October 10, 2012: Tenth World Day for the abolition of the death penalty. Mobilization, ignorance, hostility, misunderstanding, solemnity, and gravity suspend time in the global crisis, in the hyperconnected acceleration and in the various threats of destruction. And they call for contemplation and invite meditation and questioning: what is the meaning of a call for the universal abolition of the death penalty?
I
I am neither a lawyer nor a specialist of abolitionism. I have never witnessed an execution, and no one in my circle has been a victim of murder, sexual abuse, torture, or degrading violence. I will not read you medical reports chronicling the tortures of the guillotine that Camus copied to impress on us his nausea. Nor have I felt this romantic empathy that enthralled Hugo comparing his pain at being exiled to that of an outcast. I consider that pain is incommensurable, even incommunicable, and that the death wish that is within us threatens us all, in the singular.
I hear my analysands confide in me the sufferings they endured at the hands of torturers in Latin American prisons or their inconsolable grief after the extermination of their parents in concentration camps. I come apart with them, and I will not attempt to say that evil is without reason, like the mystic who states that the rose has no reason. Because I search for and with them: why? So that meaning returns, because meaning gives life back.
Abolish the death penalty: what wish and what project are we conveying here? And what does it mean?
Abolishing the death penalty signifies that we are positing “the inviolability of human life” as the foundation of the humanism of the twenty-first century, as Victor Hugo called it, more than 150 years ago (in 1854).
Since the beginning of time, humans have been afraid of death; yet they give it to better preserve life and try to save the good by inflicting the supreme evil. For the first time in history, however, we realize that it is not enough to replace old values by new ones because these new ones also get stuck in dogmas and impasses that are potentially totalitarian. And life is not a “value” like others, nor even THE value. Even more, for the last two centuries, and particularly today, life is not only a question: What is a life? Does it have a meaning? If so, what is it? But life is now a requirement: it has to be preserved and its destruction prevented—because destruction of life is a radical evil. While everything seems to be collapsing, and wars, the threat of ecological disaster, the frenzy of virtual finance and the consumer society constantly remind us of our fragility and vanity, the inviolability of human life calls on us to think of the meaning of our existence: this is the cornerstone of humanism.
What LIFE are we talking about? The abolitionist answers: ALL LIFE, whatever it is, including “accepting the life of those who horrify,” the demented, the criminals, as Robert Badinter proclaimed when he introduced a bill in the French parliament in 1981 to abolish the death penalty. Can today’s humanity feel deeply enough and stand by its beliefs to the point of “accepting the life of those who horrify”? We abolitionists say yes. Even if 141 countries 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 is still applied (since it is in effect in four of the most heavily populated countries of the planet: China, India, the United States, Indonesia).
Bolstered by its plural heritage—Greek, Jewish, and Christian—Europe chose secularization, thus effecting an emancipating mutation unique in the world; but its history was also marked by its too long litany of horrors—wars, exterminations, colonialisms, totalitarianisms. This philosophy and history impose on us a political and moral conviction that no state, no power, and no person can dispose of another person and has the right to take his life from him. Regardless of the man or woman we condemn, justice must not be one that kills.
Pleading for the abolition of the death penalty in the name of the inviolability of human life cannot be classified as either naïve or smugly and irresponsibly idealistic, nor is there any question of forgetting the victims and the pain of their families. NO. I do not believe either in human perfection or even in absolute perfectibility through compassionate grace or education. I am betting only on our ability to better understand human passions and to accompany them to their limits because experience teaches us that it is impossible (unthinkable) to respond to crime by crime.
I repeat: the human being’s greatest fear is that of seeing his life taken away, and this fear is the basis for the social pact. The oldest jurisprudence treaties in our possession testify to this. Take the Babylonian code of Hammurabi (1792–1750 BC) or the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, but also the Romans, or the Jewish and Christian holy books: all societies plead for and implement the death penalty for criminals in order to defend, protect, and dissuade.
Voices were, however, raised against this killing: today’s abolitionists have found and listened to them to support their combat. Already In Ezekiel: “I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked but that the wicked turns away from his life and lives” (33:11); but especially Saint Paul: “Death, where is your victory? Where is it, O death, your poisonous stinger? Death has been buried in the victory (of the Resurrection)!” (1 Corinthians 15:55). And in their wake, Maimonides: “It is more satisfying to acquit thousands of the guilty than to put to death one living person.”
It is rare, but some religions or politicians have come out against the death penalty: Tibetan Buddhism banned it in the seventh century; and in 747 a first abolition was proclaimed in China that Montesquieu pointed out, praising its Chinese authors who said: “The more the torture, the closer the revolution; torture increased as morals decreased.” Shouldn’t Chinese authorities be reminded of that? China eliminated the death penalty in 2011 for thirteen nonviolent crimes, but executions for corruption continue and are increasing. As for Islam, there is little question of challenging the death penalty.
