Reading Derrida with magisme

[magisme]

I don't have anyone to talk to about this stuff. I haven't since grad school, which perhaps says as much about the material as it does about anything else. Anyway, the point is that I've gotten away from reading what interests me most recently, because, for me, philosophy is a social activity, at least somewhat, and I was having a hard time coming away from some of the work I was reading when I didn't have someone on hand who was interested in bouncing ideas around.

So I'm gonna try this. It'll probably fail. I'll probably give up on it sooner rather than later. But maybe not. Who knows? I'd just ask that we try to keep the discussion about the text and things related to the text as much as possible. I don't want to Nazi the fuck out of the thread - tangents are often fruitful and fun - but if you have no interest in this, or if your sole purpose is to make snide comments about philosophy and make the thread a debate about why any of it even matters, please just don't. You know I love you, Dazey, and I ain't mad at some jokes, but please don't let it spiral out of control.

Whatever. What'll happen will happen. Let's read.

Our text is the first half (the second half is yet unpublished, in English at least) of a two year seminar Derrida gave on the death penalty beginning in 1999. Derrida had always been accused, erroneously, of eschewing political issues, and toward the end of his life - he died in 2003 - his work became much more explicitly political, which is not to say that he took explicit political positions - he almost never did - but that he focused his philosophical energy, and his deconstructive method which he would always deny was a method, squarely on explicitly political and contemporary issues.

Take your time. Derrida read his lectures very slowly. There's as much poetry in his work as there is philosophy. I'll be reading this particular text for the first time myself as well. Welcome.

I don't know how copyright laws work. I try to disregard them entirely. I hope this is OK.

....

The Death Penalty: Volume 1

First Session: December 8, 1999

What do you respond to someone who might come to you, at dawn, and say: “You know, the death penalty is what is proper to man”?

(Long silence)

As for me, I would first be tempted to answer him, too quickly: yes, you are right. Unless it is what is proper to God—or unless that comes down to the same thing. Then, resisting the temptation by virtue of another temptation—or in virtue of a counter-temptation—I would be tempted, upon reflection, not to respond too quickly and to let him wait—for many days and many nights. Until dawn.

(Long silence)

It is dawn, now, we are at dawn. In the first light of dawn. In the whiteness of dawn (alba). Before beginning, let us begin. We would begin.

We would begin by pretending to begin before the beginning.

As if, already, we wanted to delay the end, because this year, with the death penalty, it is indeed of the end that we are going to speak. It is indeed of an end, but of an end decided, by a verdict, of an end decreed by a judicial decree [arrêtée par un arrêt de justice], it is of a decided end that decidedly we are going to talk endlessly, but of an end decided by the other, which is not necessarily, a priori, the case of every end and every death, assuming at least, [24] as concerns the decision this time, as concerns the essence of the decision, that it is ever decided otherwise than by the other. And assuming that the decision of which we are getting ready to speak, the death penalty, is not the very archetype of decision. Assuming, then, that anyone ever makes a decision that is his or hers, for himself or herself, his or her own proper decision. I have often expressed my doubts on this subject. The death penalty, as the sovereign decision of a power, reminds us perhaps, before anything else, that a sovereign decision is always the other’s. Come from the other.

