The Autobiographical Subject and the Death Penalty

E. S. Burt

The rst year of Jacques Derridas two-year seminar on the death penalty is unabashedly abolitionist. Indeed Derridas position for abolition is almost a confession of faith: he afrms belief in and agreement with a worldwide tendency to abolish the death penalty, progress that he calls irreversible and inevitable. A sentence to death has already been handed down on the death penalty and it is irrevocable; it is only a matter of time before the death sentence against death sentences is carried out. Viewed as a performative, the seminar proposes to accelerate what it shows is sure to take place. The pattern of recent events in the U.S., one of the countries in the world where the death penalty is still most practised, seems to conrm Derridas assessment of a tendency towards abolition. As the Death Penalty Information Center website shows, besides the repeal of the death penalty in seven states in the past decade, between 1996 and 2012, there was a 75% decrease in the number of death sentences passed, 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 abolish in a federation what a single stroke can do away with in a state with a uniform statute. It is also true that the U.S. has reversed course on the matter more than once: most famously, in 1976, four years after the Supreme Court had struck down death penalty statues across the land, reforms in the system and new statutes allowed it to be reinstated in state after state. There is reason for optimism, however, in that the attacks being levelled on the death penalty in the U.S. at the present moment come from many different quarters and are based on a welter of arguments that fuel and reect a growing public unease. They include but are not limited to the problems
The Oxford Literary Review 35.2 (2013): 165187 DOI: 10.3366/olr.2013.0068 Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/olr

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of arbitrariness in application that led to the 1972 Supreme Court decision. Some of these arguments are economic in 2012, in the midst of a bad economy, California nearly passed a proposition to replace the death penalty with life without parole that appealed strongly to voters worried about the spiralling costs to the state of prosecuting death penalty cases and housing the condemned on death row. The economic argument cuts both ways: concerns about the ability of the American legal system to provide poor defendants with adequate representation are at a new height. Some arguments are utilitarian, decrying the death penalty as a poor means to dissuade from crime. Others are practical: sodium thiopental, the rst of the drugs in the favoured deadly cocktail of lethal injection, is all but unavailable, and the maker of propofol, a drug proposed to replace it, has announced it will not allow the drug to be sold for executions.2 Other arguments are moral or religious: some cite the sanctity of human life and others nd capital punishment no matter the method in itself cruel and unusual. Some worry about miscarriages of justice which capital punishment makes irremediable: the National Registry of Exonerations recently released a report showing that two out of the fty-eight prisoners exonerated between March 2012 and March 2013 had received a death sentence. Numerous attacks are levelled against the system in any one of its parts: they nd the denition of capital crime too broad, or note the disproportionate number of the poor, the mentally incompetent, blacks and Latinos on death row. Pointing out a less-often discussed pattern of capriciousness, on 6 April 2013, the NY Times ran a piece about an Arizona report that highlighted the arbitrariness of decisions to prosecute death penalty cases. In one case cited, a man sits on death row as an accessory to a murder for which its three main perpetrators did not receive even life sentences. The article blamed Americas plea bargain system, which, when coupled with inadequate resources, leads prosecutors to pursue wildly discrepant sentences for equivalent crimes. With eighteen states now having abolished the death penalty, and executions having taken place last year in only nine states, it seems the United States might be approaching a tipping point and realising in its corner a step towards the worldwide end of the death penalty that Derrida believed was underway. In the light of Derridas

