Butler, Judith. “On Cruelty.” Rev. of The Death Penalty: Vol. I, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Peggy Kamuf. London Review of Books 36.14 (2014): 31-33. 9 July 2014
Beyond the Pleasure Principle calls into question the exclusive operation of the pleasure principle as the organising principle of psychic life. Are there modes of destructiveness that can’t be explained by the pleasure principle?
The death drive emerges as a way of explaining repetition compulsions that fail to establish any kind of sustainable mastery.They appeared to Freud first as part of ‘war neurosis’ and were set apart from forms of neurosis organised by wish-fulfilment.
These forms of compulsive repetition were not in search of gratification: they were unwanted repetitions that wore down the ego.
Derrida is frank: ‘At issue is a diagnosis of a cruelty that has no contrary because it is originary.’ This dialectical inversion characteristic of bad conscience – the redoubling of aggression in the effort to establish its opposite – proves important for Derrida’s approach to the death penalty and to abolitionism.
For Derrida, those who oppose the death penalty – as he did – are caught up in the same
problem as those who are for it, but why?
Are abolitionists perhaps seeking to eradicate the death drive – the ‘hostility to life’, as Derrida puts it, that is ‘inherent to life itself’? Is that their furtive purpose? ‘Surpassing cruelty by an apparent non-cruelty,’ he continues, ‘would be merely a surpassing in cruelty, a surfeit of cruelty.’ 😕 eh 😕
He notes that Robespierre changed his mind from opposing to affirming the death penalty in the space of two years, depending on what seemed more useful to him – whether he feared for his own life or wished for the death of his opponents. Those who oppose the death penalty, such as Beccaria and sometimes Bentham, seem to prefer a long, drawn-out form of cruel imprisonment, which raises the question: which camp in this debate stands for the more humane form of punishment?
Wary of forms of aggression disguised as benevolence, Derrida asks whether some abolitionists are committed to other forms of cruelty that are masked by elegant moral formulations, ones that rationalise prolonging the time of cruelty and the tenure of sadistic delight.
Love Thy Neighbour
Just as Nietzsche found Kant’s categorical imperative to be soaked in blood, so Freud thought that the Christian dictum ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ was pretty much impossible to realise.
Why should my neighbour love me? he asks. And why should I love my neighbour? ‘It
is very probable that my neighbour, when he is enjoined to love me as himself, will answer
exactly as I have done and will repel me for the same reasons.’
Freud suggests that we can only really love those we know and that it is absurd to ask us to love the rest of humankind: hostility seems a more reasonable default position.
What seems to be at stake here is neither a random attitude of hostility nor even an occasional propensity towards cruelty, but the broader problem of the death drive.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle and then in Civilisation and Its Discontents, written ten years later, in 1930, Freud writes about a kind of destructiveness that seeks to dismantle social forms constructed on the basis of aim-inhibited social bonds, such as family, community and nation.
He remarks on several occasions, in particular when considering the ambivalence constitutive of love, that the pleasure principle and the death drive work in tandem, but they should be distinguished nonetheless in terms of their final aims.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud makes two inverse kinds of claim about the relationship between pleasure and the death drive: first, he gives the example of sadism, in which the death drive ‘enters the service of the sexual function’; second, just pages later, ‘the pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts,’ which are ‘especially on guard against increases of stimulation from within, which would make the task of living more difficult’.
So each can be at the service of the other, which means that neither is necessarily primary. The death drive leads us towards death, in a circuitous return to the inorganic that militates against a progressive sense of time, repeatedly taking apart the social relations we build and returning us to a state of quiescence [being quiet, still or at rest].
So the two drives – or principles, if you prefer – seem to meet up again in this final quiescence [not active] in which all that is built is undone, scattered, returning the fading ego to an inorganic condition in which the organism is relieved of all excitation.
We know that civilisation produces unhappiness because social norms demand that we not act on all the desires on the docket for gratification.
Ideally, aim-inhibited social bonds create communities, and the sublimation of immediate desires creates artworks or institutions or works like Freud’s.
But the other problem with civilisation is that it seems actively to dismantle what it has built, to destroy what one brings into being and to attack those one loves; it takes aim at its own creations and attachments, pursuing a furtive vocation – repetitive, unknowing – that works in a contrary direction to its forward-oriented tasks and all conceits of progress.
Freud ends Civilisation and Its Discontents, remarking that civilisation runs the risk of being undone by its own aggression, going so far as to voice his
anxiety about the prospect of extermination.
A brief passage in the book proves quite important for Derrida’s argument. Freud is writing
about the death penalty: ‘One is irresistibly reminded of an incident in the French Chamber when capital punishment was being debated.’ (I take it that this is the 1790s.)
‘A member had been passionately supporting its abolition and his speech was being received with tumultuous applause, when a voice from the hall called out: “Que messieurs les assassins commencent!”’
It is as if the call to let the assassins begin their work is of a part with the passions aroused by abolitionist discourse itself.
Are abolitionists like anti-pornography campaigners who end up exciting their supporters with their graphic descriptions of the porn they would get rid of?
Abolitionism has a different problem, since here it isn’t so much desire but the death drive
that cloaks itself in moral opposition to its own expressions.
Does Derrida’s reading suggest that opposition to the death penalty can quickly be converted into its opposite, unleashing a celebratory affirmation of its destructiveness?
Abolitionism in defence of an absolute right to life is, for Baudelaire, as Derrida reminds us, ‘doubly guilty’: it clings to animal existence and abandons the human.
