The Death Penalty, Volume I

Geographies of capital punishment: New directions and interventions

“…Ollman, 1976, p. 213). One need only view the contentious, often riotous events surrounding executions at Tyburn in London or public executions in France, New York, or Chicago for such evidence (Avrich, 1984; Derrida, 2013; Hay, Linebaugh, Rule, Thompson, & Winslow, 2011). Sites of public execution were once consistent sites of class struggle.…”

Grant Allen's "Jerry Stokes": Detective Fiction, the Death Penalty, and the Scene of Writing

“…In this, he echoes a correlation between literature and abolition, anticipating the argument of Jacques Derrida's The Death Penalty seminars that whereas the institution of philosophy has tended to argue in favour of capital punishment, that of literature has tended to oppose it (though not without exceptions, most famously Wordsworth and Ruskin). 26 Likewise, James notes the careers of several notable mid-Victorian members of the Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment in bookselling, publishing, editing, and related areas. 27 It is unsurprising, then, that at a striking moment in The Penalty of Death Oldfield makes a sudden swerve to literary reference:…”

“…[I]n Guernsey, in 1854, a man named Tapner was sentenced to the gallows; I intervened, an appeal for pardon was signed by six hundred notables of the island, the man was hanged … a few European newspapers that printed the letter I wrote to the citizens of Guernsey to prevent the execution made their way to America in time for this letter to be reprinted usefully by American newspapers; they were going to hang a man in Quebec, a certain Julien; the people of Canada rightly considered the letter I had written to the people of Guernsey to be addressed to them and, by a providential counter-blow, this letter saved … not Tapner whom it intended, but Julien whom it did not intend. 33 Derrida uses this incident of displaced Canadian reprieve as the starting point for what he calls the right of the writer to challenge the death penalty. Unlike the institution of philosophy, it is literature whose practitioners must "give themselves the sacred right to make the law above the laws, to make themselves the representatives of eternal justice above law and thus of divine justice."…”

The Curiosity at Work in Deconstruction

“…While distinguishable, these two curiosities are, as Derrida demonstrates, modalities of a sovereign style of curiosity. Sovereignty is an illusion upon which, nevertheless, reason, knowledge, and power are built; in deciding "on what is [qu'est-ce que]," 7 the sovereign claims sovereignty by circumscribingor asserting the limits-of words, beings, and states. Insofar as the autopsic and therapeutic modalities of curiosity negate the inherent instability of objects, divisions, walls, and procedures, they shore up the illusion of sovereignty, whether in the political or philosophical arena.…”