On the Inviolability of Human Life

On the Inviolability of Human Life

Chapter:

(p.130) On the Inviolability of Human Life

Source:

Death and Other Penalties

Author(s):

Julia Kristeva

Publisher:

Fordham University Press

DOI:10.5422/fordham/9780823265299.003.0008

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter presents the author's reflections on the desire for a universal abolition of the death penalty. It asks: What motivates
the desire for abolition, and what possibilities for a meaningful life—and a meaningful death—does this desire support? The
desire for abolition affirms the singularity and inviolability of each and every human life. But what does this imply for the lives
that have been destroyed by murder, or for the trauma of survivors? And what role does the death drive play in both the desire
for abolition and the horror of murder? It considers the three main arguments advanced by abolitionists against the death
penalty: the inefficiency of vengeance and dissuasion, the fallibility of justice, and the suffering of elimination.

Keywords: death penalty abolition, vengeance, murder, justice

October 10, 2012: Tenth World Day for the Abolition of the Death Penalty. Mobilization, ignorance, hostility, incomprehension,
solemnity, and gravity suspend the time of global crisis, the time of hyperconnected acceleration and diverse threats of
destruction. And we are called to contemplate, invited to meditate and to question: what does a project for the universal
abolition of the death penalty mean?

I am neither a jurist nor a specialist on abolitionism. I’ve never been to an execution, nor has anyone close to me ever been a
victim of murder, sexual abuse, torture, or degrading violence. I won’t read you the medical reports detailing the tortures of the
guillotine, the ones recopied by Camus himself to communicate his nausea to us. Nor have I ever felt the romantic empathy
that carries Hugo away when he compares the suffering of exile to the suffering of a man condemned to die. I find that
experiences of suffering are incommensurable, more or less incommunicable, and the death drive that inhabits us threatens us
all … singularly.

I hear my analysands confide the suffering they’ve endured at the hands of executioners in Latin American prisons, or their
inconsolable suffering after their parents have been exterminated in concentration camps. I come (p.131) undone along with
them, and I will not venture to say that evil is without a why in the way a mystic affirms that the rose is without one. Because I
search for them, with them: Why? In order that meaning might be restored, because meaning is what brings us back to life.

Abolishing the death penalty: What wish, what project are we putting forth here? And what, then, is its meaning?

Abolishing the death penalty means that we are positing as the foundation of twenty-first-century humanism what Victor Hugo
was already calling “the inviolability of human life” more than 150 years ago in 1848.1
Since the beginning of time, men have feared death. They have given death, however, in order to better safeguard life, to
attempt to save the good by inflicting the supreme evil. For the first time in history, however, we realize that it’s not enough to
replace the old values with new ones, because the new ones will in their turn congeal and become potentially totalitarian dogma
and impasses.

And we realize that life is not a “value” like any other, nor even the value. What’s more, for the past two centuries, and particularly
today, life is not only a line of questioning: What is a life? Does it have a meaning? If so, what meaning? But from now on, life
is an exigency. We must preserve it and prevent its destruction—because the destruction of life is radical evil. While everything
seems to be falling apart, while wars, the threat of ecological disaster, and the mindless enthusiasm for virtual economies and
consumer societies permanently remind us of our fragility and our vanity, the inviolability of human life invites us to think about
the meaning of our existence: it is the bedrock of humanism.

What life are we talking about? The abolitionist responds: all life, regardless of what kind, to the point even of “taking
responsibility for the lives of those who horrify us” (lunatics, criminals …), as Robert Badinter proclaimed in his 1981 testimony
before the French Parliament in support of his proposed law to abolish the death penalty.2 Can contemporary humanity test
itself, and prove itself (s’éprouver, et se prouver), to the point of “taking responsibility for the lives of those who horrify us”?
Abolitionists, we say: Yes. But even if 141 out of 192 members of the United Nations have already abolished the death penalty,
60 percent of the human population lives in a country where it’s still applied since it’s still in force in four of the most populated
countries on the planet: China, India, the United States, and Indonesia.

Fortified by its plural heritage—Greek, Jewish, and Christian—Europe chose secularization, thereby bringing about an
emancipatory mutation unique in the world. But its history was also marked by its too-long procession (p.132) of horrors: wars,
exterminations, colonialism, totalitarianisms. This philosophy and this history impose a moral and political conviction on us
whereby no state, no power, no man can usurp another man’s rights or have the legal power to take his life. No matter whom
the man or woman we condemn, no justice should be a justice that kills.