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abolitionist stance, the question arises what deconstructive arguments he contributed to help speed up the inevitable.3 For after all, argument, not advocacy, orients the seminar. Its twenty-one sessions, presented in the context of Derridas teaching at the Ecole des hautes tudes en sciences sociales and the University of California, Irvine, constitute years nine and ten of a decadelong critical inquiry grouping such motifs as the secret, testimony, hospitality, perjury and pardon under the general title Questions of Responsibility. In examining the texts of the philosophical and literary tradition on the death penalty, Derrida repeatedly comes up against a lack of any serious abolitionist philosophy, remarking that one has to turn to literature for a sustained abolitionist discourse.4 The Death Penalty Seminar presents as an inquiry into the reasons for philosophys deciency that seeks to make up for it by proposing a philosophical argument against the death penalty. Among all the reasons religious, moral, practical, economic, juridico-legal for putting an end to the death penalty, Derrida aims to set some deconstructive arguments that take on the right to life and state sovereignty, considered with Carl Schmitt as its right to make exceptions to laws against killing by inicting death on its members or sending them off to war. The argument concerning us here will be related to the individuals right to life as redened by Derrida to become what we could call a haunted subjects right to (live) her own death. Within the context of Derridas examination of the future of the death penalty, it makes sense to ask about an autobiographical side to the seminars, found both in some personal memories and in some places where an Is testimony or belief is taken up as troubling the opposition between individual and state interests. Confessional discourse at least doubly supplements philosophical argument in the context of the death penalty. In the rst place, autobiography stages an I that considers how its private beliefs, practices, interiority and experience harmonise with the states decisions, so as to bring out the stakes for the subject in the scenes of execution. In one paradoxical instance found in Rousseaus Social Contract, Derrida notices that, after having established the states right to execute, and while arguing strenuously that the sovereign should almost never exercise the right to pardon, Rousseau takes most of it back, in an autobiographical footnote 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 of pardons. In confession nd expression all the guilty desires and bloodthirsty fascinations, second thoughts, regrets, revolts, relentings or repentings on the death penalty of one who listens to the hearts murmuring of its reasons against the conclusions to which reason drives him. In Kants more systematic philosophy, there is no direct confession, yet Derrida nds evidence of Kantian remorse in various places, including in a gap between the rigorous prescriptions of the death penalty arrived at in the theory and their equally rigorous impracticability. For Kant, what makes us worthy to be called human is that we can value something more than life, and that means that where one does not do so, where one shows oneself an animal, the death penalty is called for. But, species Kant, by the same token it has to be a humanitarian death, a death that measures up to the high dignity of the human. Speculates Derrida, no such humanitarian putting to death is possible by Kants standards. The most rigorous death penalty argument is made and brought to ruin by its proponents very rigor. In short, autobiography provides a compendium of arguments untapped by philosophy where the subjects returns onto the state decision for the death penalty can be made. In the second place, the excurses into autobiography in the seminar provide a denition of the subject on whom the death penalty might be visited. As the brief summary of the discussion on Kant above shows, notions of what is the human, what are the rights, what is the guilt and what the responsibilities of a human subject are very much at the center of arguments over the death penalty, so that a look at those denitions would be critical in the assessment of the chances for survival of the death penalty itself. Autobiography is a good place to start to re-think the subject as the subject of the death penalty in a way that might provide a basis for a principled abolitionist argument. The self-reexive turn of the subject onto itself in a Cartesian-style process of self-doubt and self-analysis is necessary to redene what is subjectivity denition that must underpin arguments for and against the death penalty. We have offered some reasons that Derrida might nd it useful to include autobiographical passages in a seminar on a public topic. But we have now to stop to ask a question: how can Derrida have anything to 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 direct experience of it. At the end of the twentieth century in France where Derrida rst gave the seminar and where the death penalty had been abolished in 1981, that was a fairly safe prediction. It was perhaps less safe 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 university population not often represented on death row, perhaps not so much because they are law-abiding and virtuous as on account of race and class privilege.5 So the confessional side is somewhat surprising, because it is a topic with which as representative member of the university, Derrida has little direct experience. This is no Dernier jour dun condamn, in which Hugo imagines a condemned man telling his last day. It is not Wildes Ballad of Reading Gaol, in which an anonymous prisoner shares the emotion of other inhabitants of the jail at an execution carried out in their midst. Nor is it the account of a rsthand witness to a condemned mans ordeal, like the one found in Sister Helen Prejeans Dead Man Walking. Derridas rst autobiographical motive comes precisely from the absence of direct experience: the I feels called upon to confess its guilt at being exempt from the death penalty for all the wrong reasons. The poet Baudelaire, a somewhat paradoxical advocate for the death penalty, points an accusatory nger at middle-class abolitionists, who he says have a personal interest in its abolition. If they want to abolish the death penalty, it is because they are guilty and deserve it.6 Just so, Derridas reminder that he belongs to a class all but exempt from the death penalty, with no ostensible interest in the topic, treats that lack of interest as evidence of guilty participation in a system of justice that makes death row a matter for certain classes, races even, in the U.S., certain sections of the country or counties while excepting others.7 The guilt of belonging to a class of subjects all but ineligible for the death penalty can be seen to explain partially Derridas inclusion of a memory 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 executed man named Weidmann, Derrida breaks off to remember that he too has a personal association with Weidmanns death, that as a child in Algiers, he saw a picture of Weidmann and became aware of what capital punishment meant. One effect of the memory is to testify to the Is 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 saw Weidmanns picture in a newspaper and did not witness the public execution, which took place outside a Versailles prison in France. So the I confesses his personal implication in a class of onlookers, removed from the scene, as one of those who come to knowledge of the death penalty through the newspapers as what can happen to others. While coming into youthful consciousness about the death penalty as a feature of public life, possibly feeling the fascination of the severed head,8 the I comes to know about the death penalty as inicted by a sovereign power on a condemned man. Derridas memory supplements the look of a philosopher, who would think of capital punishment in terms of state sovereignty, by a discourse admitting the guilty interest of a subject in the scene of execution, both as a participant in the social system and also as consciousness (coming into awareness, brought to startled recognition of the preeminent role of the head, the paternal, the oedipal, the medusal). There is a certain premonitory power to the scene, which shows the budding philosopher with attention already xed on elements whose preeminence he will later work to dislodge and displace. Here is the passage:
The rst time that, as a child, before the last world war, I learned from the press in Algiers that something like the death sentence existed, that the condemned one was made to wait, and that he was 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 still see his image, the image of his photograph in LEcho dAlger. Now, Weidmann is the rst word, the rst word and the rst proper name in Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet, a book that was published right after the last world war the end of the worldwide war after which there arose a vast, increasingly worldwide movement and this is why I always underscore the word worldwide [mondial ] and numerous worldwide declarations with universal pretentions against the death penalty: appeals, declarations, or decisions condemning condemnation to death, and nally heard here, for example in Europe, and not there, in other parts of the world, in particular, in the U.S. So, a fragment of Our Lady of the Flowers was 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 the death penalty in France: Our Lady of the Flowers, a book in which the imaginary hero, Our Lady, is sentenced to capital punishment; I say the imaginary hero because the rst name and the rst word of the book, Weidmann, whose name and face I saw appear in the newspapers of my childhood, Weidmann is the name of a real- life character, as they say, who was guillotined, and whose name echoed in everyones ears in France, all the way to Algeria, which was then part of France. (DP I, 289)

