Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light —Dylan Thomas, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’
Measure me while I live—after, it will be too late —Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading
Angels and Demons
When Derrida heard his angel speak, he heard only the voice of the demonic. When the angel prophesised the idea of a deconstruction of death, a doing away with death, these were the whispers of a demonic Other. Against the ethical death epitomised by self-sacrifice, this Other who forcefully strips our death and dies in-stead does away with any such notions of responsibility, irreplaceability, or ethics and its individuation. It puts under erasure the very category of subjectivity itself. The face of the Other who dies in-stead expresses not the command “Thou shalt not kill” but rather “Thou shalt not die”.
In light of this radical rephrasing of the ethical command, Levinas’s thought shall here be brought in to better understand what lies beyond the confines of the Jemeinigkeit of Heideggerian ontology. While Levinas never directly discusses the death sentence, it is nonetheless through his thought that the death penalty, as understood both philosophically and literarily, will here be further revealed as that which questions the very being of human beings. This does not mean, however, that one needs necessarily arrive at the same conclusions as Levinas; indeed, the question of the death penalty and its workings refigures some of the basic tenets of Levinasian thought, whereby the modality of the human is understood otherwise on the basis of relational death.
The Third arrives unexpectedly. Carton entered Darnay’s cell and ‘stood before him face to face, quiet, intent upon him’ (TC, 363). The face-to-face, for Levinas, is beyond ontology: it is the realm of the ethical. Returning once more to the angel, this time not a demon in disguise, Richard Cohen reminds us that Levinas takes the concept of the face-to-face ‘from Genesis 32:31, where, after having fought an angel all night, it is written: “And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved”’.1 The face is,
for Levinas, the Other whom Narcissistic ontology firmly places in the stratum of the ontic. While Heidegger stresses that Mitsein is an essential part of the being-there of Dasein, Levinas recognises that Heidegger’s conception of alterity—following René Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Husserl—is ultimately self-contained, merely existentiell, whereby alterity simply becomes the das Man and its Saying merely distracting chatter [das Gerede].2 Authenticity is thus, for Heidegger, to be found solely in the understanding of being through the ‘substantive and substantial identity of the I’, and finding it in the anxiety of being-toward-death has neither
a need for a relation to the other nor sees in the other’s death any more than a corpse, a thing.3
Levinas’s radical contribution to this discussion comes in defining the other as ‘[t]he there of
being-there’, shifting gravity away from the totality of Narcissistic being.4 The face of the
Other demands from us that we prioritise its life and needs over ours, calling for justice, piercing through the autonomy of the self and, in so doing, individualising the irreplaceable self who beholds, from below, the face of alterity. Its primary command, Levinas says, is “thou shalt not kill”.5 This face-to-face encounter and the subsequent ethical demands made reveal
the self’s asymmetrical relation to the other—one of acknowledgement and not recognition, as
1 Cohen, p. 250. It is to be noted here that the “face” is first phenomenological, and it is only later that the face
of the Other is shown to bear the trace of God.
2 ‘Western philosophy has most often been an ontology: a reduction of the other to the same’. Levinas, Totality
and Infinity, p. 43.
3 Levinas, ‘Dying For…’, p. 213. 4 Ibid., p. 184.
5 See Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. by Richard A. Cohen
a ‘relation without relation’ which is the foundation of Levinasian philosophy—as both conceiving the self as inseparable from the there-ness of Dasein as well as going beyond ontology in its account of ethics.6 Finally, this intersubjective “relation” with non-present alterity and the consequent demand for justice are what, as Cohen pithily sums up, ‘inform the whole of social life and constitute the very humanity of the human’.7 It is not my mortality that makes me human, contra Heidegger—it is the other’s. ‘My solitude’, as Levinas states, ‘is thus not confirmed by death but broken by it’.8
The figure of the Other as read here, as one who interrupts the death penalty from within and dies in-stead, may to a certain extent be read in accordance with Levinas’s broader understandings of alterity. The Third can only be acknowledged, and its time is indeed dia- chronic: the time of the other, writes Levinas, is that which ‘does not gather into re-
presentation’ (as opposed to ‘synchrony as being in its egological gathering’).9 As stated in the previous chapter, this is analogous (or perhaps deeper than that) to the Carmagnole of the Revolution, where the Third emerges as a figure that undoes the temporal certainty of the death penalty from within, rendering the future completely and creatively novel once more, stygian, or what Levinas calls ‘pure future’.10 If, as Heidegger writes, ‘[d]ying is something that every
6 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 80.
7 Richard A. Cohen, ‘Foreword’, in Levinas, Otherwise Than Being,pp. xi-xvi (p. xi). For more on the concept
of the face in Levinas, seeespecially: EE, pp. 97-100; Totality and Infinity, pp. 79-81, 187-247; Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Diachrony and Representation’, in Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, and additional essays, trans. by Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2011), pp. 97-120 (pp. 105-08); and Ethics and Infinity, pp. 85-92.For further commentary, see, for instance:Davis, pp. 45, 131-36, and Cohen, pp. 236-54.
