Suchergebnisse

Why does writing of the death penalty demand the first-person treatment that it also excludes? The article investigates the role played by the autobiographical subject in Derrida's The Death Penalty, Volume I, where the confessing 'I' doubly supplements the philosophical investigation into what Derrida sees as a trend toward the worldwide abolition of the death penalty: first, to bring out the harmonies or discrepancies between the individual subject's beliefs, anxieties, desires and interests with respect to the death penalty and the state's exercise of its sovereignty in applying it; and second, to provide a new definition of the subject as haunted, as one that has been, but is no longer, subject to the death penalty, in the light of the worldwide abolition currently underway.