© Mark Lewis Taylor

(The following short paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Comparative Literature, at a session on “Deconstructing Capital Punishment: Analyzing Derrida’s Death Penalty Seminars, vol. 1, University of Chicago Press, 2013). Photo above right: Derrida on the death penalty at Robert Cardozo Law School.

        David Long, two days before his execution date in Texas of December 8, 1999, attempted suicide on death row with an overdose of anti-psychotic drugs. Texas rushed him to intensive care, onto a ventilator, then took him off over a doctor’s protest to make a 25 minute plane-trip to his execution on time. In Paris of December 8, Derrida’s first session of the death penalty seminars had begun. Over the course of his seminars, 32 men and one woman in the U.S. would be executed. 92 men and women in the U.S., that year, had already been executed before the seminars began, an all-time, annual high since the death penalty resumed in 1976. There was a U.S. execution on the very day of each of the last four sessions of Derrida’s seminar of 1999/2000 – another one, the day after the 11^th session. Then, 58 additional men and women over the remainder of the year 2000.

I

            Why these “references” – designations of names and dates of those executed. I do so not simply to recall the timeliness of Derrida’s death penalty seminars in 1999/2000. Derrida and his audience were well aware that the U.S. killing apparatus was in high gear as he gave the lectures. I do so in resonance with the many references Derrida himself embeds in the seminars’ text – “referring,” as he does, to news about U.S. executions;  to histories, French and American, of death penalties practiced, debated, suspended, abolished, reinstated;  referring also, as he did, to the letters he received from death row inmates in the U.S., as from Thomas Miller-El and family, which occurred, he wrote, “because I modestly but clearly and publicly came forward, with others, with all those who throughout the world call for at least a review of the scandalously irregular trial that condemned to death Mumia Abu-Jamal seventeen years ago” (DP1, 76).

References to these executed ones, and also to this condemned figure, Abu-Jamal, puts part of philosopher Derrida’s biography into the picture, which Derrida indicated in interviews needs to be done for philosophers generally.[1] Also, the references help me find my own way into the picture, giving me a line into this literary text. Some of the executed names are familiar to me. But even more, I recall the sense that many were being executed by my government on a routine basis. The air to me felt red with death.

In the early 1990s, I was teaching Abu-Jamal’s essays; and then in 1995, when then PA Gov., Tom Ridge, signed a death warrant for Abu-Jamal, I organized educators in American colleges and universities to help in the movement to stop the execution scheduled for August 17, and to fight for his new trial. I still work in that movement. Abu-Jamal ended 29 years on death row in 2012, after courts confirmed his death sentence as unconstitutional, and is now serving a life sentence. He is now in his 33^rd year of confinement, today, the U.S.’s most well-known political prisoner with our movements still pressing for his release.

Derrida had “come forward,” as he writes, for Abu-Jamal with a statement on August 1, 1995 at a press conference in Paris by the International Parliament of Writers.[2] It was published in Le Monde on August 9. Then in Abu-Jamal’s native city, on August 10, our ad featuring U.S. scholars appeared in Philadelphia newspapers. There, 500 educators, representing nearly all Philadelphia schools and a majority of PA ones, included also such national names as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Achille Mbembe, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Angela Y. Davis, Toni Morrison, Howard Winant, Sonia Sanchez, Houston Baker, Manning Marable, Frances Fox Piven, Elaine Kim, John Edgar Wideman.

For me, working for Abu-Jamal was a way of being part of a network of an international movement, and to be accountable to its working against the sovereign killing state. It was a way to strike at the whole killing apparatus, what Derrida so well describes in his Ninth session, as the state engaged in “calculating and mastering the instant of death” with a whole “network of presuppositions, in which ‘capital punishment,’ the calculation of capital punishment, finds its place of inscription” (DP1, 239).

Why Mumia Abu-Jamal for Derrida? He is referenced five times in Derrida’s 1999/2000 seminar: first, because Derrida’s UNESCO statement for Abu-Jamal, which was later published as the Foreword to the French edition of Mumia’s book, Live from Death Row in 1996, went onto the recommended reading list for these seminars (DP1,46n20). Second, Abu-Jamal is referenced because Derrida offers his support for Abu-Jamal as reason for his receiving, still in 1999, so many letters from death row prisoners in the U.S. (as he did from Thomas Miller-El on Texas’s death row) (76-77). Third, more noteworthy still, I think, for understanding Derrida’s philosophical deconstruction of the DP, because Abu-Jamal was a political prisoner, “hounded” by the Fraternal Order of Police for his Black Panther militancy and thus who, though wrongfully convicted of a “common crime” (killing a police officer), sheds light on the fragility of the fragile distinction between “common” and “political” crime, especially when the State deploys the DP (90-01). Fourth, in Derrida’s important Sixth Session about “the telephone,” Abu-Jamal is evoked as an example of one tortured by the imminence of execution, awaiting the “telephone,” – subjected to a teleferic transcendence, to sovereign power. (138). Finally, fifth, in an interesting jump through time, Derrida references debates of death penalty abolition in Pennsylvania in 1787 after the publication of Beccaria’s abolitionist text, Of Crimes and Punishments, and then reminds his audience that this Pennsylvania is “the state where Mumia is today and has been for eighteen years on death row along with so many others in PA, which is today one of the most prominent “killing states” (212).