So we would pretend to begin not after the end, after the end of the death penalty, which is abolished today in only a limited number of nation-states in the world, a growing number but still limited (ten years ago, it was a minority—fifty-eight; today it is a small majority), but to begin before the beginning, on the eve of the beginning, at dawn, in the early morning, as if I wanted to begin in a somewhat pathos-laden fashion (but who would dare conduct without pathos a seminar on the death penalty?) [as if I would prefer to begin, in a deliberately pathos-laden fashion] by leading you or keeping you with me, before beginning, at dawn, in this early morning of prisons, of all the places of detention in the world where those condemned to death are waiting for someone to come either to announce to them a sovereign pardon (that pardon [grâce] we often spoke of last year around the subject of forgiveness) or else to lead them away, a priest almost always being there (and I insist on this because today I will be speaking above all of political theology and of the religion of the death penalty, of the religion always present at the death penalty, of the death penalty as religion) [or else to lead them away, then,] toward one of those very numerous apparatuses for legally putting to death that men have ingeniously invented, throughout the history of humanity as history of techniques, techniques for policing and making war, military techniques but also medical, surgical, anesthesial techniques for administering so-called capital punishment. Along with the cruelty of which you are aware, and a cruelty, always the same, which you nevertheless know can range from the greatest brutality of slaughter to the most perverse refinement, from the most bloody or burning torture to [25] the most denied, the most concealed, the most invisible, the most sublimely mechanized torture, invisibility and denial being never, and in no case, anything other than a piece of theatrical, spectacular, or even voyeuristic machinery. By definition, in essence, by vocation, there will never have been any invisibility for a legal putting to death, for an application of the death penalty; there has never been, on principle, a secret or invisible execution for this verdict. The spectacle and the spectator are required. The state, the polis, the whole of politics, the co-citizenry—itself or mediated through representation—must attend and attest, it must testify publicly that death was dealt or inflicted, it must see die the condemned one.

The state must and wants to see die the condemned one.

Excerpt From: Jacques Derrida. “The Death Penalty, Volume I (The Seminars of Jacques Derrida).” iBooks. https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=687FCDFB408AE335CC8C15CE3A431065

[magisme]

....

And moreover it is at that moment, in the instant at which the people having become the state or the nation-state sees die the condemned one that it best sees itself. It best sees itself, that is, it acknowledges and becomes aware of its absolute sovereignty and that it sees itself in the sense in French where “il se voit” can mean “it lets itself be seen” or “it gives itself to be seen.”1 Never is the state or the people or the community or the nation in its statist figure, never is the sovereignty of the state more visible in the gathering that founds it than when it makes itself into the seer and the voyeur [voyante et voyeuse] of the execution of an irrevocable and unpardoned verdict, of an execution. For this act of witnessing—the state as witness of the execution and witness of itself, of its own sovereignty, of its own almightiness—this act of witnessing must be visual: an eye witness. It thus never happens without a stage and lighting, that of the natural light of day or artificial lighting. In the course of history, the light of fire might have been added to it. Not always or only that of gunfire, of the condemned shot by a firing squad or by a single bullet to the base of the skull, but also sometimes the fire of the stake.

We have not yet begun, nothing has yet begun. We are in the early morning. It is dawn, the dawning of one knows not what, life or death, pardon or execution, the abolition or perpetuation of the death penalty, also the [26] perpetration of the death penalty. Whatever we may think or say during this seminar, we have to think, we will have to think ceaselessly, taking ourselves there by way of the heart and the imagination, by the body as well, of the early morning of what is called an execution. At the dawn of the last day.

It is dawn, then. Early light, earliest light. Before the end, before even beginning, before the three blows are struck,2 the actors and the places are ready, they are waiting for us in order to begin.

Excerpt From: Jacques Derrida. “The Death Penalty, Volume I (The Seminars of Jacques Derrida).” iBooks. https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=687FCDFB408AE335CC8C15CE3A431065

[Facekicker]

By definition, in essence, by vocation, there will never have been any invisibility for a legal putting to death, for an application of the death penalty; there has never been, on principle, a secret or invisible execution for this verdict. The spectacle and the spectator are required. The state, the polis, the whole of politics, the co-citizenry—itself or mediated through representation—must attend and attest, it must testify publicly that death was dealt or inflicted, it must see die the condemned one.

The state must and wants to see die the condemned one.

And moreover it is at that moment, in the instant at which the people having become the state or the nation-state sees die the condemned one that it best sees itself. It best sees itself, that is, it acknowledges and becomes aware of its absolute sovereignty and that it sees itself in the sense in French where “il se voit” can mean “it lets itself be seen” or “it gives itself to be seen.”1 Never is the state or the people or the community or the nation in its statist figure, never is the sovereignty of the state more visible in the gathering that founds it than when it makes itself into the seer and the voyeur [voyante et voyeuse] of the execution of an irrevocable and unpardoned verdict, of an execution. For this act of witnessing—the state as witness of the execution and witness of itself, of its own sovereignty, of its own almightiness—this act of witnessing must be visual: an eye witness. It thus never happens without a stage and lighting, that of the natural light of day or artificial lighting. In the course of history, the light of fire might have been added to it. Not always or only that of gunfire, of the condemned shot by a firing squad or by a single bullet to the base of the skull, but also sometimes the fire of the stake.