In France, the abolitionist movement began after the torture of Damiens, who attempted to assassinate Louis XV. While Diderot advocated the death penalty for its dissuasive effect, Voltaire was one of the rare people to support the work of Cesare Beccaria, who, as of 1764, was thinking: “What right do men have to allow themselves to kill their fellow men?” In the spirit of the Enlightenment and of libertarian humanism, abolitionism developed throughout the nineteenth century. Think of Clemenceau, Gambetta, and those lucid words of Jean Jaurès, proclaiming that the death penalty “is contrary to both the spirit of Christianity and that of the Republic.” Closer to us, I am thinking of Camus, who saw that “capital punishment is written about only in whispers” because “the new murder, far from repairing the offense done to the social body, adds a new strain on the first.… The capital judgment breaks the only indispensable human solidarity, solidarity against death.”
II
The abolitionists put forward three main arguments against the death penalty: the ineffectiveness of vengeance and dissuasion; the fallibility of justice; the pain this elimination locks in.
In the first place, nothing proves the effectiveness of the death penalty against human destructiveness: there is no correlation between the maintenance of the death penalty in a legal system and the crime rate. Furthermore and on the contrary, the possibility of death, far from annihilating criminal passion, exalts it. He who sows terror and transcends it by his own death is not seeking expiation. The stigmatization of his acts and his very sacrifice in reality have no other end than to enflame martyrs ready to die in their turn. Far from being dissuasive, fear becomes temptation and then feeds the desire to inflict death by inflicting death on oneself. The death penalty as the “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” law turns out to be ineffective as vengeance as well as dissuasion.
The second argument refers to what Victor Hugo called the “derisory brevity of human justice”: the judiciary lottery and its fallibility. In what name does an institution, a man, or a woman grant themselves the right to pronounce and carry out a death sentence?
The third argument is only whispered because it addresses the pain of the victims and their families. Some people think that even if putting the criminal to death does not avenge his crime nor dissuade those who come after him, it does at least get rid of the perpetrator. The death penalty as elimination of its agent would thus alleviate the unbearable and soothe.
But does the image of the criminal in his tomb really relieve the pain of those who have lost someone close to them, victim of the worst atrocities? This pain that has to be soothed is as inexpressible and unable to be shared as it is legitimate and respectable: who would dare deny this? No one and especially not those who, indignant at the death of innocent victims, desire also to defend and protect life in the name of its inviolability. Because they know that death as the ultimate and unique recourse is an illusion.
When will we stop making the tomb our savior? Let us separate ourselves from the jouissance that the vengeful act provokes. Victor Hugo pointedly drew our attention to this religion of death as savior: “Do not dig a tomb with your own hands around us,” he wrote from Guernsey. “Men who know so little and who can do nothing, you are always face to face with infinity and the unknown. Infinity and the unknown are the tomb.” What I hear is do not hope to find “the unknown or infinity” in the sacrifice of the condemned, even an assassin. And I add: the only unknown or infinity are human passions whose experience we do not stop probing and whose knowledge we do not stop acquiring.
By abolishing the death penalty we are not shouting victory over death as Paul of Tarsus wanted and who called for believing in the Resurrection. We encourage knowing and accompanying passions better, and the most terrible of them, the death drive.
III
Psychoanalysis discovered that Homo sapiens, who is both Homo religiosus and Homo economicus, is a Homo eroticus inhabited not only by a life force but also by a death drive: the one that Freud, as if he sensed the Holocaust, explored at the end of his life and that contemporary research continues to elucidate today.
The human being is fundamentally binary: digesting the good and expelling the bad, oscillating between the inside and the outside, pleasure and reality, prohibition and transgression, one’s self and the other, body and mind. Language itself is binary (made of consonants and vowels, and other dual forms that were a boon for structuralism). Thus children gain access to the difference between good and evil at the very moment they begin learning the mother tongue: the universe of meaning leads one to distinguish between good and evil, before refining their nuances, perceiving their polyphonies, their excesses, their transgressions, or creating works of art.
Our desires prove to be more or less compatible with those of others. They draw us toward the other, and to love, but to a love that in itself contains aggression: I love you, me neither, hatred and guilt; such is the alchemy of the word. These are precisely the convergent and divergent libidinal interests, founded on our conceptions of good and evil, that our loftier values are constructed on and that become competitive or conflictual. Desires and values lay down religions, philosophies, and ideologies that live off them, kill each other because of them, or attempt to explain and understand each other.