The lesson about the condemned man as one made to wait for a determinate death, to wait and hope for pardon, had a xed time and place, just like the execution itself: it occurred before the last world war, in Algiers. Weidmanns execution on 17 June 1939 was widely reported making its way across the Mediterranean to LEcho dAlger and across the Atlantic to the New York Times. Derridas memory retrieves the referential information that would make it possible to pin almost to the day the lesson the child, Jackie Derrida, born 15 July 1930, received in the death penalty. But the memory itself is awakened by another text, this one read in the context of the seminar, Jean Genets autobiographical novel Our Lady of the Flowers. The testimony is thus mediated by two acts of reading: it presents an execution, moment that comes with an indubitable time stamp, ltered through a newspaper report, as having a second, parallel existence in the murkier duration appropriate to ction (a novel appearing part in 1944, and the whole text in 1948, just after the last war). The executed Weidmann is both an historical, real life character, and a mythic being for Genets imaginary hero, Our Lady, while the lesson on the death penalty received by the boy in 1939 is doubled by the lesson on the death penalty given by his older self in 1999, as he recalls the earlier lesson. One point made about this double existence of the same event, testied to by the I through his double perspective, is that the supposedly xed context was, as seen from the present, actually undergoing some seismic shifts so far as state sovereignty and the death penalty are concerned, shifts that were not understood by the child or those around him, but that can be seen from the retrospective vantage point.

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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 at that 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 an independent state. It is not simply France whose borders will have been contested. Weidmanns execution came a scant three months before the last world war when rst Poland and then the rest of the states of Europe would deal with threats to sovereignty. The word Derrida accentuates in discussing both the war and the abolitionist movement worldwide is critical in underscoring that the war did not bring simply the sovereignty of a few states, but the very idea of sovereignty into crisis, insofar as declaring war and sending people off to kill and be killed is one of the acts of a sovereign state. As Derrida presents it, a worldwide war is not declared by any state; as if modeling the vast, worldwide movement of abolition that follows it, the worldwide war arises and increases its territory without stopping at the borders for anyone to declare it, drawing states into the spreading war 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 conict that spreads without state decision. Although Derrida does not say so here, the French death penalty too is in transition: Weidmanns execution, a rst for the little boy, will turn out to have been the last of what we call public executions in France (if one excepts from the public, as Derrida will not, the group that observes and ofciates at executions within the prison precincts). One week after Weidmanns death, according to some as a result of an excessive public exposure, a decree went out from Edouard Daladier, at that time Council President and War Minister, that all further executions would take place away from the public eye.9 The newspapers had not published the news yet, but the dawn execution would actually have marked a sunset for the public spectacle of the death penalty. The autobiographical subject, who as reader and self-reader is split and not self-contemporaneous, registers all of these coming changes. Despite the Is removal by virtue of age, place, class, and time from the execution, his relation to texts in their double and undeterminable status as report and ction allows him to testify to the execution as a crisis 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 the changes in the wings. That conscious-unconscious subject clearly has a role to play in a seminar under the umbrella title of Questions of responsibility, where responsibility in action is at stake. Further analysis by Derrida complicates the truism that makes its absence from the scene of execution a matter for subjectivity in general. For of course, the I as speaker and self-willed agent disappears from the impersonal scene of execution, rst in the executioners who as representatives of the state enact its will and not their own, and even more clearly in the suffering body of the condemned. An execution cannot be told in the rst person. One result is an absence of testimony about for instance whether the punishment suffered is, as American law prohibits, cruel and unusual. When describing the guillotine to the National Constituent Assembly in 1789, Dr. Guillotin promoted it as a humanitarian invention that would eliminate suffering by making death as swift as light. Dr. Guillotin is reported in the Journal des Etats-Gnraux to have described the movement of the death machine thus, in a passage Derrida comments on at length: The mechanism falls like a bolt of lightning, the head ies off, the blood spurts out, the man is no more (DP I, 221). Notice the rapidity of death, which Guillotin supposes to be instantaneous and painless. In several stylistic remarks, Derrida underscores the absence of any subjective testimony. He says that Dr. Guillotin talks about the moment of execution and the elimination of pain in the third person:
. . . everything remains here in the third person: the subject of the utterance could not use any other person but the third person; he could 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 what happens to one condemned to death, to a man as third man, as third party [he, the man, is no more]. (DP I, 2212)