Making a plea for the abolition of the death penalty in the name of the inviolability of human life does not, therefore, stem
from naivety or an irresponsible, blissful idealism. It is not a question of forgetting the victims and their loved ones’ suffering.
No! I do not believe in human perfection, or even in absolute perfectability through the grace of compassion or education. I’m
only betting on our capacity to understand human passions better and to accompany them to their limits, because experience
teaches us that it is impossible (unthinkable) to respond to a crime with a crime.

I repeat: a human’s greatest fear is to see his life taken, and this fear founds the social pact. The oldest jurisprudence treatises
we possess bear witness to this. Take the Hammurabi Babylonian Code (1792–1750 before our era), and yet again with Plato
and Aristotle’s Greek philosophy, but also with the Romans, and also the sacred texts of Christians and Jews. All societies have
advocated and practiced putting criminals to death in order to defend, protect, and dissuade.

Voices against execution have, however, been raised: contemporary abolitionists return to them and listen to them to support
their struggle. Thus, already, Ezekiel: “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and
live” (Ez. 33:11). But above all, Saint Paul: “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting? The sting of death is
sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, he gives us victory over sin and death” (through the Resurrection) (1
Corinthians 15:55–57). Or again, after them, Maimonides: “It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons
than to put a single innocent one to death.”3

Religion and politics rarely make pronouncements against the death penalty: Tibetan Buddhism forbade it in the seventh century,
and in 747 the first abolition was proclaimed in China. Moreover, Montesquieu points this out, praising these Chinese authors
according to whom “the more severe the punishments, the nearer, the revolution. This is the case because punishments increased
in severity to the extent that mores were lost.”4 Maybe we should remind the Chinese authorities. China abolished the death
penalty in 2011 for thirteen nonviolent crimes, but executions for corruption continue and multiply. As for Islam, there is
absolutely no question of challenging the death penalty.

(p.133) In France, the abolitionist movement began after the torture of Damiens, who had tried to assassinate Louis V. While
Diderot advocates the death penalty for its dissuasive power, Voltaire is one of the few to support the work of Cesare Beccaria
who, from 1764, asks: “By what right can men presume to slaughter their fellows?” 5 In the spirit of the Enlightenment and
libertarian humanism, abolitionism develops throughout the nineteenth century: I’m thinking of Clémenceau, Gambetta, and of
Jean Jaurès’s lucid words, proclaiming that the death penalty “is contrary to both the spirit of Christianity and the spirit of the
Republic.”6 Or, closer to us, Camus states that “one can only write about capital punishment in a low voice” because “this new
murder, far from making amends for the harm done to the social body, adds a new blot to the first one 7. … Capital judgment
upsets the only indispensable human solidarity, the solidarity against death.”8

Abolitionists advance three main arguments against the death penalty: the inefficiency of vengeance and dissuasion, the fallibility
of justice, and the suffering of elimination.

In the first place, nothing proves that the death penalty works in countering human destructiveness: there is no correlation
between maintaining the legality of the death penalty and the criminality curve. Furthermore, the perspective of death, far from
annihilating criminal passions, to the contrary, exalts them. He who sows terror and transcends it through his own death is not
seeking expiation. In reality, the stigmatization of his acts and the sacrifice itself have no other end but to inflame martyrs ready
to die in their turn. Far from being dissuasive, fear becomes temptation and henceforth nourishes a desire to inflict death by
inflicting death on oneself. The death penalty as lex talionis, “an eye for an eye,” thus turns out to be just as inefficient a
vengeance as it is a useless dissuasion.

The second argument brings us back to what Victor Hugo called the “scrawny brevity of human justice” 9: the judiciary lottery,
its fallibility. In the name of which institution do men and women allow themselves the right to pronounce and apply a mortal
condemnation?

The third argument is expressed in murmurs because it is addressed to the victims and those close to them. Some of them feel
that even if putting criminals to death doesn’t avenge their crimes or dissuade those who would follow in their footsteps, at
least it gets rid of their author. The death penalty as elimination would consequently attenuate the unbearable and appease.

But does the image of the criminal in his tomb really relieve the suffering of those who have lost a loved one, a victim of the
worst of atrocities? This suffering in search of alleviation is just as inexpressible and unshareable (p.134) as it is legitimate and
respectable: Who would dare ignore this? No one, and above all those men and women who, outraged by the death of innocent
victims, equally hope to defend and protect life in the name of its inviolability. Because they know that the notion of death as
ultimate and unique recourse is a lure.

