories such scenes have to be translated into linguisticterms, where they show their real character: in repetition, doubt asto the unity of the act, and uncertainty as to the uniqueness andinstantaneity of death.

In both of the two autobiographical moments examined sofar, memories bring out the socio-political, psycho-epistemologicalinterests subjects might have in maintaining the death penalty, evenas they point to places of crisis where it is under deconstructive review.In the last two moments to be discussed where the autobiographicalsubject gets play in the first year of the Death Penalty seminar,however, where Derrida is concerned with formalising the results ofthe discussion of what is proper to the subject ‘under deconstruction’,the I provides positive grounds for abolition. The first discussion occursin the context of an examination of talionic law, the law of an eye foran eye and a tooth for a tooth that serves as the basis for the deathpenalty, as life for a life. Talionic law installs the fiction that thereis a calculable equivalence ‘between the crime and the punishment,between the injury and the price to be paid’ (DP I, 151). Derridaagrees with Nietzsche when he maintains in The Genealogy of Moralsthat the belief in such equivalence is crazy: ‘Nietzsche deems this ideaof equivalence at once mad, unbelievable, inadmissible . . . ’(DP I, 151).

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Nobody can or does really believe it. A wrong and a suffering, a rapeand a castration, a murder and an execution, are not equivalent, andno one really thinks that the debt incurred through the murder of oneperson by another can be paid off by that other’s suffering death at thehands of the state. Nonetheless, our justice system imposes as true thisbelief in equivalence; its takes as a given that crimes can be paid for bypunishment, murder by execution. This is where Derrida situates thenecessity for a deconstruction of equivalences, a deconstruction likethe one that Nietzsche performs and like the ones that he is himselfperforming throughout the Death Penalty seminars.

It is in this context that Derrida insists that a subject’s act ofbelieving, its confession or testimony or act of faith, is not a simplematter of adhering or saying yes to orthodoxy, but must include asceptical turn. Belief is not opposed to doubt; it is the process ofbelieving and turning against belief:

Skepsis, skepticism, incredulity, epokhe, all these suspensions of beliefor of doxa, of the opining of opinion, of the ‘saying yes to’ are notaccidents that happen to believing; they are believing itself. Believingis its own contrary and thus it has no contrary. Not to believe in itis not the contrary of believing, of trusting, of crediting, of havingfaith. (DP I, 154)

A little later, he’ll say that in the subject ‘. . . this internal division,this properly analytic dissociation, this cleavage, this split of believinghaunted by nonbelief is almost quasi-hypnotic, one might say spectral,quasi-hallucinatory, or unconscious’ (DP I, 154). The confessionalsubject is a haunted subject. It professes faith in something, saysyes to it, and just by virtue of that, suspends it and starts up thework of negation, skepsis and not believing. For such a subject,talionic law, the fiction of equivalences is not a given, but is suspectas a fiction. It is the haunted subject who can question the maddictum of the state that one death can ever be equivalent to another.Derrida’s profession of faith that the worldwide tendency is towardabolition of the death penalty reposes partly on the idea that we areall autobiographical subjects involved in the unfinished process oftaking apart the law’s assertion of equivalency. Derrida’s subject is self-affirming and self-doubting, pursued by doubts about the equivalences

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in which it believes, condemned to question to the end the talionic lawunderpinning the death penalty.

There is another important place where the confessional subjectshows up in the Death Penalty Seminar, this time to ground theargument for abolition in a strange right. This is the passage that Iadmit to finding the hardest to take in a seminar that does not spare ussome terrible moments — including, just for instance, an account of aguillotine dysfunctioning five times in a single ‘routine’ execution (DPI, 216). Derrida is discussing the difference between being condemnedto die, the fate of all of us, and being condemned to death, the deathapplied to others:

Fundamentally, it is by answering the question, when? that one candivide, as with a knife blade, two deaths or two condemnations, thecondemnation to die and the condemnation to death. The mortalthat I am knows that he is condemned to die, but even if he is sick,incurable, or even in the throes of death, the mortal that I am does notknow the moment, the date, the precise hour that he will die. He doesnot know, I do not know and I will never know it in advance. Andno one will know it in advance. This indetermination is an essentialtrait of my relation to death. It may be a little sooner, a little later,much sooner, much later, even if it cannot fail to happen. Whereasthe one condemned to death (. . . ) can know, can think he knows,and in any case others know for him, in principle, by right, on whichday, at which hour, or even at which instant death will befall him.In any case (. . . ), the concept of the death penalty supposes thatthe state, the judges, society, the bourreaux and executioners, that is,third parties, have mastery over the time of life of the condemnedone and thus know how to calculate and produce, in so-calledobjective time, the deadline to within a second. This knowledge, thismastery over the time of life and death, this mastering and calculatingknowledge of the time of life of the subject is presupposed (. . . )alleged, presumed in the very concept of the death penalty. Society,the state, its legal system, its justice, its judges and executioners, allthese third parties, are presumed to know, calculate, operate the timeof death. Their knowledge of death is a presumed knowledge on thesubject of time and of the coincidence between objective time andlet us say the subjective time of the subject condemned to death andexecuted. (DP I, 219–20; emphasis added)

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The ‘mortal that I am does not know the moment that he will die’,the moment that she will have become the other, no longer a subjectaware of coming death, but one who will have died. So, if you wantto know one thing that makes the very terrible death of murder notquite the same as the very terrible one of execution, it is this: thewould-be murderer leaves the I with the indeterminacy of her relationto death intact right up to the moment of death;12 whereas the statedoes its best to take away that indeterminacy, by purporting to knowahead of time the minute and hour of the death inflicted on me thatit will not let me survive. It converts an uncertainty into an allegedcertainty.

