Stephanie Straub & Kelly Oliver 
Deconstructing the Death Penalty 
Derrida’s Seminars and the New Abolitionism

This volume represents the first collection of essays devoted exclusively to Jacques Derrida’s Death Penalty Seminars, conducted from 1999 to 2001. The volume includes essays from a range of scholars working in philosophy, law, Francophone studies, and comparative literature, including established Derridians, activist scholars, and emerging scholars. These essays attempt to elucidate and expand upon Derrida’s deconstruction of the theologico-political logic of the death penalty in order to construct a new form of abolitionism, one not rooted in the problematic logics of sovereign power. These essays provide remarkable insight into Derrida’s ethical and political projects; this volume will not only explore the implications of Derrida’s thought on capital punishment and mass incarceration, but will also help to further elucidate the philosophical groundwork for his later deconstructions of sovereign power and the human/animal divide. Because Derrida is deconstructing the
logic of the death penalty, rather than the death penalty itself, his seminars will prove useful to scholars and activists opposing all forms of state sanctioned killing. In compiling this volume, our goals were twofold: first, to make a case for Derrida’s continuing importance in debates on capital punishment, mass incarceration, and police brutality, and second, to construct a new, versatile abolitionism, one capable of confronting all forms the death penalty might take.

Table of Content

Introduction: From Capital Punishment to Abolitionism: Deconstructing the Death Penalty
Stephanie M. Straub
Part I: Reading Derrida’s Death Penalty Seminars
1. Beginning with Literature
Peggy Kamuf
2. Derrida and the Scene of Execution
Elizabeth Rottenberg
3. Always the Other Who Decides: On Sovereignty, Psychoanalysis, and the Death Penalty
Michael Naas
4. The Death Penalty and Its Exceptions
Christina Howells
Part II: Derrida and His Interlocuters
5. Derrida at Montaigne: A Stay of Execution
Katie Chenoweth
6. “Bidding Up” on the Question of Sovereignty: Derrida Between Kant and Benjamin
Kir Kuiken
7. Calculus
Kas Saghafi
Part III: Extending Derrida’s Analysis
8. A Proper Death: Penalties, Animals, and the Law
Nicole Anderson
9. Figures of Interest: The Widow, the Telephone, and the Time of Death
Elissa Marder
10. Opening the Blinds on Botched Executions: Interrupting the Time of the Death Penalty
Kelly Oliver
Part IV: Derrida and Capital Punishment in the United States
11. Furman and Finitude
Adam Thurschwell
12. The Heart of the Other?
Sarah Tyson
13. An Abolitionism Worthy of the Name: From the Death Penalty to the Prison Industrial Complex
Lisa Guenther
List of Contributors
Index

About the author

Elizabeth Rottenberg is Professor of Philosophy at De Paul University and a practicing psychoanalyst in Chicago. She is the author of Inheriting the Future: Legacies of Kant, Freud, and Flaubert (Stanford) and the editor and translator of many books by Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard.