{"id":13004,"date":"2014-07-09T15:18:24","date_gmt":"2014-07-09T19:18:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=13004"},"modified":"2014-07-09T15:25:57","modified_gmt":"2014-07-09T19:25:57","slug":"butler-conclusion-forgiveness-pardon-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2014\/07\/09\/butler-conclusion-forgiveness-pardon-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Butler conclusion forgiveness pardon (3)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Butler, Judith. “On Cruelty.” Rev. of The Death Penalty: Vol. I, by Jacques Derrida<\/a>, translated by Peggy Kamuf. London Review of Books 36.14 (2014): 31-33. 9 July 2014<\/p>\n

Following Benjamin\u2019s \u2018Critique of Violence\u2019, Derrida underscores the toxic intimacy between crime and its legal remedy.<\/p>\n

The law distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate forms of the death penalty, establishing the procedures by which that distinction is made.<\/p>\n

It also establishes the grounds on which the state can inflict deadly violence either in war or through such legal instruments as the death penalty.<\/p>\n

The death penalty, for Derrida, considered as a form of legal violence, closes down the distinction between justice and vengeance: justice becomes the moralised form that vengeance assumes.
\nLike Davis, Derrida understands that the death penalty and imprisonment are hardly opposites, but form two modalities of an economy of vengeance.<\/p>\n

When the state kills, and justifies doing so, it enacts vengeance through its reasoning process; legal violence becomes no different from non-legal violence, except that now the state performs the act and supplies its justification.<\/p>\n

But for Davis, the task is to move beyond vengeance. Her mentor was at one time Herbert Marcuse<\/strong>, who in Eros and Civilisation<\/em>, his rejoinder to Civilisation and Its Discontents<\/em>, suggested that Eros might be expanded to create forms of community that would counter the force of Thanatos, or the death drive<\/span><\/strong> augmented under capitalism.<\/p>\n

He referred to the surplus aggression created under capitalism, and suggested that Freud was describing a very specific social organisation of aggression, not a pre-social death drive.<\/p>\n

He also thought that revolutionary energy, as it were, could be marshalled against repressive institutions, among them capitalism and the family.<\/p>\n

There is no drive theory in Davis\u2019s work, as far as I know: both sexuality and aggression are socially organised. At the same time, however, there is a clear understanding that political resistance has both to build and destroy. <\/strong>There is no way of getting round that double demand.<\/p>\n

Davis calls for the abolition not only of the death penalty but of the institution and industry of imprisonment. The negation of exploitative and violent institutions makes use of destructiveness, but also seeks to establish and strengthen social bonds through repair and \u2018restorative justice\u2019 rather than vengeance and retribution<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

If we stay within the problem of cruelty\u2019s relation to the death drive<\/span><\/strong>, we may wonder to
\nwhat extent the death drive<\/span><\/strong>, or aggression, can be fully directed by conscious political<\/strong> programmes<\/strong> such as those proposed by Davis, and whether there is always an excess to destructiveness that can\u2019t quite be controlled or explained by the social organisation of life.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The important question here seems to be whether social bonds should be understood
\nwithin the framework of civilisation, or in some other way.<\/p>\n

As Freud makes clear in Civilisation and Its Discontents<\/em>, civilisation will hardly save us: the moral face of civilisation, after all, is vengeance, and prisons are its exemplary institutions.<\/p>\n

In their place, Davis imagines communities that focus on healing and repair, on forms of responsibility that forge new social bonds for those who may have broken them.<\/p>\n

These bonds would be explicitly anti-capitalist, and would put an end to racist forms of
\nexploitation.<\/p>\n

She insists that in the United States, both prisons and the death penalty have to be understood as part of the legacy of slavery, given that the disproportionate number of
\npeople in prison and on death row in the US are black or Latino men and, increasingly,
\nblack or Latino women.<\/p>\n

Davis also argues that love and forgiveness<\/span><\/strong> must be pursued as alternatives to retribution. This is not to imply that there is no destructiveness in this picture<\/strong>, but that it takes the form of \u2018negating\u2019 prisons, whose form of destructiveness damages life that ought properly to be repaired and even restored to a broader social world.<\/p>\n

Are we really so far from the death drive here? What if we understand the death drive<\/span> <\/strong>not only as manifested within the individual psyche, or in terms of group psychology, but as something that takes hold of institutions<\/strong> and guides their aims, sometimes with furtive tenacity?<\/p>\n

The call for an end to imprisonment and to prisons may not be possible, or practical<\/strong>, but it establishes a perspective<\/span><\/strong> from which we can see the way that legal remedy is engaged in cruelty.<\/p>\n

To call for an end to cruelty is to call for the destruction of the institutions of cruelty; the only question that remains is whether it would be possible to control the destructive effects that would follow from the deinstitutionalisation of criminals.<\/p>\n

The fact is that the destructive consequences of acts that seek to destroy destruction can\u2019t be fully known in advance<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

This is, perhaps, where Freud on the unconscious operation of the death drive<\/span><\/strong> seems to have the last word, indicating a future of destruction whose exact contours we can\u2019t know<\/strong>, but about which we can only feel anxiety<\/span><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The fact that the death penalty is disproportionately applied to people of colour implies that it is a way of regulating citizenship by other means and, in the case of the death penalty, concentrating state power over questions of life and death<\/strong> that differentially affect minority populations.<\/p>\n

Yet this power is not simply or exclusively sovereign<\/span><\/strong>. With the idea of a demographics of the condemned, we enter the terrain that Achille Mbembe has called \u2018necropolitics<\/strong>\u2019.<\/p>\n

That security companies have taken over the public administration of prisons in the US<\/strong>, the UK and elsewhere exposes the link between who is owned, who is put out of play, whose unpayable economic or social debt now defines who they are \u2013 and who profits.<\/p>\n

\u2018The people\u2019, the public, are established as those who must be protected from the criminal class, producing one class of people whose lives are worth preserving, and another whose lives can be easily lost or destroyed.<\/p>\n

Does debt forgiveness enter into this picture? What would be its psychic equivalent?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Would it perhaps be the operation of \u2018pardon\u2019 as a deinstitutionalising force, including the deinstitutionalisation of sovereignty and the death penalty?<\/p>\n

Derrida\u2019s reflections on \u2018pardon\u2019 were the focus of his seminar in 1997-99, directly preceding his seminar on the death penalty. One question raised was whether forgiveness and pardon<\/span><\/strong> must be figured as sovereign acts, or can be ways of deconstituting established forms of sovereignty.<\/p>\n

Is there a way to conceptualise<\/strong> forgiveness and pardon<\/span> <\/strong>as forms of institutional life, perhaps as the driving force that undertakes the deinstitutionalisation of both the prison and the death penalty? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Perhaps the opposition to the death penalty has to be linked with an opposition<\/strong>
\nto forms of induced precarity<\/span><\/strong> both inside and outside the prison, in order to expose the
\nvarious different mechanisms for destroying life, and to find ways, however conflicted and ambivalent, of preserving lives that would otherwise be lost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 Following Benjamin\u2019s \u2018Critique of Violence\u2019, Derrida underscores the toxic intimacy between crime and its legal remedy. The law distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate forms of the death … Continue reading “Butler conclusion forgiveness pardon (3)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,73,115],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abject","category-derrida","category-precarity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13004"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13004\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13009,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13004\/revisions\/13009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}