The Facekicker edit.

Seriously thats the "interesting" part. And I use that term loosely. The rest is him jabbering on like an eloquent windbag.

That's the problem with the French, everything is a fucking poem. Can't get to the fucking point.

And when he does, it's not even particularly interesting.

Edited January 31, 2015 by Facekicker

[Dazey]

Appreciate the shoutout and I can be a grownup for once here. Proceed.

[magisme]

I think every word is interesting, like edge of my seat shit.

Appreciate the shoutout and I can be a grownup for once here. Proceed.

<3

[Len Cnut]

it is of a decided end that decidedly we are going to talk endlessly, but of an end decided by the other

*snickers*

I'm gonna participate I swear, I'm just too buzzed to make sense of that at the moment but i will do!

[magisme]

You know, Derrida always gave the sense, clearly intentionally, that he chose his words very, very deliberately, so, much like with fiction, we're given license to ask questions of every last letter of the text, although this is a translation from the French. Derrida has much to say about translation. Maybe we'll get to that later.

Anyway, yeah, if you're looking for him to get to the point, it ain't gonna happen. That's not what he's after. So far he's just setting a stage, and he's clearly in no hurry, and he's asking precisely the question of execution. He'll put off the end as long as he can.

[Facekicker]

If you didn't get it from my post I fucking hate Derrida I'll be interested to read what you guys have to say though.

I'd have to agree with what Searle had to say about him

Searle wrote in The New York Review of Books that he was surprised by "the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial

[magisme]

Yeah, I know you hate Derrida. You mentioned it another time I brought him up, I think.

Searle translated: I don't understand Derrida and he doesn't write like I want him to, so I'm mad.

[Mysteron]

It is odd, my brain just refuses to read it. I cannot get to the end of the text. The repetition of some of the words makes it difficult.

Frank Barone would call it moon man talk

[magisme]

Quick list of some of the concepts at play so far:

beginning and end

dawn, the morning

justice

the other

death penalty (duh)

death

sovereignty

the decision

imprisonment/detention

the pardon

waiting

temptation

technique

cruelty

visibility

witnessing

representation

staging/theatricality

light

execution

the heart, the imagination and the body

[Facekicker]

Yeah, I know you hate Derrida. You mentioned it another time I brought him up, I think.

Searle translated: I don't understand Derrida and he doesn't write like I want him to, so I'm mad.

I have sympathy for him

I guess for me it boils down to the kind of writer/reader/person I am. Very logical and blunt.

When I read Derrida my brain just screams "Get to the fucking point!"

And when he does, for the most part, I'm underwhelmed. As in, could you not have just said that in one paragraph? He's like a nervous virgin who wants to ask out the pretty girl and just stumbles around like a jackass building up the conversation to some great level of expectation or more likely confusion and then when he comes out with it the other person says - "Oh right. Is that it?"

He's the Hugh Fucking Grant of Philosophy

[magisme]

Fire too, definitely fire. I'm sure the Holocaust will be in here somewhere.

Yeah, I know you hate Derrida. You mentioned it another time I brought him up, I think.

Searle translated: I don't understand Derrida and he doesn't write like I want him to, so I'm mad.

I have sympathy for him

I guess for me it boils down to the kind of writer/reader/person I am. Very logical and blunt.

When I read Derrida my brain just screams "Get to the fucking point!"

And when he does, for the most part, I'm underwhelmed. As in, could you not have just said that in one paragraph? He's like a nervous virgin who wants to ask out the pretty girl and just stumbles around like a jackass building up the conversation to some great level of expectation or more likely confusion and then when he comes out with it the other person says - "Oh right. Is that it?"

