This paper looks at the recently published text of Derrida’s 1999–2000 Death Penalty Seminars, reading it alongside a key text from the early 2000s, Derrida’s address to the Estates General of Psychoanalysis. Tracking Derrida’s insistent references to psychoanalysis in his writings on the issue of capital punishment, I argue that the deconstruction of the death penalty, in its full scope, can perhaps best be approached in the terms emerging out of Derrida’s engagement with psychoanalysis in this period. If this is the case, it is because the way psychoanalysis conceptualizes cruelty ultimately opens onto to a particular thinking of life, one that serves as the crucial lever in Derrida’s treatment of the death penalty. What emerges in Derrida’s engagement with psychoanalysis in this period, then, I argue in conclusion, is the radical thinking of finitude and mortality at the core of the deconstruction of the death penalty.

This paper, an Evaluation of Jacques Derrida's position on Death Penalty; A case against the Abolitionist, is aimed at raising logical arguments against the abolitionist by providing basis for the justification of Death penalty, while exposing the merits and demerits of the argument of Jacque Derrida in support of the abolition of capital punishment. Responding to Derrida Death penalty Seminar of 1999/2000 which took an abolitionist stance against the practice of death penalty, this paper argued that, Derrida's de construction of theologico-Political concept of the sovereign right over life and death in view of abolishing capital punishment, should be understood in terms of the unconditional renunciation of sovereignty as called for in Derrida's later political writing, Rogues in particular. This paper thus, adopted the overlapping philosophical method of historical, critical and hermeneutical analysis, evaluation and prescription to web together its arguments in support of Capital Punishment while giving special attention to the positions of Jacque Derrida with regards to the idea of death penalty. The work made a case against the Abolitionist by providing basis for the justification of Death penalty. It is the opinion of this paper that, even the capital punishment is not enough to right a wrong or engender justice. Rather restitution should also be made on the side of the offender in other forms while also giving his life as a punishment. It is often perceived that the lextalions is principle is the apogee of punishment when applied to serious crimes, especially culpable homicide. This work sets up yet a higher bar anchored on the perspective of critical cogitation and replaces this prescription of " tooth for a tooth and eye for an eye " with some teeth for teeth and the eyes for an eye " advancing arguments to move the frontiers of debate on capital punishment forward

By way of a double reading of the temporality of guillotine and photography in the anonymous 1939 film of the execution of Eugène Weidmann, this essay examines the putative instantaneity of death, which posits life as that which happens only before death.

Reading Derrida’s 1999-2000 Death Penalty Seminar, this paper presents a very brief discussion (with long quotations) of how Derrida juxtaposes Kant’s defense of the death penalty with Victor Hugo’s vote for the pure, simple and definite abolition of the death penalty. If one wants to ask what is the death penalty, one has to reconstitute the history of sovereignty as the hyphen in the expression “theologico-political”, and try to think the theologico-political in its possibility beginning from the death penalty. Deconstruction is thus perhaps, perhaps insists Derrida in this seminar, the deconstruction of the death penalty. Published in Human Rights, Rule of Law and the Contemporary Social Challenges in Complex Societies: Proceedings of the XXVI World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy of the Internationale Vereinigunf für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophieas. Marcelo Galuppo, Mônica Sette Lopes, Lucas de Alvarenga Gontijo, Karine Salgado and Thomas Bustamante (eds.). Belo Horizonte/MG: Initia Via, 2015 (E-book), pp. 1013-1029.

In Derrida’s lectures on the death penalty, the United States figures as “both exemplary and exceptional” (79). Derrida acknowledges the racist structure of state violence in the United States, and he cites data and specific cases to support this point, but he does not develop a critical analysis of race or racism in the lecture series. Drawing on the work of incarcerated intellectual Mumia Abu-Jamal, critical race theorists Cheryl Harris and Angela Davis, and contemporary prison abolitionists, I argue that racism is an issue, not only in the particular context of the United States, but also for the logic of the death penalty that Derrida proposes to deconstruct. Derrida’s own account of indemnity, interest, and condemnation in the Tenth Session is incomplete without a supplementary analysis of black civil death and the construction of whiteness as property. In conclusion, I argue that an abolitionism worthy of the name would have to move beyond the death penalty, towards the (im)possible project of prison abolition and the abolition of white supremacy.