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MEDITATIONS ON MERCY AND FORGIVENESS IN CONTEMPORARY
PHILOSOPHY AND ART
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Ewa Bobrowska
Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland
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This paper focuses on the notions of vanitas, death, and forgiveness in the light of Jacques Derrida’s
critique of the social institution of the death penalty in his Seminars on this topic with reference to
inter alia the thought of: J. Hillis Miller, Martin Heidegger, Donna Haraway, and Richard Rorty.
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Keywords
the death penalty, forgiveness, death, contemporary philosophy, contemporary art
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The theme of the capital punishment is not a frequent topic both in art and philosophy. The
archetypal figure of a heroic martyr of truth, a misunderstood philosopher, unjustly sentenced to
death by law and the democratic society, has been established by Socrates's execution. Preliminary
reflections on the death penalty can be found in the ethics of Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. However, an in-
depth philosophical analysis of this subject appears in the recent lectures by Jacques Derrida,
(published in English in 2013 by the University of Chicago Press). This is the last word and the last
will of Derrida, the final ethical message of the anti-institutional and genuinely humanistic thought
of this contemporary philosopher, resulting from the traumatic experiences of the twentieth century.
It seems significant that the last subject taken by this prominent contemporary philosopher of
international authority concerns the deconstruction of the current model of social justice. The places
where he held his lectures on the death penalty are also significant - the Sorbonne in France and the
University of California in Irvine (USA), since the history of both countries, with which Derrida
was associated, is not free of the practices of executions.
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In Derrida’s argument, particular emphasis is placed on the figure of those, who have been
wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death by the society. This figure, which is based on the
public trials and executions of martyrs: Socrates, Jesus, Joan D'Arc, Persian mystic Al-Hallaj, plays
a unique role in modern culture and philosophy. Emphasizing the frightening descriptions of the
public theater of cruelty, Derrida points to the absurdity and illegitimacy of the death sentence. He
also makes references to the writings of the first French theologians of the abolition of the death
penalty: Montesquieu and Camus (Reflections on the Guillotine). Moreover, he notes that the social
justice of ancient Greece was more humane, because it granted the condemned the liberty of
choosing the exact moment of death, and in this way, it did not additionally impose the terror of
time upon the convict.
 The paradox of contemporary politics is, as Derrida observes, the presence of the death
penalty in the legislation of two oppositional superpowers: the US and Iran. The "difference"
between the two nations is the difference in the use of anesthesia. In other words, the practice of the
death penalty applies to both countries, although the American version is more merciful because it
includes the application of pain prevention drugs. Curiously, Derrida argues, the aesthetics, and
therefore also art, is close in its historical function, to anesthesia - anesthetic (in its function of
“calming down" the social will).
In his argument, Derrida repeats the previous question about the possibility and, at the same
time, the need to forgive the unforgivable from his text On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. It is
a challenging task that the post-humanism of the 21st century will have to face. Cruelty is not a
good response to brutality, and the course of history abounds in paradoxical meanders, as Derrida
argues; if Louis XVI had abolished the death penalty, his head would have been saved.