When, in effect, will we stop making the tomb our savior? Let’s detach ourselves from the jouissance brought about by the
vengeful act. Victor Hugo’s elevated words already alerted us to this religion of death as salvation: “Do not open a tomb in the
middle of us with your own hands,” he writes in Guernsey. “You who know so little and can’t do anything about it, you are always
face to face with the infinite and the unknown! The infinite and the unknown: this is the tomb.” I understand: Don’t hope to find
“the unknown or the infinite”10 in the sacrifice of the condemned. And I add: there is no other unknown, no other infinity than
those of human passions—of which we never stop deepening our experience and establishing our knowledge [connaissance].

By abolishing the death penalty, we’re not screaming victory over death as Paul de Tarse would have it, calling for belief in the
Resurrection. We invite a better knowledge [connaître] and accompaniment of the passions and among these the most terrible:
the death drive.

Psychoanalysis discovers that Homo sapiens is both Homo religiosus and Homo economicus and is a Homo eroticus inhabited
not only by a life drive but also by a death drive. The death drive that Freud—as if he had a premonition about the Shoah—
explored at the end of his life, and that contemporary research continues to elucidate today.
The human being is a fundamentally binary being: digesting the good and expelling the bad, oscillating between inside and
outside, pleasure and reality, the forbidden and transgression, his ego and the other, body and mind/spirit. Language itself is
binary (made up of consonants and vowels, and other dual forms that so delighted structuralism). The child thus attains to the
difference between good and evil from the very moment he learns his mother tongue; the universe of meaning invites a
distinction between good and evil before refining its nuances, perceiving its polyphonies, its excesses, its transgressions, and
before creating works of art.

Our desires are revealed as more or less compatible with the desires of others. They draw us toward the other, up to the point
of love, but a love carrying an aggressiveness within: je t’aime, moi non plus, hatred and culpability: such is the alchemy of
words [le verbe]. It is precisely on these convergent and divergent libidinal interests, underpinned by our conceptions of good
and evil, that the most elevated values are constructed and (p.135) enter into concurrence or conflict. Desires and values dictate
religions and philosophies, as well as the ideologies living off them, killing each other or attempting to explain and understand
themselves.

Often, so-called “values” capture destructiveness, which then takes the form of a fascination with evil, an evil to be sought in
the other: henceforth, all that remains is to track down the scapegoat in order to exterminate him with no remorse, for the
benefit of the sovereign good, my own good, my religion. Such is the logic of a fundamentalism that wages a merciless war in
the name of an absolute ideal erected against the other. Whether individual or collective, this fundamentalism is nourished by
a total, blind faith that tolerates no questioning whatsoever. As I argued previously, condemning a fundamentalist to death
doesn’t eliminate fundamentalism; to the contrary, it makes its agent a martyr and exalts his logic—a logic with economic and
social roots but also a psychosexual nervous system running through the very structure of his passion, remaining untouchable
unless it’s deactivated from the inside.

Here, however, it is only a question of the superficial layers of radical evil. A pure death drive equally exists, dissociated from all
desire (one might say: uncomplicated by desire). This death drive sweeps aside the distinctions between good and evil, between
ego and other, and abolishes the meaning and dignity of self and other. The destructiveness I just pointed out cedes here to its
own undoing. These extreme states of the quasi-total detachment of the death drive touch the limits of Homo sapiens as a
speaking being capable of values (beginning with good and evil). The person who has fallen prey to this detachment expresses
himself in a language that is no longer anything but simple mechanics, an instrument of destruction with neither code nor
communication: without any why, without remorse, neither expiation nor redemption.

Such liminal states [états limites] find refuge not only in hospitals or on the analyst’s couch. They do not only plague serial
killers, nor do they only brutally explode within the chaos of adolescence destined to indifference and insensitivity in the face
of the foreigner [étranger] to be suppressed. The death drive’s liminal states also unfurl in sociopolitical crises and catastrophes.
Abject, these states can lead all the way to the cold, planned extermination of other human beings; this was the case with the
Shoah and other genocides.

I hear your question and share your indignation: So, abolitionists want to spare those criminals’ lives?

If I’ve taken my reflections all the way to the point of dehumanization, it is only to demonstrate better that the humanism
vindicated by partisans (p.136) of an abolition of the death penalty is a wager against horror. Even if an understanding of the
human passions renders us neither all-powerful nor capable of annihilating this genocidal pathology when an entire society
suffers from it, this knowledge does allow us to approach these liminal states and accompany them within a clinical context. But
after Ezekiel, Paul de Tarse, and Maimonides, after Beccaria, Voltaire, Hugo, Jaurès, Camus, Badinter, and so many others, it seems
that a better understanding of the spectre of human passions is the only way to uncover and confront the many faces of this
radical evil. When compassion and forgiveness abdicate because they no longer have any hold on evil, it nevertheless does
become possible to sound the depths of evil. How?