In these seminars, Derrida declares his own interest in the fight against the death penalty. He was engaged in affirming life, his life, the “my life” whose sense “originarily passes by way of the heart of the other.” His interest in fighting the death penalty is an interest in his own life: “I want to save my neck, to save the life I love, what I love to live, what I love living. . . ”. “My life pulse…, receives its life from the heart of the other” (DP1, 255). Thus, “I protest in the name of my heart when I fight . . . so that the heart of the other will continue to beat – in me before me, after me, or even without me.” (DP1, 257).

As for me, with my own heart, often literally skipping beats as executions went down and as Mumia’s execution always loomed, I was writing in 1999-2001 my book, The Executed God, attempting to reconstruct meanings of Jesus death, largely, as is clear, for a currently non-existent Christianity. In my book I did not deconstruct Christianity or the death penalty, so much as I simply set aside both the Hugo evangelical abolitionist Christianity, and that of any churches whose religions rationalized the death penalty. I was interested more in reconstructing a more human understanding of Jesus’ death as an imperial execution, of a man, not God. Let me come to that by following some of the lines into Derrida’s text opened up by the biographical reference(s) to Abu-Jamal.

II

                Derrida’s advocacy for Abu-Jamal seems to me eminently congruent with the way he deconstructed it in the conceptuality of his seminar. Abu-Jamal, writes Derrida in both his DP seminars and in his UNESCO statement was, he writes, “a courageous and independent journalist, a journalist of the people, and quickly dubbed ‘the voice of the voiceless.’ This voice has become intolerable; it is the this voice that one wants not only to silence, not even to have heard, not only to prevent from rising up but to prevent from causing other living voices to rise up, other living voices that might protest against the same oppression, the same racist repression.”[3]

Not for Derrida was an abolitionism that viewed the death penalty as only barbaric anomaly, on the wane. Quite to the contrary, it was the foundation of the Western State, of the the law. It was even an insidious network of presuppositions and phantasms in which was inscribed, any of our reflections on death itself (DP1, 237-9). Further, recall his words on the final page: “the death penalty will survive; it will have other lives in front of it, and other lives to sink its teeth into it.”(DP1,283) .
In response to the death penalty’s intractability, then, Derrida was in pursuit of precisely that which a political case like Abu-Jamal’s intensely motivates, a deconstruction of not just the death penalty, but that penalty as intrinsic to a state that kills, that assumes its mastery of the instant of death, or seeks to do so (DP1, 256-7). When Derrida quickly adds, though, that the state’s calculating machinery “only seems to do that” – i.e. to have this finitude-ending power – he points to a whole network of phantasms in which persons, enduring the States calculating limits, dream themselves to be at every point of the death dealing process (as judge, jury, executioners and their assistants, lethal practitioners and administrators, relatives, voyeuristic spectators, and so on). Derrida terms an “infinitization at the heart of finitude, an infinitization of survival….” He even sees this infinitization as what prompts our believing in God, a believing in the belief, God. And, he notes, “as long as there is “God,” belief in God, thus belief period, there will be some future for both the supporter of the death penalty and for his abolitionist opponent: both for the agent of the death penalty [the “mortalist”] and for the militant abolitionist” (DP1, 259). Derrida thus is seeking “another path” (DP1,   ), one that entails a radically non-Christian deconstruction” (245n6).

Here, though – I discern what I might call Derrida’s incomplete deconstruction of the Christian theologico-political, particularly as beliefs in Jesus’ death as redemptive, somehow proffering forgiveness – a key theologeme of almost all Christianity, especially in the U.S. Or, is this more complete deconstruction yet to come in DT2? To be sure, Derrida nowhere affirms a belief in the salvific agency of “the Passion of the Son of God.” But he does find the Christian legacy of Jesus’ redemptive death, to be “an example of the gift or forgiveness of love, of passion and of grace in general, which must put an end to the death penalty, thus put an end to the church, at least to that church which has supported it and has not yet asked forgiveness for that fact…”. For Derrida, “the Son of God is but an example, or else a copy [un exemplaire] for us . . . Love itself has need of it, of this granted grace in order to save itself.” (DP1, 283).

