When he died in 2004, Jacques Derrida left behind a vast legacy of unpublished material, much of it in the form of written lectures. With "The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I", the University of Chicago Press inaugurated an ambitious series, edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf, translating these important works into English. This volume, now in paperback, launched the series with Derrida's exploration of the persistent association of animality with sovereignty.
The Death Penalty, Volume I (The Seminars of Jacques Derrida)
Added by: avro | Karma: 1097.18 | Other | 28 September 2014
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In this newest installment in Chicago’s series of Jacques Derrida’s seminars, the renowned philosopher attempts one of his most ambitious goals: the first truly philosophical argument against the death penalty. While much has been written against the death penalty, Derrida contends that Western philosophy is massively, if not always overtly, complicit with a logic in which a sovereign state has the right to take a life.
[This] is a compelling study of the intimate, complex, and often unexpected aspects of the relationship between philosophy and myth ... This is an eloquent, forceful, and altogether timely contribution in a world in which new myths purport to be unquestionable, while philosophy bides its time in self-absorbed conceptual retreat. Its publication marks a new step in deconstructive thinking, after which deconstruction will never again be the same.'
The two essays in this volume are telling examples of Jacques Derrida’s recent work on ethical and political issues. Both deal with pressing contemporary problems. First, Derrida discusses the dilemmas of reconciliation and amnesty in situations where the bloody traumas of history demand forms of forgiveness, such as Apartheid in South Africa, the Vichy Regime in France, or the current situation in Algeria. Second, Derrida addresses the dilemma of refugee and asylum rights, which is a theme also addressed, in a different mode, by Sir Michael Dummett in another volume in this series.
This article represents the first part of a ten-hour address Derrida gave at the thirdCerisy-la-Salle conference devoted to his work, in July 1997. The title of the conference was ''LAnimal autobiographique"; see J:Animal autobiographique: Autour deJacques Derrida, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris, 1999); Derrida's essay appears on pp. 251-301. Later segments of the address dealt with Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, and Lévinas, as note 4 explains and as other allusions made by Derrida suggest. The Lacan segment will appear in Zoo Ontologies: The Question of the Animal in Contemporary Theory and Culture, ed. Cary Wolfe (Min neapolis, 2002).