8 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Time and the Other’, (p. 74). This is of course in direct opposition to the melding of
solitude and finitude in Heidegger’s Fundamental Concepts.
9 ‘Diachrony and Representation’, (pp. 112, 99). Emphasis added. In full, diachrony is ‘[t]he signification of a[n
immemorial] past that has not been my present […], and the signification of a [pure] future that commands me in mortality or in the face of the Other’ (p. 118). On this, despite some notable differences, Levinas works with Henri Bergson’s notion of duration. See, for instance, Cohen, pp. 44-56, and Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death, and Time, ed. by Jacques Rolland, trans. by Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 50-56.
Dasein itself must take upon itself at the time’, there is not always only an(-)other self, but also
an(-)other time (BT, 284).11
However, the literary works discussed here point to a different understanding of both “my death” and that of the other, and with this sociality, justice, and the time of death and life in general. To briefly introduce the argument expounded below, the relational death which includes within it the Third dying in-stead deeply challenges Levinas’s account of death as one always necessarily in the future and one always mine. Levinas does briefly question this latter characterisation of death, the “mine every time”, but ultimately answers in the affirmative, seeing in death a necessary part of the freedom that ‘is not found in autonomy but responsibility, responsibility in the face of the other person’.12 He writes:
But the death thus announced as other, as the alienation of my existence, is it still my
death? If it opens a way out of solitude, does it not simply come to crush this solitude, to crush subjectivity itself? […] The problem does not consist in rescuing an eternity from the jaws of death, but in allowing it to be welcomed, keeping for the ego—in the midst of an existence where an event happens to it—the freedom acquired by hypostasis.13
This freedom is at core social, responsible, and moral—a ‘difficult freedom’ found not in the subject, as Sartre would for instance claim (the “for-itself”), but in the other.14 On the other
hand, as we have seen in the previous chapters, at the core of the very notion of human society
11 Emphasis added.
12 Cohen, p. 28. Here, then, emerges one of the principal differences between Levinasian and Blanchovian
thought.
13 ‘Time and the Other’, (pp. 77-78).
14 This is a concept that Levinas grapples with throughout his entire oeuvre, and one of the strongest links
Levinas makes bridging alterity and ethics. See especially Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. by Seán Hand (Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 1990). This is often in opposition to Sartre’s concept of freedom, and the descriptor he uses is telling: ‘Man is condemned to be free’. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism (London: Methuen, 1960), p. 34. Emphasis added.
itself one finds only the death penalty, and, with this, relational death. Death is not only no longer mine, but also no longer able to “happen”, no longer an event à-venir in the avenir. In this relational death made now and past, it is not life which is preserved, as Jacob proclaims in Genesis, but death, and the freedom for subjectivity to avoid being condemned or “crushed”, in Levinas’s words, is brought starkly into question.
On this, as we shall see, the figures of the angel and the demon, so often bound to an afterlife strictly demarcated by proper death, simultaneously recede from and manifest in our living of the relational death.
The Unbecoming Subject
After death begins decomposition. The corpse is certainly unbecoming, for most a visceral affront to all vital senses. For some, however, it is beautiful, as Lacan says of Antigone, or has a natural aesthetic, as explored in Jim Crace’s Being Dead, or is even ‘exquisite’, as Maria
Torok calls the corpse in what are in this context seemingly but not entirely disparate terms.15 Beautiful or not, does the one who lives on also decompose? Of course, without proper death, there can be no proper decomposition (except in the cases of certain illnesses), but living death as the unexperienced experience can perhaps be understood as an existential, ontological, and even ethical decomposition, a rotting away or shedding of what life and being are, of what makes being be.
This is to a certain extent touched on by Malabou when she speaks of the disease and derangement that would grip the ego were habit not capable of leading to the notion of Self—
15 See Maria Torok, ‘The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse’, in Nicolas Abraham and
Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, Vol. I, ed. and trans. by Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 107-24.
a becoming subject—and indeed habit is stripped in the death penalty. What shall be made clear in this section is that the “unbecoming subject”, whatever that is, is first and foremost not a process leading from state a to b, but a permanent condition of the human—or, more precisely, a constant process with no true beginning or end. “Unbecoming”, this adjective-cum- infinitive, may be understood similarly, not only grammatically but also conceptually, to how Derrida speaks of the crypt as ‘[t]o crypt’.16
Indeed, the condemned man is a dead man walking, a ‘living corpse’ as previously discussed in particular through Mbembe and Kojève who use this same term. Though both helped elucidate the complex matrices on which the death penalty operates, neither thinker refers to the penalty specifically nor thinks of the primary “activity” of the corpse—that is, decomposition. What, then, is the unbecoming corpse, this thing that every human supposedly is? How is the one not condemned to death, such as ourselves, also to be understood as the corpse living on, living the relational death, living the death one has already died?