The logic of the unforgivable, well-grounded in politics in the value of social justice and
vengeance, should never be the validation of truth in a heterogeneous society based on a
multiplicity of unrelated and rarely intersecting discourses and narrations. Derrida, Lyotard, and
Rorty claim that the universal susceptibility to suffering, as well as the narratives of mercy and
forgiveness, are the landmarks on the path to the ideal of social solidarity that, in Donna Haraway’s
approach, should also encompass all living species. The mercy of death is time-related and private,
as long as it remains unpredictable, alogical, unschematized, unmechanical (uncontrolled by the
human reason). Although it is unavoidable and constitutes the only certain event in human history,
its value of hope always relays on its unpredictability and the possibility of delay. The famous
Scheherazade figure symbolizes the ability of narration, language, speculation, and imagination to
postpone death. “Talking, giving seminars, writing philosophy, writing criticism, writing poetry
(creating art - EB) are all forms of the postponement of death” (Miller 2009, 69). That’s why all
narrative, creative forms of writing such as fiction, theory, philosophy, etc. are inherently against
capital punishment. This is the case of famous Camus’s Reflections on the Guillotine, philosophy of
Foucault, Derrida, Nietzsche, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. With regard to the theme of
abolition in art and cinema, one should mention contemporary movies such as American Green mile
(1999), in art: Bruce’s Nauman artworks on the topic of torture prisons, Francisco Goya’s The
Disasters of War, Andrzej Grottger’s prints, Victor Eugène Delacroix’s paintings, Polish painter
Andrzej Wróblewski’s Shootings, etc. Both painting, storytelling and philosophical speculation are
mystical forms of delay and of coping with the fear of death, overcoming the unconscious death
drive according to Freud. The language of art and writing opposes the language of law in this
respect, while imagination contrasts logic, reason, and social justice on this issue. Once death
becomes a part of social, judicial, and political systems, it becomes systematized as a result of
various regulations and laws. When the society and its order regulate the administration of the death
penalty, the system may resemble the machinery of death, within which there is always the place for
doubt and mistakes. The mechanism of death penalty deprives the convict of an essential feature of
the human condition, that is the undecidability of the instance of death. Because the moment of
one’s death is secret, never decided, it always allows for the arrival of future. One’s horizon of being
is always open to the future to come to use Derrida’s wording. The death penalty takes away this
perspective, the calculability and the fixity of the event of death makes it a systematized, automatic
procedure. David Willis says that the technology of death penalty is calculable by machines of law,
social order, clock, time. In this way, the society gains the inhuman power to control and decide
between the flow of life and the decay and annihilation of death. Exercising this kind of ultimate
authority and power requires wisdom and maturity, but are we as societies mature enough to decide
on the final existential matters? Are we able to distinguish and precisely separate justice, security,
and politics?
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Andrzej Wróblewski, Shooting VIII (Surrealist), 1949 Artur Grottger, Nocturn. 1864.
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Francisco Goya, Disasters of War No.39 (1810-1820)

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Death occupies its place in history, although it always remains imperceptible and beyond the
present time. Death is always an ultimate and uncanny estrangement, the Other; an interval that
disjoins present and future, justice and hope. It can never be “a matter of firsthand experience (…)
you can experience everything up to the moment of death, the ‘edge of life,' but not death
itself” (Miller 2009, 57), according to Hillis Miller, and from this perspective one should look at
and reconsider the past. The edge of life is a privileged point of view towards which one progresses.
From this point of view (the edge of life, the zero point, a crossing point of the vectors of life and
death) one should look at life’s finality and life events. It is the point at which we can welcome
yesterday and the Other; the point of the ultimate forgiveness of the unforgivable and the filter of
truth. Life as a repetitive re-experience and the receiving of yesterday, the past anticipated in the
future as a remedy to the awareness of the finality of the human condition. In his last unpublished
seminars, Derrida claims: “And the other would say to me, or I would say to the other: since I
always run for dear life (à mort - towards death - EB) after yesterday, yesterday will always be to
come, not tomorrow, in the future, but to come, from in front, there in front, before
yesterday” (Miller, 2007, 65). These statements are an expression of a very personal experience of
time and perhaps an anxiety of death. Yesterday is the time that has been given an individual trait,
personalized - my time. The future is unknown, unnamed, the disturbing other to be welcome and
colonized, who rushes toward me to devour me like death, Hillis Miller says.
Consequently and paradoxically the subject of the capital punishment does not exist, if it
exists, it has not undergone the punishment yet, if it underwent the punishment it does not exist any
longer. What does death mean from the point of view of personal perspective? Has anyone ever
been dead, so that he or she can describe it? Nevertheless, most of our most significant artistic and
philosophical masterworks are concerned with death; it is enough to mention Shakespeare, Goya,
and Dostoyevsky.
In Hamlet, the famous scene that relates to the topic of death is the scene in the graveyard.
The punishment of death is ironically discussed there in the context of social orders and machinery
of order power and law, because the skulls found on the cemetery by Hamlet, Horatio, and two
clowns may belong: one to a politician/courtier and the second one to the layer. In the face of death,
law loses its dignity and authority and the license for truth. The logic and narration of the game of
law prove in Hamlet as unreliable and deceitful as any other discourses. Hamlet says:
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why may not be the skull of a layer? Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his
tenures, and his tricks, Why does he suffer this rude knave now to knock him about the
sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell him now of his action of battery?”