He's the Hugh Fucking Grant of Philosophy

He was actually quite the ladies man. He was a forceful and alpha personality. You would approve.

[Facekicker]

I'd be more of a Don Logan type myself

You see I might actually really agree with Derrida on what he has to say but my issue is with how he says it. Which is a shame really. I did a BA in English & Philosophy and studied all those lads but the French lads really rubbed me up the wrong way for some reason. Except Descartes, I like his stuff, Spinoza, Leibniz, Plato, Socrates, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Chomsky. Rationalists eh

Kant, Locke, Derrida, Foucault, Levi-Strauss and a few others wrecked my head though. And I know Kant is a rationalist but fuck him to be honest.

[magisme]

....

Just as, last year, we played without playing at the theater, we pretended to play at staging, as theatrically but also as nontheatrically as possible, [at staging] four men, statesmen or thinkers of the state, statesmen or churchmen, thinkers of the state or of the church or both (Hegel, Mandela, Tutu, Clinton: four Protestants of modern times—not one woman, no Catholic, no Orthodox, no Jew or Muslim),3 well, this year, before beginning, and because the question of the theater will have to keep our attention even more and otherwise than in the scene without scene or stage without stage of forgiveness (the history of the relations between the death penalty and spectacle, the mise en scène, the essential voyeurism that attaches to a putting to death that must be public because legal, this history of the theater of capital punishment would in itself deserve a whole seminar and it will interest us a lot, even if never enough), well, this year again I will begin, before beginning, by evoking, by convoking or resuscitating a few figures, great personalities, great characters4 who will accompany us incessantly—whether or not we name them or see them. Once again they will be four; this time there will be no Protestant among them; they, masculine and feminine, will [27] once again be four, but this time a woman will come to remind us of one of the sexual differences in this truth of the death penalty. (Recall the question that we were asking or quoting last year, from out of the South Africa of Antjie Krog, author of Country of My Skull, and of the women victims who testify or cannot testify before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: “Does truth have a gender?” or else, and it is the title of a chapter: “Truth Is a Woman.”)6

What will be, this year, who will be these masculine and/or feminine “characters”? Those condemned to death, to be sure, or those who accompany them, a chorus of great condemned ones from our history, from the history of the Graeco-Abrahamic West, condemned ones who have illustrated, or even founded, by means of the scene, by means of the visibility and the time, by means of the duration of their putting to death, [who have illustrated, then,] the properly theologico-political meaning of what is called the “death penalty.”

Each time the state, associated with a clerical or religious power in ways that must be examined, will have pronounced these verdicts and executed these great condemned ones that were then (there are four of them, once again), who were then (I will name them only one after the other when the time comes) first of all Socrates, of course, the first of the four. Socrates who, as you know—but we will come back to this—was reproached with having corrupted the youth by not believing in the gods of the city and by substituting for them new gods, as if his aim had been to found another religion and to think a new man. Reread the Apology and the Crito, you will see there that an essentially religious accusation is taken up by a state power, a power of the polis, a politics, a juridico-political authority, what one might call with terrible ambiguity a sovereign power as executive power. The [28] Apology says it explicitly (24b–c): the katēgoria, the accusation lodged against Socrates, is to have done the wrong, to have been guilty, to have committed the injustice (adikein) of corrupting the youth and of (or for) having ceased to honor (nomizein) the gods (theous) of the city or the gods honored by the city—and especially of having substituted for them not simply new gods, as the translations often say, but new demons (hetera de daimonia kaina); and daimonia are doubtless often gods, divinities, but also sometimes, as in Homer, inferior gods or revenants, the souls of the dead; and the text does indeed make the distinction between gods and demons: Socrates did not honor the gods (theous) of the city and he introduced new demons (hetera de daimonia kaina). Thus, in its content the accusation is religious, properly theological, exegetical, even. Socrates is accused of heresy or blasphemy, of sacrilege or heterodoxy: he is misled about the gods; he is misled, or he misleads others, especially the youth, on the subject of the gods; he was mistaken about the gods or he has caused contempt and misunderstanding [le mépris et la méprise] concerning the gods of the city. But this accusation, this charge, this katēgoria of an essentially religious nature is taken up, as always—and we will be interested consistently in this recurrent, always recurrent articulation—by a state power, as sovereign, a state power whose sovereignty is itself essentially phantasmatico-theological and, like all sovereignty, is marked by the right of life and death over the citizen, by the power of deciding, laying down the law, judging, and executing the order at the same time as the condemned one. Even in nation-states that have abolished the death penalty, an abolition of the death penalty that is in no way equivalent to the abolition of the right to kill, for example, in war, well, these several nation-states of democratic modernity that have abolished the death penalty keep a sovereign right over the life of citizens whom they can send to war to kill or be killed in a space that is radically foreign to the space of internal legality, of the civil law where the death penalty may be either maintained or abolished.