These so-called values often capture destructivity, taking the form of a fascination for evil that is sought in the other, and which then leads to searching for the scapegoat to get rid of him mercilessly, in favor of the Sovereign Good, my very own Good, my religion. This is the rationale for fundamentalism, which carries out a relentless war in the name of an absolute ideal erected against the one facing you. Whether individual or collective, this fundamentalism is fed by a total and blind faith that suffers absolutely no questioning. As I stated before, the condemnation to death of the fundamentalist does not eliminate fundamentalism itself; on the contrary, it makes its agent a martyr and exalts the rationale, one that has economic and social roots but also a psychosexual nerve, by the very structure of its passion, and it remains unassailable if it is not defused from within.
There are, however, only the superficial layers of radical evil here. There is also a pure death wish, dissociated from any desire (or désintriquée from desire). This death wish does away with the distinction between good and evil, between me and other; it abolishes the meaning and dignity of the other and of self. The destructivity I have just highlighted here yields to unbinding. These extreme states of almost total unbinding of the death wish touch the limits of Homo sapiens as a speaking being and capable of values (beginning with good and evil). The person in thrall to this unbinding expresses himself in a language that is now only mechanical, an instrument of destruction without either code or communication: without reason, without remorse, nor expiation nor redemption.
Such borderline states do not take refuge only in hospitals or on couches; they do not strike serial killers alone or explode brutally only in the chaos of an adolescence doomed to indifference and insensibility to the stranger to get rid of. Borderline states of the death wish also break out in sociopolitical crises and catastrophes. These abject states can lead to the cold and planned extermination of human beings, as was the case for the Holocaust and other genocides.
IV
I hear your question and share your indignation: so the abolitionists want to save the life of these criminals?
If I have carried this thinking to the idea of dehumanization, it is to demonstrate more clearly that the humanism the abolitionists of capital punishment advocate is a wager against horror. Knowledge of human passions enables us to look at these borderline states and deal with them clinically, even if such knowledge makes us neither all powerful nor able to cancel out this pathology when a whole society is suffering from it. But after Ezekiel, Paul of Tarsus, and Maimonides, after Beccaria, Voltaire, Hugo, Jaurès, Camus, Badinter, and so many others, greater knowledge of the range of human passions would seem to be the only way to spot and deal with the many faces of this radical evil. When compassion and forgiveness abdicate because they have no hold on this evil, it still becomes possible to probe it down to its depths. How?
Hannah Arendt, philosopher and political journalist, denounced the Nazi horror as an unprecedented radical evil but argued that it is not the evil but the good that is radical. Because good is not a symmetric reversal of evil; it is found in the infinite capacities of human thought to find the causes and the ways of fighting the malaise and the malignity of evil.
V
Allow me to conclude on a more personal note.
As a child in Bulgaria, my native country, I heard my parents discuss the death penalty the communist regime inflicted on the previous parliament but also the Stalinist purges and trials. I was studying French when my father, a man of faith, explained that while the revolutionary terror had been inevitable, the language, like French culture, also carried light within it. I was already in France when he was hospitalized for a benign operation and assassinated in a Bulgarian hospital in 1989, a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall—they were then carrying out experiments on old people. The death penalty was abolished in Bulgaria in 1998, even though today 52 percent of the people polled in this country say they are in favor of it.
It is not a question of saving society, which can perpetuate itself only by steeling itself against the infinite complexity of passions. It is a question of using our knowledge of the passions to help the human being, to better protect us against ourselves. The new humanism should be able to defend the principle of the inviolability of human life and to apply it to all, without exception, as well as to other extreme situations of living experience: eugenics, euthanasia, etc. Far be it from me the idea of idealizing the human being or of denying the evil he is capable of. We can, though, care for him, and by abolishing capital punishment—which, remember, is a crime—we fight against death and against crime. This means that the abolition of the death penalty is a lucid revolt, the only worthy one against the death wish and ultimately, against death. It is the secularized version of resurrection.
You no doubt know that the Italians light up the coliseum, the bloody memory of many Christian gladiators and martyrs put to death, each time a country abolishes the death penalty or decrees a moratorium on executions.
I suggest that every night a country gives up the death penalty its name be seen on a specially installed giant screen on Place de la Concorde (former Place of Revolution) and the Hotel de Ville (former Place de Grève), in memory of Mme Roland, Mme du Barry, Charlotte Corday, the knitting women, the guillotine, Fouquier-Tinville, André Chénier, etc. Would this extra expense risk exacerbating the state of our finances? Optimists predict that virtually the whole world will have abolished the death penalty by 2050. It is up to us to see that the majority of the people are in favor of this abolition.