What I am left asking about, is the power of this remainder, this notion of “grace granted,” which Derrida sees exemplified by/copied by “the Passion of the Son of God?” I suspect this “example” or “copy for us,” could be jettisoned, subordinated to his own uncovering of passion, love, pardon and grace, all of which he speaks of across his work and – am I right? – often without the trope of the “Son of God” passion? There is almost no way of holding together “grace granted” and the trope “Son of God,” without presupposing a God who wills Jesus to torture death on the cross. In his Sixth Session, Derrida had used Nietzsche’s critique of this theologeme as Christianity’s cruel “stroke of genius.” Hugo’s evangelical abolitionism is better than the church that keeps and rationalizes the death penalty, but Derrida writes he is seeks “another path” (262), wherein no Christianity can perpetuate the “double rooting” of the death penalty and abolitionism, and so binding them to one another as two dynamic inventions continually reinventing one another. It would be another path wherein there is no God, or belief in God, or religion as the analgesic drug “to make death pass, to appease, distract . .  attenuate, distract from the pain of death . . .” (DP1, 276).  But is he, in fact, on another path, when retaining, as he does, “the Son of God” as “example?” What other path might he have taken.

III

In answer, we do well to think back to turns taken, and not taken, by Derrida in the First session(s) that deal begin the “interminable analysis” demanded of us by the theologico-juridico-political (DP1, 23). The “essence of sovereignty” is in the hyphen of the theologico-political (DP1, 22-3). The theologico-political is an apparatus in which the death penalty is inscribed. “There is theological-political wherever there is death penalty” (DP1, 23). (Several passages in Abu-Jamal’s corpus, address also the theologico-political.[4])

One of Derrida’s key turns is in his reflections on Jean Genet’s striking analogies between executed men and Christ. He meditates creatively on the white bandages swaddling the face of Weidman condemned to execution. He then relates those bandages, viewed by him in photos during his youth in Algeria, to the bandages at the tomb recounted in the Gospel of John (Jean-John) – unwound, untied, fallen away, part of a “theater of the bandages” figuring “the dead one…resuscitated, insurrectioned, insur-resuscitated, if I can say that” – and Derrida does! (DP1, 34). They figure the presence of the dead one, but his absence.

And then we come to his reference to “Mary’s tears.” Derrida writes: “I am going to read this well-known passage and draw your attention, among other things, to the moment in which Mary’s tears, upon seeing the bandages, bespeak the mourning that is not done, that cannot set to work, because what Mary weeps for then, when faced with the bandages, is not only the death of Jesus buried but the disappearance of his unburied body….his corpse has disappeared” (DP1,35). This generates a “worse sorrow,” one to which the relatives in Plato’s Laws were also subjected when their punished loved one was denied burial. Derrida then makes another reference to his time. He suggests that Mary with her tears “prefigures the misfortune and complaint and the anger of all the women, mothers, daughters, and sisters of the ‘disappeared’ of our time who, whether in the streets of Chile, Argentina, or in South Africa, also accuse and denounce those who did worse than torture and kill their men, because they also made them disappear, a disappearance that sometimes seems worse than death.” (DP1, 35-6)

It seems to me that precisely here, in the turns Derrida takes in meditating on the bandages of John’s Gospel, that he starts down truly “another path” – without God, the belief in God, without vestiges of the pardoning act of the Son of god on the cross, but with power for fighting the death penalty. Yet still, some of his interpretive turns then foreclose some insightful implications that lie in his suggestions. I want to end by briefly noting these.

IV

           I would point down this path by making three gestures (I do so ready to be told that perhaps somewhere Derrida has already wandered down such a path!) But here are my three gestures. Each deploys a historical imagination. I’m not posing some harder historical data over and against Derrida’s handling of the literary Gospels. There is no such hard history, but there is historical research with both more or less informed inferential judgments, about the context of Jesus’ death and burial that shape alternative thinking for deconstructing the way the death of Jesus is often used in the Christian “theologeme”[5] of the U.S. theologico-political.