By relaying the emotional horror produced by a more precise diagnosis of the consequences of radical evil. Vigilance, objective
analysis, treatment, and education do nothing to efface criminals’ guilt, but they do mobilize us from the very first symptoms
of evil;

by replacing the death penalty with rigorous criminal penalties that prevent recidivism;

and, finally, by organizing a support system for convicted criminals and political prisoners [criminels politiques] in order to lead
them as far as possible toward possibilities for restructuring and to attempt to elucidate the triggers of destructiveness and the
detachment that generated the crime.

Hannah Arendt, philosopher and political journalist, denounced the Nazi horror as an unprecedented radical evil—by arguing,
however, that it’s not evil, but rather good, that’s radical. Because good isn’t the symmetrical opposite of evil; it resides in the
infinite capacities of human thought to find causalities and the means to combat unhappiness [ le mal-être: “evil-being”] and the
malignity of evil.

Permit me to finish on a more personal note. As a child in my native country of Bulgaria, I heard my parents evoke the executions
carried out by the previous Parliament’s Communist regime but also by the Stalinist trials and purges. I was already learning
French when my father, a man of faith, explained to me that, even if revolutionary terror had been inevitable, language, like
French culture, also contained enlightenment. I was already in France when he was hospitalized for a minor operation and killed
in a Bulgarian hospital, several months before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989—at the time they were experimenting on the
elderly. Although the death penalty was abolished in 1988 in Bulgaria, today 52 percent of those questioned in this country still
say they support its application.

(p.137) It’s not a question of saving society, which perpetuates itself only by walling itself off from the infinite complexity of the
passions. Rather, it’s a question of putting our knowledge of these passions in the service of the human in order better to protect
ourselves from ourselves. The new humanism should be up to the task of defending the inviolability of human life and applying
it to everyone, without exception, as well as to other extreme situations in the life experience: eugenics, euthanasia, and so forth.
I am far from idealizing human beings, nor do I deny the evil of which they’re capable. They can always, however, be cared for,
and by abolishing the death penalty—which is a crime, let’s remember—we’re combating both death and crime. In this context,
the abolition of the death penalty is a rational revolt, the only one that counts against the death drive and, definitively, against
death: abolitionism is the secularized version of the Resurrection.

You know, of course, that the Italians illuminate the Coliseum, a bloody memorial to the innumerable gladiators and Christian
martyrs put to death, every time a country abolishes the death penalty or declares a moratorium on executions.

I propose that every night when a country renounces the death penalty, its name be displayed on giant screens installed at the
Place de la Concorde (formerly Place de la Révolution) and the Hôtel de Ville (formerly Place de Grève) for just this purpose, in
memory of Madame Roland, Madame du Barry, Charlotte Corday, the tricoteuses (knitting women), the guillotine, Fouquier-
Tinville, André Chenier, and others. Would this supplementary expense exacerbate the state of our economy? Optimists predict
that most of the world will have abolished the death penalty by 2050. It’s up to us to do what it takes to make the majority
support this abolition.

Translated by Lisa Walsh (p.138)

Notes:

(1.) Victor Hugo, Écrits sur la peine de mort (Actes Sud, 1992), 71.

(2.) Robert Badinter, Débats À l’Assemblée Nationale Sur L’abolition de La Peine de Mort En France: Intervention de M. Badinter,
Garde Des Sceaux, Ministre de La Justice (Paris: Journal officiel de la république française, 1981),
http://www.peinedemort.org/document.php?choix=4738.

(3.) Maimonides, The Commandments, trans. Charles B. Chavel (Brooklyn, NY: Soncino Pr Ltd., 1984), 269–271.
(4.) Charles de Secondat baron de Montesquieu, Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws, ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller,
and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 82.

(5.) Cesare marchese di Beccaria, Beccaria: “On Crimes and Punishments” and Other Writings, ed. Richard Bellamy, trans. Richard
Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 66.

(6.) Jean Jaurès qtd. in Badinter, Débats À l’Assemblée Nationale Sur L’abolition de La Peine de Mort En France.

(7.) Albert Camus, “Reflections on the Guillotine,” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage
International, 1995), 132.

(p.332) (8.) Ibid, 218.

(9.) Hugo, Écrits sur la peine de mort, 118.

(10.) Ibid, 121.