No one who says I is left to give the crucial testimony on what happens to one condemned to death or what the supposedly humanitarian death feels like. For Guillotin, the man already is no more 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 is mercifully free of suffering and focuses on the separation of head from body as the moment making the passage of life to death that has already occurred visible to an audience. Any Is present are watching eyes, not those who could say how it was with them when the head ew off and the blood spurted out. In fact, however, as Derrida shows in some difcult pages, the guillotine can and did sometimes dysfunction, and excruciating pain was the result. Nor does he nd it clear that where death is swift, it is necessarily painless. He cites studies by scientists of the bodies of the executed that show physical evidence of an explosive pain even where no I gives voice to it. The idea of deaths instantaneity is also subject to deconstruction: Derrida explores no fewer than three denitions of when death arrives. The effect of these analyses is rst to bring even more sharply into relief the absence of any discursive subjects from the stage where the death penalty is carried out, and their placement among the much-interested onlookers. For Derrida suggests that we subjects at a remove, in addition to the socio-political stakes of our recognition of a guilty participation in the state show of execution, have heavy psychological and epistemological stakes in the mirage that Dr. Guillotin makes so seductive. The audience seems to see the second splitting life from death, death delivered by a deus ex machina, a quasidivine hand (Zeus throws lightning bolts), which reassures them not only 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: they think they see the misleading motif of a certainty without appeal, of an alleged indubitability of death, as indubitable as the cogito for the executed prisoner (DP I, 224).10 Of course Derrida cannot provide rst-person testimony as to the pain of the agonising body, as one place where doubts about the sharp distinction between life and death would surface and a deconstruction would start. But the testimony he provides from memory of an experience he had with a sort of executioner in early childhood does complicate the truism that the I cannot testify to the bodys pain at the scene of execution. This time, Derridas memory is sparked by Le Premier homme, Camuss unnished, third-person ctionalised autobiography. Camus tells a story in two parts about the dogcatcher of Algiers. In the rst part, he describes a cart bearing a dogcatcher always 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 at the supple, rapid and silent pace of a trapper, then erupts in a sudden burst of astonishing speed, and puts his noose around the unsuspecting dogs neck which, suddenly strangled, making inarticulate groans, would be quickly dragged to a cart and thrown into a cage.11 In the second part, it recounts an insurgency by the children of Algiers who band together to frustrate Galoufa and help the dogs escape. Here is Camus, cited by Derrida:
At least that is how things happened when the dog was not under the protection of the neighborhood children. For they were all in league against Galoufa. They knew the captured dogs were taken to the municipal pound, kept for three days, after which, if no one claimed them, the animals were put to death. And if they had not known it, the pitiful spectacle of that death tumbrel returning after a fruitful journey, loaded with wretched animals of all colors and sizes, terried behind their bars and leaving behind the vehicle a trail of cries and mortal howls, would have been enough to rouse the childrens indignation. So, as soon as the prison van appeared in the area, the children would alert each other. They would scatter throughout the streets of the neighborhood, they too hunting down the dogs, but in order to chase them off to other parts of the city, far from the terrible lasso. If despite these precautions the dogcatcher found a stray dog in their presence, as happened several times to Pierre and Jacques, their tactics were always the same. Before the dogcatcher could get close enough to his quarry, Jacques and Pierre would start screaming Galoufa! Galoufa! in voices so piercing and so terrifying that the dog would ee as fast as he could and soon be out of reach. Now it was the childrens turn to prove their skill as sprinters, for the unfortunate Galoufa, who was paid a bounty for each dog he caught, was wild with anger, and he would chase them brandishing his leather rod. (DP I, 2323)

Camuss story is organised around a vivid spectacle divided between the nightmare actor that makes the moment of death appear by choking off the animals voices with his lasso and throwing the inert bodies into the cages, and the heroic gures 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 they are awakened to action by a Rousseauian-type pity and a Kantiantype respect: the pitiful spectacle of that death tumbrel has roused their indignation, their sense that the dignity of life is under attack. In Camuss abolitionist argument, they counter-attack to save the dogs, driven by support for the side of life. Here is how Derrida represents and translates the two parts:
Camus recounts how, as a child, he saw other children try literally to guillotine cats (he calls these children bourreaux) and above all he remembers a mythical character, the name of a character that I myself knew in my Algerian childhood; he was nicknamed with the mythical name Galoufa (no doubt because the rst person who fullled this function was so named). And this Galoufa was a municipal employee whose job it was to capture stray dogs and take them away. Camus describes very well, with faultless detail, all the operations of the said Galoufa, which I witnessed more than once in my childhood. (Whats more, when one wanted to frighten disobedient children, one threatened to call Galoufa.) And what is remarkable in Camuss description, which runs for several pages that you can read without me (. . . ) is that he borrows from the rhetorical code of the Terror (Camus speaks of the death tumbrel) and the code of executions or the eve of executions, strangling being one stage on the way to certain death. It is indeed a matter of arrest with torture and putting to death by a bourreau, but this time the victims are neither men nor cats but undomesticated dogs, stray dogs in the streets of Algiers. I excerpt a passage and I can assure you, my childhood memory can attest [en tmoigner ], that Camuss description is soberly and impeccably exact. (DP I, 2312)

Derridas comments on the description of Galoufa are extensive and concern the ritualistic, repeated side of the performance. His comments on the childrens part in the story are conned to a reminder that just previously these children were torturing cats, and a parenthesis, presumably based on a personal memory, about the use to which parents put the dogcatcher: (Whats more, when one wanted to frighten disobedient children, one threatened to call Galoufa.) These comments cast suspicion on the noble motives and bring out the fear under 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, Pierre and Jacques imitate Galoufa, hunting down the dogs and uttering blood-curdling cries that terrify them so they will run off, while Galoufa, wild with anger chases the heroes, brandishing his leather rod (DP I, 233). One result of the boys action is to direct onto their own bodies the attention of the executioner and to reveal one psychically plausible possibility, that far from deterring criminal behaviour, the threat of capital punishment can tempt the subject to take hold of his destiny, to act as if he were master and to precipitate a situation he sees as inevitable. Very early in the seminar, under the theme of fascination with the theater of the guillotine (DP I, 59 passim), Derrida asks about the role of the death penalty as a deterrent and raises such a possibility. The boys really do not know what they are doing: perhaps it is in thinking to save the dogs that they terrorise them and call the executioner down on themselves; perhaps it is for the thrill of a simulated experience of a fascinatingly certain and quick death that they are in point of fact condemning Galoufa who lives from the bounty he gets from picking up the dogs to the long and uncertain death of starvation. Their fascination with the moment of death that Galoufa presents to them sets off a rash of imitative activity in which each action increases the uncertainty as to whether they are trying to preserve life or through their mechanically repetitive activity of simulation are operating under the spell of a death drive. Supporters of the right to life who are supposedly moved by the moral feelings of pity and indignation, they are not just inexpert but are doing things for contradictory and dubious motives. Under the light shed by Derridas supplementing memory, the scene provides reason to doubt the difference Galoufa represents between life and death, and the alleged unity of action and intention that underwrites the scene of giving death. Through autobiography, Derrida recalls a ctional, idealising side to the story of the heroic children, and by so doing, brings out a grey area in action where the difference between desiring life and desiring death is no longer sharp. The longer and more interesting part of Derridas comment on Camuss third-person narrative is concerned with Galoufa and his swift choking-off of the dogs voices. Derrida intervenes in the rst person several times to say in effect: yes, I remember, that was true, there was a dogcatcher who really was called Galoufa, who drove about in a cart with 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 is exactly what did happen in Algiers when I was growing up. Derridas memory attests rst that the picture Camus makes, while it could look like that of a mythical type or stock character, was actually a portrait of an historical being. Hired on in the 1910s to catch dogs under the nickname Galoufa, a city employee still roamed the streets in the 1930s under the same name. Camuss rhetoric is that of the Terror, and the dogcatchers movements are a choreographed ritual; but, Derrida insists, I witnessed more than once the events Camus describes. His discursive acts of witnessing (afrming, attesting to, swearing to) the truth of lived participation in the ritual are worth noting, for they bring out the engagement of the speaker, which Derrida has in fact translated from a spectacle into a scene of language. Since the scene is one of the choking off of voice, the attestation has the effect of calling attention to a place where the death penalty shows up symptomatically in style, as Derrida earlier noted namely, to places where the rst person discourse alternates with a third person to narrate an unnarratable end of narrative voice. Strangled articulation characterises the narrative in the way that Derrida speaks of Galoufa. Notice the proliferation of terms that involve calling, recalling, or speaking the name Galoufa in the passage repeated below, all of which are conjugated in the third person in Derridas discussion, and related to Camuss use of description and a conventional code. They are offset by a discourse in which the I testies:
Camus remembers [rappelle] a mythical character, the name of a character that I myself knew in my Algerian childhood; he was nicknamed [on le surnommait] with the mythical name Galoufa (no doubt because the rst person who fullled this function was so named [sappelait ainsi]). And this Galoufa was a municipal employee whose job it was to capture stray dogs and take them away. Camus describes very well, with faultless detail, all the operations of the said [dudit] Galoufa, which I witnessed more than once in my childhood. (Whats more, when one wanted to frighten disobedient children, one threatened to call Galoufa.) And what is remarkable in Camuss description, which runs for several pages that you 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 of executions (. . . ). I excerpt a passage and I can assure you, my childhood memory can attest [en tmoigner], that Camuss description is soberly and impeccably exact. [Emphasis added]

The name Galoufa four times punctuates Derridas discussion; each time he sets it by some method in quotation marks, as a name mentioned or repeated, pronounced perhaps, but never used or proffered by the rst person, also four times in evidence as I. Probably, we are told, in one place where the shift from I to role is particularly remarkable, there once was a rst person named Galoufa, and his name has been borne ever since by whoever steps into his part. As for the rst person I, who wont say the name Galoufa in his own discourse, who goes so far as to mime a discursive disappearance (pages that you can read without me) in the name of letting Camuss third-person description with its exactness and code of the Terror take over, it nonetheless keeps resurfacing to insist on its participation and knowledge of the operations: I knew, I witnessed, I excerpt, I assure, my (. . . ) memory can attest. The effect of this division of labor, where the scene described has to be told and its chief gure named in the third person, even as the I returns repeatedly to witness to remembering the operations of that gure, works to translate the problematic signied of the strangled dogs into the signifying discourse. The I that cannot voice its death, says its choking by the repeated insertion of the name Galoufa into various sorts of quotation marks (Galoufa, this Galoufa, the said Galoufa, threatened (. . . ) to call Galoufa) in short, by a skillfully brandished pen that inserts a mark to divide the living from the dead, the I swear that I remember from the third person reporting the strangling of voice over the name Galoufa. The point of the translation of the described spectacle into the register of an autobiographical narrative is at least double: (1) It renders problematic the singularity of the death exemplied in Camus by the choking off of the voice of each individual dog. The operation of choking off is familiar to I, who has assisted more than once at it in the past, and is assisting at it once more in the deictic shift into and out of rst person discourse. Choking to death is as frequent and everyday an occurrence as the move from talking in the rst person to talking

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about the rst person (. . . ) so named. (2) It makes the distinction between the rst person who suffers execution but cannot testify to it and the third person who delivers and talks about it problematic. Some sense of what it is to suffer death is attached to an I that resuscitates to remember having its voice strangled by the looping of a brandished pen, just as some sense of what it is to act as executioner is attached to the act of marking, repeating and repurposing in the terms of a coded, impersonal language. It is no accident that Derrida should make use of autobiographical discourse to say what happens to one condemned to death (DP I, 221), because autobiography has ceaselessly to take on the problem of whether the I is determined by or determines the models it uses to say its experience, and thus whether it is spoken or speaking, victim or executioner. Derridas memory of Galoufa takes up a certain intimate experience he has of death as a writer about the self. Whereas the spectacle of execution aims to alleviate anxieties about agency and to present scenes where instantaneity and self-presence are depicted as certain, in Derridas memories such scenes have to be translated into linguistic terms, where they show their real character: in repetition, doubt as to the unity of the act, and uncertainty as to the uniqueness and instantaneity of death. In both of the two autobiographical moments examined so far, memories bring out the socio-political, psycho-epistemological interests subjects might have in maintaining the death penalty, even as they point to places of crisis where it is under deconstructive review. In the last two moments to be discussed where the autobiographical subject gets play in the rst year of the Death Penalty seminar, however, where Derrida is concerned with formalising the results of the discussion of what is proper to the subject under deconstruction, the I provides positive grounds for abolition. The rst discussion occurs in the context of an examination of talionic law, the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth that serves as the basis for the death penalty, as life for a life. Talionic law installs the ction that there is a calculable equivalence between the crime and the punishment, between the injury and the price to be paid (DP I, 151). Derrida agrees with Nietzsche when he maintains in The Genealogy of Morals that the belief in such equivalence is crazy: Nietzsche deems this idea of 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 rape and a castration, a murder and an execution, are not equivalent, and no one really thinks that the debt incurred through the murder of one person by another can be paid off by that others suffering death at the hands of the state. Nonetheless, our justice system imposes as true this belief in equivalence; its takes as a given that crimes can be paid for by punishment, murder by execution. This is where Derrida situates the necessity for a deconstruction of equivalences, a deconstruction like the one that Nietzsche performs and like the ones that he is himself performing throughout the Death Penalty seminars. It is in this context that Derrida insists that a subjects act of believing, its confession or testimony or act of faith, is not a simple matter of adhering or saying yes to orthodoxy, but must include a sceptical turn. Belief is not opposed to doubt; it is the process of believing and turning against belief:
Skepsis, skepticism, incredulity, e pokhe , all these suspensions of belief or of doxa, of the opining of opinion, of the saying yes to are not accidents that happen to believing; they are believing itself. Believing is its own contrary and thus it has no contrary. Not to believe in it is not the contrary of believing, of trusting, of crediting, of having faith. (DP I, 154)

A little later, hell say that in the subject . . . this internal division, this properly analytic dissociation, this cleavage, this split of believing haunted by nonbelief is almost quasi-hypnotic, one might say spectral, quasi-hallucinatory, or unconscious (DP I, 154). The confessional subject is a haunted subject. It professes faith in something, says yes to it, and just by virtue of that, suspends it and starts up the work of negation, skepsis and not believing. For such a subject, talionic law, the ction of equivalences is not a given, but is suspect as a ction. It is the haunted subject who can question the mad dictum of the state that one death can ever be equivalent to another. Derridas profession of faith that the worldwide tendency is toward abolition of the death penalty reposes partly on the idea that we are all autobiographical subjects involved in the unnished process of taking apart the laws assertion of equivalency. Derridas subject is selfafrming 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 law underpinning the death penalty. There is another important place where the confessional subject shows up in the Death Penalty Seminar, this time to ground the argument for abolition in a strange right. This is the passage that I admit to nding the hardest to take in a seminar that does not spare us some terrible moments including, just for instance, an account of a guillotine dysfunctioning ve times in a single routine execution (DP I, 216). Derrida is discussing the difference between being condemned to die, the fate of all of us, and being condemned to death, the death applied to others:
Fundamentally, it is by answering the question, when? that one can divide, as with a knife blade, two deaths or two condemnations, the condemnation to die and the condemnation to death. The mortal that 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 not know the moment, the date, the precise hour that he will die. He does not know, I do not know and I will never know it in advance. And no one will know it in advance. This indetermination is an essential trait 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. Whereas the one condemned to death (. . . ) can know, can think he knows, and in any case others know for him, in principle, by right, on which day, at which hour, or even at which instant death will befall him. In any case (. . . ), the concept of the death penalty supposes that the state, the judges, society, the bourreaux and executioners, that is, third parties, have mastery over the time of life of the condemned one and thus know how to calculate and produce, in so-called objective time, the deadline to within a second. This knowledge, this mastery over the time of life and death, this mastering and calculating knowledge 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, all these third parties, are presumed to know, calculate, operate the time of death. Their knowledge of death is a presumed knowledge on the subject of time and of the coincidence between objective time and let us say the subjective time of the subject condemned to death and executed. (DP I, 21920; 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 subject aware of coming death, but one who will have died. So, if you want to know one thing that makes the very terrible death of murder not quite the same as the very terrible one of execution, it is this: the would-be murderer leaves the I with the indeterminacy of her relation to death intact right up to the moment of death;12 whereas the state does its best to take away that indeterminacy, by purporting to know ahead of time the minute and hour of the death inicted on me that it will not let me survive. It converts an uncertainty into an alleged certainty. Derrida goes on to explain why he nds the indeterminacy of the Is relation to death so precious. It is what gives us a future worthy of the name, a future where the certain is after all not what happens. And it provides a relation to the other (other beings, fate, God) as the one outside from whom come its chances for something besides an allegedly certain, programmed execution. Derrida again:
The insult, the injury, the fundamental injustice done to the life in me, to the principle of life in me, is not death itself, from this point of view; it is rather the interruption of the principle of indetermination, the ending imposed on the opening of the incalculable chance whereby a living being has a relation to what comes, to the tocome and thus to some other as event, as guest, as arrivant. And the supreme form of the paradox, its philosophical form, is that what is ended by the possibility of the death penalty is not the innity of life or immortality, but on the contrary the nitude of my life. It is because my life is nite, ended in a certain sense, that I keep this relation to incalculability and undecidability as to the instant of my death. It is because my life is nite, nished in a certain sense, that I do not know, and that I neither can nor want to know, when I am going to die. Only a living being as nite being can have a future, can be exposed to a future, to an incalculable and undecidable future that s/he does not have at his/her disposal like a master and that comes to him or to her from some other, from the heart of the other. (DP I, 2578)

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

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certainty. The death penalty takes away incalculable death in exchange for a spurious, calculable death. It is the incalculable death that gives the I a relation to possibility, to something happening that is not already programmed. To deprive a single being of that relation is to deprive not just a single life of the chances that that one life might have had and the futures it might have wrought, but to strike at the indeterminable in every I. The individual subject is condemned to die wherever the other arrives without warning, as repetition, as the unexpected not within its mastery as subject. All but one of those deaths it will end by surviving. The death penalty substitutes a single calculable death for the many little deaths a subject undergoes, and in so doing tries to take away the incalculable. On the basis of a belief in the subjects right to life as a right to its death(s) that Derrida proclaims himself an abolitionist, and afrms his belief in the worldwide movement for abolition of the death penalty as what gives a chance for a future. Through a consideration of the confession and the confessional subject, Derrida has added two more reasons, both deconstructionist, to the tide of reasons being put forward for ending the death penalty. The rst is that the subject in which we are coming to believe is a haunted subject; that is, one with doubts, among other things, about the talionic law in which the state obliges us to believe, doubts visible as second thoughts, reservations or remorseful paradoxes, even in strong advocates for the death penalty like Kant or Rousseau. We owe it to the double and haunted subjects we have been coming to believe in to work to abolish the death penalty, which could only be pronounced in the service of a supposed certainty and where the process of belief had been ended. The second is that it is in our collective interest not to substitute for the openness of the relation the subject has to death a closed, calculable relation, which despairs of the future arriving, not simply for the one executed, but for those who assist at an execution or otherwise let it take place. For Derrida, confessing his abolitionist stance, the ongoing deconstruction of the subject entails the ongoing deconstruction of the death penalty.
Notes 1 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 on the road to abolition in the U.S. from a legal perspective, see Is the Death Penalty Dying?: European and American Perspectives, edited by A. Sarat and J. Martschukat (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011). Some states use a three-drug while others use a one-drug protocol for lethal injection. States are having a hard time obtaining the anesthetics necessary for both protocols (propofol, phenobarbital and pentobarbital) as a result of resistance from manufacturers. See http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/state-lethal-injection, consulted 13 July 2013, 2:10 p.m.. See also Peggy Kamuf, Protocol: Death Penalty Addiction, Southern Journal of Philosophy 50, Spindel Supplement (September, 2012), 519. See, for instance, DP I, 17 n25, where Derrida writes: (No philosophy against the death penalty). Similar statements can be found in material Derrida published about the death penalty; see, for example, Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow. . . : A Dialogue, translated by Jeff Fort (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2004), 146. See Michael Naass Remarks on Session 4 of Jacques Derridas Seminar Death Penalty I, Derrida Seminar Translation Project, 2010 Workshop, http://www/derridaseminars.org/workshops.html, consulted 13 July 2013, 2:15 p.m.. For the question of unequal applications of the death penalty in the U.S. according to race see Death Penalty Information Center, http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/race-and-death-penalty, consulted 13 July 2013, 2:12 p.m.. Discussing Baudelaires Pauvre Belgique! (DP I, 206211), Derrida considers the implication of the spectator in the scene of execution through a prior feeling of guilt. For the question of the unequal geographical distribution of executions in the U.S., see Death Penalty Information Center http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions-county, consulted 13 July 2013, 2:08 p.m. A little later in the seminar, Derrida will insist on the wrappings on Weidmanns head: By choosing the word bandelettes to describe Weidmanns face, which, then, I myself saw in the newspapers surrounded by strips or wrappers that were not linen cloths or bandelettes, this John/Jean (here Genet) seems to me to be pointing with a christological sign toward John the Evangelist (or toward Luke who uses the same words for the same scene), and this seems signicant in many respects (DP I, 64). The photographs that appeared in LEcho dAlger subsequent to the execution did not contain the one to which Derrida refers. There exist several shots of the still-living Eugen Weidmann, wounded while being taken prisoner, whose

