The Death Penalty, Volume I (The Seminars of Jacques Derrida) by Jacques Derrida

Author:Jacques Derrida [Derrida, Jacques]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226144320
Amazon: 0226144321
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-12-04T05:00:00+00:00

SEVENTH SESSION

February 9, 2000

Economy. Might there be an economy of the death penalty?

And what could that mean?

If someone formulated the following sentence: “to abolish the death penalty is to economize [faire l’économie de] the death penalty,” how would one interpret such a declaration?

Or again if someone said, in French, the European Union has from now on “classé”1 the death penalty, how does one hear that?

Before attempting to respond to these questions and to the logic they put to work, let us form already the hypothesis that the stakes of this semantic and syntactic inquiry have to do no less with the words or the lexicon of “economy,” “economize,” or even of “class,” “classify,” and “classification” than those of the so-called death penalty. As if, fundamentally, one had to define “economy” or “class” and have access to the semantics of economy and class by beginning from the death penalty and punishment in general, rather than the reverse; this would be good common sense if one recalled that penalty (poena, peine) had first of all the trivially economic sense of ransom, repurchase, or redemption, of the punishment meant to pay for damage, to repair a wrong. Penalty is a payment and even if, with Nietzsche, one puts in question the projection or the posing of a general equivalent for the payment of a wrong, no one can dispute that the concept of “penalty,” be it penalty as cruel suffering, has an economic sense of buying back or redemption in a market. And thus that a calculation, the calculation of a price, [236] tends to be sought there. Whether or not this calculation is possible, whether it is conscious or unconscious, there is no penal law without this project of calculation, be it the calculation of the incalculable, with or without interest, with or without surplus value. And when I say conscious or unconscious calculation, it will always remain to be known (but I hold this knowledge to be impossible, by definition) if what appears incalculable cannot still be calculated by what we blithely call the unconscious.

But then the question of an economy of the death penalty risks losing or dividing its meaning, like a river that gets lost by dividing into a delta, as one says the Mississippi delta, the Nile delta, or the Rhône delta. The water rushes, with open arms, into the literal triangle of a Delta that forever divides its course (the water that gets lost like this will never again go back up toward the supposed uniqueness of a source, and the triangle is often a sea, when it is not oceanic). To economize the death penalty, is that to calculate its interest, the interest there is in saving it, or does economizing the death penalty mean, on the contrary, <learning> to economize the death penalty, learning to do without it, to abolish it? But is it ever abolished? Has one ever, forever, abolished the death penalty? Will one ever have abolished it forever? Is a law, a

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