So, consider my first gesture. I point to Derrida’s assumption that the body of Jesus made it to burial. This is an assumption Derrida makes with John and all the gospels, written decades after the date usually set as that of Jesus of Nazareth’s death. The politics and practice of crucifixion would have made difficult the arrival of Jesus’ body to any tomb. This is because crucifixion was a political crime against the theo-political sovereignty of the Roman state. Denial of burial, exposure to the birds and dogs of prey, was usually intrinsic to the punishment. Historians and archaeologists have few remains at all from the thousands crucified in Jesus or proximate periods.[6] This would make all the more resonant Derrida’s taking of Mary’s tears as prefigurative of the tortured, slain, disposed of bodies of “the disappeared.” It would mean there was something about Jesus’ life – perhaps that “other political message” that Derrida attributes to Jesus, Socrates, Joan of Arc and al-Hallaj- which was problematic to the political sovereignty of the Roman state. On this view, Jesus went the way of all the tortured – i.e. screaming and also probably resistant – surely, not mounting the cross out of an intentional divine will as the God-Man, from there to effect, or even exemplify, pardon for sins. By assuming with John that Jesus’ body made it to the tomb, he glosses the body that disappeared because it was physically desecrated and left for destruction. I suspect that the spectrality of that victim/body would have been better rendered with the hauntology of his Specters of Marx, than by these meditations on white bandages in a tomb.

A second gesture: I note that Derrida reads so within the literary parameters of John’s gospel text that he forecloses a  reading of “Mary’s tears,” that would signal the fuller role of women in historical funerary practices, caring for dead bodies and commemorating their lives. Mary’s tears “bespeak the mourning that is not done,” writes Derrida; indeed, but also they bespeak the “not done” of mourning funerary rituals that were under women’s purview and agency: holding, caring for, washing and commemorating, constituting the memory of this special dead one. Religious studies scholar, Kathleen Corley of the U of Wisconsin,[7] interested in no supranatural readings of a resurrection for Jesus, documents how women, contrary to the silence about this in patriarchal canonical texts, in their mourning of Jesus’ death, sang songs of mourning, narrated stories of Jesus (“the poetic” of song and story), and so set in place the major motifs in the oral traditions of Jesus’ life used by later redacted gospels.[8] A later transcendentalizing Christianity erases this role of women, or reduces it to largely quiescent weeping, erasing women’s funerary ritual presence and action. Historical references, here, might push Derrida’s foregrounding of Mary’s tears, and uncover a space of meaning where women mourning a politically executed body is precisely what reconstitutes presence of the absent one, in collectively mobilized memory. Here, any salvation, indemnification, any unscathedness – to cite familiar terms in Derrida for religious experience – is linked not to a transaction of pardon and forgiveness worked by or exemplified on the cross. Instead, the human passion for militating and cool headed fighting against political sovereignty and its state killing, which includes the death penalty, begins with women and their communities funerary practices, a critical mourning, that might become resistance. And so my third gesture.

Third, I highlight a zone wherein women’s role in funerary mourning intersects with political agency. Here I  move, again, along Derrida’s reference to the mothers and families of the disappeared. My point here is that these people of our present, prefigured by “Mary’s tears,” don’t just weep, they work. They do political work. Mourning is a work, and generates further work. It is always undone and being done, especially if one thinks about the work of women against the feminicides in current Ciudad Juárez, Mexico,[9] or among the women leading and families and citizens of North and all of Latin America in performance of resistant mourning at the walls of U.S. Ft. Benning GA, every November.[10]

Such women and mothers (with their families), work with, and in some cases become, forensic anthropologists, to better seek bodily remains, tracing in them the hidden but brutal way the death penalty has come to them. Mourning, here, can involve gathering bones, torn clothing, a single shoe – for re-membrance, collective organizing and fight back.[11] Having known and interviewed such women and their families in Guatemala, Mexico and Peru of the 1980s and 1990s, I know they display precisely what Derrida values for fighting the death penalty on his final page: “courage and composure” (le sang-froid), “being militant…organizing with cool heads (de sang-froid) . . . and “in the price-less interest of life” (283). This politics is continually enacting a politics of wounded bodies, a somatic performance that galvanizes memory and action that fights back, relying on the ways hearts beat in intersubjective communal action.

So, this other path I have looked down, to which I have gestured, is one where remembrance of the historically crucified Jesus, thousands crucified in his time, peoples “crucified” by sovereign power today, is carried by and constituted by the passion(s) of rage and lamentation, the creative care, and political organizing of those living on “in the wake” of their special dead. I see no need for an agony of “the Son of God,” even only as “example” (DP1, 283). Crucified peoples on the move keep alive in us, for us, the originary heart-beat of the other in us, even of the dead in us (DP1, 254-5). Down this path I don’t think we find any of the two or more Christianities rightly deconstructed by Derrida. We might not find any Christianity at all. We do find communities – human and perhaps animal – suffering the death penalty in its many forms and afterlives, communities working without God and without the cruelty of Christianity’s “stroke of genius,” – but fighting back to constitute complex communities of greater genius and power for resisting sovereignties of state killing.

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