Excerpt From: Jacques Derrida. “The Death Penalty, Volume I (The Seminars of Jacques Derrida).” iBooks. https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=687FCDFB408AE335CC8C15CE3A431065

I'd be more of a Don Logan type myself

You see I might actually really agree with Derrida on what he has to say but my issue is with how he says it. Which is a shame really. I did a BA in English & Philosophy and studied all those lads but the French lads really rubbed me up the wrong way for some reason. Except Descartes, I like his stuff, Spinoza, Leibniz, Plato, Socrates, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Chomsky. Rationalists eh

Kant, Locke, Derrida, Foucault, Levi-Strauss and a few others wrecked my head though. And I know Kant is a rationalist but fuck him to be honest.

Of course you like Descartes. French philosophy since him has basically been a bunch of attempts to kill him, much like philosophy in general with Plato. I oversimplify, of course.

[Facekicker]

Can't kill a good thing Mag.

[magisme]

List of concepts/topics cont'd:

sexual difference/gender

the state

political theology....When Derrida talks about the theologico-political, he's talking about political theology, and he has German jurist Carl Schmitt in mind, for whom sovereignty and the decision were key concepts. "The sovereign is he who decides on the exception." So much in Derrida is referential, even if he doesn't make that clear. Full text of Schmitt:

https://idepolitik.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/schmitt-political-theology.pdf )

[Mysteron]

I love this whole Derrida thing. It is impact text. Brilliant.

The subject is a big bag of whatever, but I like how it is written.

[magisme]

I love this whole Derrida thing. It is impact text. Brilliant.

The subject is a big bag of whatever, but I like how it is written.

Thank you! Let's not listen to Facekicker. He's a doodoo-head. Don't worry about the subject if it's not your cup of tea. The subject was important to him, but it's also a vehicle for his thought, which, as we've already seen, goes well beyond the confines of capital punishment.

[magisme]

I'm beginning to feel like Derrida is, in a way, casting himself as executioner. He's going to call each of these four names when their time comes, and then he's going to show us their deaths.

[Facekicker]

We'll be dead by then Mag

[Mysteron]

I love this whole Derrida thing. It is impact text. Brilliant.

The subject is a big bag of whatever, but I like how it is written.

Thank you! Let's not listen to Facekicker. He's a doodoo-head. Don't worry about the subject if it's not your cup of tea. The subject was important to him, but it's also a vehicle for his thought, which, as we've already seen, goes well beyond the confines of capital punishment.

On a different level, your post will have an impact on my life, and for that I thank you.

I am a forever private individual, but you have helped me, quite bizarrely So there you be

[Facekicker]

I'm against the death penalty for what its worth.

Not because of any qualms about execution. I'd just rather the cunts suffer for longer.

Edited February 1, 2015 by Facekicker

[Dazey]

Can't kill a good Maggie

You cunts did your best in Brighton though didn't ya?

Edited February 1, 2015 by Dazey

[Mysteron]

I'm against the death penalty for what its worth.

I am, as well. Death is an easy way out

It is the beauty of how the text is written, that is what the thread is about. There is a poetry to it, it is amazing