The passion of those who oppose the death penalty is guilty, he remarks, ‘because they are afraid for their own skins, because they feel guilty and their tremulations are a confession; they confess, with the symptom of their abolitionism as it were, that they want to save their lives, that they tremble for themselves because … unconsciously, they feel guilty of a mortal sin.’ So the passion against the punishment is articulated by those who are guilty not for what they do, but for what they wish they did not wish – to do away with someone. But also because they fear losing their own lives, so formulate their position not from principle, but from fear of being done away with by another: ‘I want to abolish the death penalty because I am afraid of being condemned.’
Derrida’s move to expose the way that the abolitionists are implicated in the death drive has a certain intellectual appeal, resting as it does on a dialectical inversion by which those who oppose the death penalty are implicated in its cruelty, especially when they prefer forms of imprisonment.
Here is a [Butler’s] rejoinder.
Derrida’s position implies that the only route to an abolitionist position is through the violent suppression of the aggressive impulse, a redoubling of aggression that is now conveyed and amplified by moral instruments.
But given that aggression can be interrupted by more relational orientations, why wouldn’t opposition to the death penalty emerge from those?
The pleasure principle intervenes to derail aggression time and again, and I have noted already that for Freud the death drive can be brought within the service of the pleasure principle, and that pleasure can serve the purpose of creating and reproducing social bonds.
In the context of preserved social bonds, aggression can become agonism, or it can be strictly contained within the rules of a game: a sadomasochistic sexual scene, for example, or some other rule-bound activity.
Emotional Ambivalence
But there is a more general argument to be made, concerning Freud’s idea of emotional ambivalence. This idea is there early on in his interpretations of Hamlet in The Interpretation of Dreams; it gets a chapter in Totem and Taboo and is central to the explanation of melancholia in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’.
After 1920, it is recast as a mode of entanglement between the pleasure principle and the death drive. There is no overcoming ambivalence in love, since we are always at risk of destroying what we are most attached to and vulnerable to being destroyed by those on whom we are most dependent.
According to this later model, Oedipus doesn’t necessarily kill the father in order to have the mother (that would be to posit wish-fulfilment as the final aim of all murderous wishes); he could be moved by various unconscious motives in killing the father, and sexual gratification may or may not be among them.
So the problem with Derrida’s dialectical inversion is that it relies on the death drive, or its principal exponent, aggression, as the only motive operating in the scene.
What ethical decisions emerge from the ambivalent situation of wanting someone to die and at the same time wanting them to live, and even wanting both things with equal intensity, but at different levels of consciousness? Ambivalence isn’t quite the same as hypocrisy.
I am a hypocrite if, however furtively, I want someone to die, or am possessed by a murderous wish even as I cloak that wish in a moral argument, say, against the death penalty.
I am a hypocrite only if there is a wish I pretend I do not have, but in fact do. In the condition of ambivalence, however, there are at least two wishes at work, two true motives struggling to coexist despite their incompatibility.
What then works against the inner demand that someone pay for a crime with his or her life? Is it only when we might enjoy inflicting further pain on the criminal that we wish she or he would live?
Or are there other reasons why we might want them to live? Are there, even within the terms of psychoanalysis, reasons for wanting to keep the other alive that do not primarily rely on our wish to continue torturing that other, even when it isn’t someone in particular, but an anonymous other or the general population?
To answer that question, we have also to ask whether there are social relations outside the terms of debt and payment, relations that might be understood as being outside capital, or outside the psychic and moral terms by which injury-cum-debt authorises incarceration and the death penalty.
This is already to move from a drive theory to an account of relationality, but that doesn’t mean we can dispense so easily with the problem of destructiveness.
After all, when Freud posits Eros and Thanatos as two separate principles, as drives which belong to the figural language available to him, he is trying to take account of ambivalence.
Eros may well be defined as building social bonds through sublimation, but love, we should remember, is also constituted by ambivalence. This is the very point from which Melanie Klein departs, suggesting that the ambivalence of all human bonds is the basis of an ethical demand to preserve precisely the life it is in one’s power, and sometimes also in one’s interest, to destroy.
‘The power of love – which is the manifestation of the forces which tend to preserve life – is there in the baby as well as the destructive impulses,’ Klein writes in ‘Love, Guilt and Reparation’.
The fantasy of destroying becomes coupled with the fear of losing those on whom one is absolutely dependent.
To do away with the one on whom I depend for food and shelter and survival is to imperil my own existence.
The ‘fear of losing’ emerges time and again in Klein: ‘There is … in the unconscious mind a tendency to give [the mother] up, which is counteracted by the urgent desire to keep her for ever.’
This form of ambivalence emerges developmentally as an emotional bind when individuation isn’t complete. But since individuation is never complete, and dependency never really overcome, a broader ethical dilemma emerges: how not to destroy the other or others whom I need in order to live.
It isn’t a matter of calculating that destroying them would probably be a bad idea. Rather, it is a matter of recognising that dependency fundamentally defines us: it is something I never quite outgrow, no matter how old and how individuated I may seem.
And it isn’t that you and I are the same; rather, it is that we invariably lean towards and on each other, and it is impossible to think about either of us without the other.
If I seek to preserve your life, it is not only because it is in my self-interest to do so, or because I have wagered that it will bring about better consequences for me.
It is because I am already tied to you in a social bond without which this ‘I’ cannot be thought.
So, what implications does the thesis of emotional ambivalence in love have for thinking about alternatives to the death penalty and for legal violence more generally?
Is there a way to move beyond the dialectical relation between the punishment of the death penalty and the life sentence?