Some answers may be found through Sartre’s ‘The Wall’, a short story set during the Spanish civil war where the protagonist Pablo Ibbieta, along with two other men (Juan Mirbal and Tom Steinbock) are condemned to death by firing squad by a Falangist tribunal.17 After their
sentence, the three cellmates spend their last night accompanied by a Belgian doctor. As in other works examined in this study, the ‘three bloodless shadows’ have gone through the instant of death, the unexperienced experience, becoming the living corpses of those condemned (TW, 62). As night turns to the dawn of their execution, Pablo thinks of their state: ‘grey and sweating: we were alike and worse than mirrors of each other’, with ‘bodies dying in agony while yet alive’. Tom, the more vocal of his cellmates and who ‘wore death on his face’,
16 The verb denotes the act of encryption and decryption which ‘one can never do alone’. Derrida, ‘Foreword:
Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, p. xxxvi.
doubles (in death) both the thoughts that run through Pablo’s mind and the expression: ‘now we looked as much alike as twin brothers, simply because we were going to die together’. He tells Pablo: ‘I can feel the wounds already; I’ve had pains in my head and in my neck for the past hour. Not real pains. Worse. […] I see my corpse; that’s not hard but I’m the one who sees it, with my eyes’ (TW, 60-61).18
Together, they watch the doctor—‘the Belgian, the living’—who watches them with ‘false solicitude’(TW, 60, 62):
All three of us watched him because he was alive. He had the motions of a living human being, the cares of a living human being; he shivered in the cellar the way the living are supposed to shiver; he had an obedient, well-fed body. The rest of us hardly felt ours— not in the same way anyhow (TW, 62).
The three are living corpses, no longer human beings; they are decomposing, grey, with strange, detaching and unbecoming bodies. But does not their distance from the Belgian doctor—an uncrossable distance between life and death, ironically personified by a man of medicine just like Hippocrates—only reinforce the idea that the state of the living corpse is one limited only to the condemned man trapped in the night between the experience of death and proper death, ‘between what is going to arrive and what has already arrived’?
The narrative also points to just the opposite being true. Aside from the shared mortality on the faces of Pablo and his cellmates—a dying-with (Mitsterben) signified by the doubled Hippocratic face—there is also the death of Ramon Gris, the man Pablo is accused of having hidden in his house for a short time. The militia offer Pablo a deal after having killed his two cellmates: if he tells them where Gris was hiding, he could have his life back. Knowing fully
18 And yet Derrida, once more in Heidegger’s camp despite his continual troubling of Heideggarian boundaries
of death, says: ‘it is certain that we are “not capable” of our own corpse, we will never see it and feel it’ (BSII, 161).
that Gris was hiding out with his cousins, Pablo plays to the absurdity of the situation, wanting to laugh but keeping a straight face, and feeds them the lie that Gris ‘is hidden in the cemetery. In a vault or in the gravediggers’ shack’ (TW, 72). After a period of time, an officer informs him that he is being transferred to a courtyard to be with other prisoners; confused as to why he has not been executed, he asks around only to find out that the officers had found Gris exactly where he had described, and killed him.
The deal made between Pablo and the officers, ‘his life against yours’, is not an exchange of life—it is an exchange of death. ‘You can have yours if you tell us where he is’, an officer tells him; except, clearly, one does not survive the death penalty, and one cannot regain life or be fully resurrected (TW, 70). Ibbieta is condemned to live on, outside the matrices of the penalty, and at this knowledge he ‘laughed so hard [he] cried’ (TW, 74). This is not to say that he was not previously aware that this would be the case had he somehow managed to survive another way or if he were pardoned. He was to remain a living corpse:
In the state I was in, if someone had come and told me I could go home quietly, that they would leave me my life whole, it would have left me cold: several hours or several years of waiting is all the same when you have lost the illusion of being eternal. I clung to nothing, in a way I was calm. But it was a horrible calm—because of my body; my body, I saw with its eyes, I heard with its ears; but it was no longer me; it sweated and trembled by itself and I didn’t recognise it any more. I had to touch it and look at it to find out what was happening, as if it were the body of someone else (TW, 66).
Already one can see the power of the death penalty, the ability of the sovereign’s droit de glaive
to extend beyond cells and sentences, killing those on the outside of the decreed or “lawful” condemnation. Pablo can imagine what living on is like, as a living corpse; moreover, this indeed happens to him. Just like Blanchot’s protagonist, Darnay, and Chavel, Ibbieta has been
outstripped of his death, something he assuredly did not want (‘I would rather die than give up Gris’, he resolves), and his death has been exchanged by Gris, who dies in-stead (TW, 71). There is no voluntary or ethical sacrifice at play here; Gris has served as the ‘lightning rod’ just like the three sons of farmers or the commoner substitutes of the ancient king. What is here most revealing of the foundational nature of the death penalty, therefore, and what now needs close discussion, is not Pablo’s living on but Gris’s very implication and death.
What Derrida (with Kant) stresses in the two volumes of The Death Penalty must not be forgotten. Being ‘at the origin of the social contract or the contract of the nation-state, at the