Derrida goes on to explain why he finds the indeterminacy of theI’s relation to death so precious. It is what gives us a future worthy ofthe name, a future where the certain is after all not what happens. Andit provides a relation to the other (other beings, fate, God) as the oneoutside from whom come its chances for something besides an allegedlycertain, programmed execution. Derrida again:

The insult, the injury, the fundamental injustice done to the life inme, to the principle of life in me, is not death itself, from this point ofview; it is rather the interruption of the principle of indetermination,the ending imposed on the opening of the incalculable chancewhereby a living being has a relation to what comes, to the to-come and thus to some other as event, as guest, as arrivant. And thesupreme form of the paradox, its philosophical form, is that what isended by the possibility of the death penalty is not the infinity oflife or immortality, but on the contrary the finitude of ‘my life’. Itis because my life is finite, ‘ended’ in a certain sense, that I keep thisrelation to incalculability and undecidability as to the instant of mydeath. It is because my life is finite, ‘finished’ in a certain sense, thatI do not know, and that I neither can nor want to know, when I amgoing to die. Only a living being as finite being can have a future, canbe exposed to a future, to an incalculable and undecidable future thats/he does not have at his/her disposal like a master and that comes tohim or to her from some other, from the heart of the other. (DP I,257–8)

What matters the most to an I about the death penalty is thedeprivation of a relation to its finitude in exchange for a misleading

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certainty. The death penalty takes away incalculable death in exchangefor a spurious, calculable death. It is the incalculable death that givesthe I a relation to possibility, to something happening that is notalready programmed. To deprive a single being of that relation is todeprive not just a single life of the chances that that one life mighthave had and the futures it might have wrought, but to strike atthe indeterminable in every I. The individual subject is condemnedto die wherever the other arrives without warning, as repetition, asthe unexpected not within its mastery as subject. All but one ofthose deaths it will end by surviving. The death penalty substitutesa single calculable death for the many little deaths a subject undergoes,and in so doing tries to take away the incalculable. On the basis ofa belief in the subject’s right to life as a right to its death(s) thatDerrida proclaims himself an abolitionist, and affirms his belief in theworldwide movement for abolition of the death penalty as what gives achance for a future.

Through a consideration of the confession and the confessionalsubject, Derrida has added two more reasons, both deconstructionist,to the tide of reasons being put forward for ending the death penalty.The first is that the subject in which we are coming to believe is ahaunted subject; that is, one with doubts, among other things, aboutthe talionic law in which the state obliges us to believe, doubts visible assecond thoughts, reservations or remorseful paradoxes, even in strongadvocates for the death penalty like Kant or Rousseau. We owe it tothe double and haunted subjects we have been coming to believe in towork to abolish the death penalty, which could only be pronouncedin the service of a supposed certainty and where the process of beliefhad been ended. The second is that it is in our collective interest notto substitute for the openness of the relation the subject has to deatha closed, calculable relation, which despairs of the future arriving, notsimply for the one executed, but for those who assist at an executionor otherwise let it take place. For Derrida, confessing his abolitioniststance, the ongoing deconstruction of the subject entails the ongoingdeconstruction of the death penalty.

Notes1 From ‘Death Penalty in 2012: Year-End Report’. Death Penalty Information

Center, December 2012. http://deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/2012YearEnd.

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pdf, consulted 13 July 2013, 2:00 p.m.. For an assessment of where we are onthe road to abolition in the U.S. from a legal perspective, see Is the Death PenaltyDying?: European and American Perspectives, edited by A. Sarat and J. Martschukat(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011).

2 Some states use a three-drug while others use a one-drug protocol for lethalinjection. States are having a hard time obtaining the anesthetics necessary forboth protocols (propofol, phenobarbital and pentobarbital) as a result of resistancefrom manufacturers. See http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/state-lethal-injection,consulted 13 July 2013, 2:10 p.m.. See also Peggy Kamuf, ‘Protocol: Death PenaltyAddiction’, Southern Journal of Philosophy 50, Spindel Supplement (September,2012), 5–19.

3 See, for instance, DP I, 17 n25, where Derrida writes: ‘(No philosophy against thedeath penalty)’. Similar statements can be found in material Derrida publishedabout the death penalty; see, for example, Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco,For What Tomorrow. . . : A Dialogue, translated by Jeff Fort (Stanford, StanfordUniversity Press, 2004), 146.

4 See Michael Naas’s ‘Remarks on Session 4 of Jacques Derrida’s SeminarDeath Penalty I’, Derrida Seminar Translation Project, 2010 Workshop,http://www/derridaseminars.org/workshops.html, consulted 13 July 2013, 2:15p.m..