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head is wrapped in bandages. One appeared in LEcho dAlger on 11 December 1937, the day after his arrest. The main picture accompanying the article on the execution is a collage of two photos. In the upper left-hand corner, the editors have superimposed onto a shot of the guillotine erected in front of the Versailles prison, an earlier shot of Weidmann, head in prole, looking into the air above the guillotine, and looking like the reversed image of the oating head of John the Baptist, as depicted by Gustave Moreau in LApparition. Although rumour reported rowdy and hysterical reactions at Weidmanns execution, newspaper accounts in Paris Soir and Paris Match note only a few whistles and shouts from the crowd. Too much daylight seems nevertheless to have been shed on the guillotines operation on that early midsummer morning: scheduled for 3:50, the execution took place at 4:30, as a result of an administrative disagreement over whether death was to occur according to clock or solar time. The gathering daylight meant that the photographers scattered throughout the crowd and in the nearby balconies could capture events in the pictures that appeared in Paris Match (22 June 1939) and elsewhere. Those pictures, as well as a lm shot clandestinely from a neighboring balcony, can still be found circulating on the web today. According to Emmanuel Taeb, writing a Foucauldian analysis in La Guillotine en secret: les excutions publiques en France, 18701939 (Paris, Belin, 2011), the press helped bring an end to public executions not because it gave too much publicity to the execution, but rather because its sober accounts persuaded the state that it would make a better witness than the too-passionate public. In Rexions sur la guillotine, Albert Camus notes with some irony that the secrecy following the decree ending public executions favoured the politically motivated executions of the Occupation. For both Taeb and Camus, precisely because they awaken presumably abolitionist passions in the viewers, public executions are more desirable than execution behind closed doors. Derrida, who generally critiques the spectacularity of the death penalty as aiming to convince citizens of state sovereignty and its power over life and death, takes a more sceptical position. In recounting the execution on Sunday, 18 June 1939, LEcho dAlger builds up to a similar moment where the difference between life and death is presented. First, it follows the prisoner in his cell on his last day, a last day that is presented as a day of grace, since Weidmann was supposed to have died the day before according to the reporter; then it moves to note the arrival of the slowly-gathering supporting cast and the setting of the scene around midnight, the public starts to collect at a caf, 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 to keep 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 the Public Prosecutor and the prosecutorial team; soon the advocates for the Defence and 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 is made to lay his head on the guillotine collar and then, a paragraph says this: During an interminable second the executioner hesitates before lowering the top half of the collar (lunette). The blade falls. A new paragraph begins: It is exactly 4:32. Time slowly accelerates until all at once there is no more time, and the audience will have seen the instant separation of life from death. The newspaper narrative in which the young Derrida learned about the death penalty follows very closely the narrative model set by Guillotin in talking about his machine. Albert Camuss Le Premier homme (Paris, Gallimard, 1994), 1335; The First Man, translated by David Hapgood (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 1412. As cited in DP I, 3401. Anyone who has ever survived an attack by another human being must be grateful for this indeterminability, which constitutes a real advantage for the victim over the would-be murderer. The killer operates under the assurance that the victim is 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.