5 For the question of unequal applications of the death penalty in the U.S.according to race see Death Penalty Information Center, http://www.death-penaltyinfo.org/race-and-death-penalty, consulted 13 July 2013, 2:12 p.m..

6 Discussing Baudelaire’s Pauvre Belgique! (DP I, 206–211), Derrida considers theimplication of the spectator in the scene of execution through a prior feeling ofguilt.

7 For the question of the unequal geographical distribution of executions in theU.S., see Death Penalty Information Center http://www.deathpenalty-info.org/executions-county, consulted 13 July 2013, 2:08 p.m.

8 A little later in the seminar, Derrida will insist on the wrappings on Weidmann’shead: ‘By choosing the word “bandelettes” to describe Weidmann’s face, which,then, I myself saw in the newspapers surrounded by strips or wrappers that were notlinen cloths or bandelettes, this John/Jean (here Genet) seems to me to be pointingwith a christological sign toward John the Evangelist (or toward Luke who usesthe same words for the same scene), and this seems significant in many respects’(DP I, 64). The photographs that appeared in L’Echo d’Alger subsequent to theexecution did not contain the one to which Derrida refers. There exist several shotsof the still-living Eugen Weidmann, wounded while being taken prisoner, whose

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head is wrapped in bandages. One appeared in L’Echo d’Alger on 11 December1937, the day after his arrest. The main picture accompanying the article on theexecution is a collage of two photos. In the upper left-hand corner, the editorshave superimposed onto a shot of the guillotine erected in front of the Versaillesprison, an earlier shot of Weidmann, head in profile, looking into the air abovethe guillotine, and looking like the reversed image of the floating head of John theBaptist, as depicted by Gustave Moreau in L’Apparition.

9 Although rumour reported rowdy and hysterical reactions at Weidmann’sexecution, newspaper accounts in Paris Soir and Paris Match note only a fewwhistles and shouts from the crowd. Too much daylight seems nevertheless tohave been shed on the guillotine’s operation on that early midsummer morning:scheduled for 3:50, the execution took place at 4:30, as a result of an administrativedisagreement over whether death was to occur according to clock or solar time. Thegathering daylight meant that the photographers scattered throughout the crowdand in the nearby balconies could capture events in the pictures that appearedin Paris Match (22 June 1939) and elsewhere. Those pictures, as well as a filmshot clandestinely from a neighboring balcony, can still be found circulating onthe web today. According to Emmanuel Taïeb, writing a Foucauldian analysis inLa Guillotine en secret: les exécutions publiques en France, 1870–1939 (Paris, Belin,2011), the press helped bring an end to public executions not because it gave toomuch publicity to the execution, but rather because its sober accounts persuadedthe state that it would make a better witness than the too-passionate public. InRéflexions sur la guillotine, Albert Camus notes with some irony that the secrecyfollowing the decree ending public executions favoured the politically motivatedexecutions of the Occupation. For both Taïeb and Camus, precisely because theyawaken presumably abolitionist passions in the viewers, public executions are moredesirable than execution behind closed doors. Derrida, who generally critiquesthe spectacularity of the death penalty as aiming to convince citizens of statesovereignty and its power over life and death, takes a more sceptical position.

10 In recounting the execution on Sunday, 18 June 1939, L’Echo d’Alger builds up toa similar moment where the difference between life and death is presented. First, itfollows the prisoner in his cell on his last day, a last day that is presented as a dayof grace, since Weidmann was supposed to have died the day before according tothe reporter; then it moves to note the arrival of the slowly-gathering supportingcast and the setting of the scene — around midnight, the public starts to collect ata café, unusually allowed to remain open late; the mother of one of the victims,Roger Leblond, arrives and makes a statement to a reporter; barriers are set up tokeep the public away from the place of execution; the executioner arrives to oversee

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the erection of the death machine; the Head of Security comes, followed by thePublic Prosecutor and the prosecutorial team; soon the advocates for the Defenceand the Magistrates show up; then, out comes Weidmann between guards, calm,hair cut away from the nape of the neck, shirt undone to expose it; quickly he ismade to lay his head on the guillotine collar — and then, a paragraph says this:‘During an interminable second the executioner hesitates before lowering the tophalf of the collar (lunette). The blade falls.’ A new paragraph begins: ‘It is exactly4:32’. Time slowly accelerates until all at once there is no more time, and theaudience will have seen the instant separation of life from death. The newspapernarrative in which the young Derrida learned about the death penalty follows veryclosely the narrative model set by Guillotin in talking about his machine.

11 Albert Camus’s Le Premier homme (Paris, Gallimard, 1994), 133–5; The First Man,translated by David Hapgood (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 141–2. As citedin DP I, 340–1.

12 Anyone who has ever survived an attack by another human being must be gratefulfor this indeterminability, which constitutes a real advantage for the victim overthe would-be murderer. The killer operates under the assurance that the victimis condemned and must remain there immobile, fascinated, awaiting certain death.The victim, who has a legitimate reason for doubting that she has to prove a victim,may seize her freedom to devise an escape and, luck aiding, may survive.