(Shakespeare 1928, 1043)
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This ironic remark is preceded by an equally grotesque and mock commentary
concerning the current fate of a politician/courtier:
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Why, e’en so, and now my Lady Worm’s; chapless, and knocked about the mazzard with a sexton’s
spade. Here’s fine revolution, an we had the trick to see ’t. Did these bones cost no more the breeding
but to play at loggats with ’em? mine ache to think on ’t.
(Shakespeare 1928, 1043)
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The punishment of death applies in Hamlet’s graveyard first of all to those who are
representatives of the machinery of social order: the politician, the layer, the landowner. Most
importantly, for my argument, Hamlet’s example demonstrates the reverse ironical image of the
spectacle of the death penalty, in which the layer and the politician, thus the representative of the
deadly system of social justice, become the victims and the gravediggers - two clowns, those
condemned to the most unwanted profession, the outcasts of the society, become the spectators -
those who contemplate the spectacle of death. The most humorous and ironic parts of Hamlet take
place in the graveyard, as if to cover emptiness with storytelling, because to phrase a phenomenon
of death that is unspeakable in itself, one can only resort to the ironic distance, lamentation, or
silence. The second hypothesis concerning this skull relates to wealth and possession. In this way, in
Hamlet, death subverts all social and logical orders, and divisions even between truth and lie, or
justice and injustice, authority and derision, the citizen and the outcast.
The second issue that seems to be alluded to in Hamlet is the right to burial. In his Laws,
Kant grants the state the right to the death penalty and states that a culprit shall be cast out beyond
the borders without burial. In Hamlet’s graveyard, it is the social outcasts that dig the lawful citizens
out of their graves. Thus Hamlet presents an inverted version of Kant’s social laws.
Derrida draws attention to cruelty inherent in the capital punishment from poising, burning
at the stake, shooting down, hanging, beheading, to “(…) the most concealed, the most invisible, the
most sublimely mechanized torture, being never, and in no case, anything other than a piece of
theatrical, spectacular, or even voyeuristic machinery”. This machinery operates and drives history
of humanity “as the history of techniques, techniques for policing and making war, military
techniques, but also medical, surgical, anesthesia techniques for administering so-called capital
punishment” (Derrida 2013, 2).
The spectacle and the spectator are required. The state must and also wants to see the
condemned die. In this way, the state reaffirms and confirms its power. It sees itself, says Derrida.
Because the death penalty is, in some sense, the essence of the absolute authority of what Derrida
calls “the phantasmatico- theological” (Derrida 2013, 6) order of the hegemony of the state.
Last but not least, an interesting hypothesis about the role of the psychological death-drive
in society is proposed in Male phantasies by Klaus Theweleit. According to this view, an increase in
politically sanctioned and imposed violence and cruelty should be linked to the absence or a
decreasing role of women in social life and politics. The red wave in the form of war crimes and
murders, but also rigoristic and brutal state rules represents the suppressed male desire for the
intense sexual and emotional contact with the other sex. When experiencing deprivation in this
aspect, the instinctual desire - libido finds an outlet in increasingly cruel political actions and
oppressive public systems.The figure of a woman as a social guarantee of mercy and forgiveness,
and as an ironist, in this case, could also be found in the contemporary philosophy of Richard Rorty.
In this approach, the central principle of an intellectual, erudite, private, elitist, ironist, and
paradigmatic figure of a critic (literary according to Rorty, but also social in a broader sense) is to
avoid cruelty towards others. Rorty’s ideal political system is an intellectual democracy or an
enlightened democracy since it is knowledge, intellect, reason, and education that prevent cruelty in
Rorty’s society. The condemnation of cruelty and the fear of suffering are the most dependable
community ties, in this view. They also guarantee the humane course of technological and political
progress of communities towards more peaceful and more mercy-based societies.
The common bond that unites all humans in Rorty’s view and all beings in Donna Haraway’s
approach is the susceptibility to suffering, as we all inhabit bodies made of flesh, we all share
suffering. We all can suffer, and this is what we all know and should understand and avoid. The
Christian and Jewish commandments that state that one should not hurt the other person, in the light
of Haraway’s philosophy encompass all human and non-human beings. We should understand
animals’ pain in the most literal way. She draws upon the example of a mouse that served as an
experimental laboratory breast cancer model and argues: “Whether I agree to her existence and use
or not, s/he suffers, physically, repeatedly, and profoundly, that I and my sisters might live. (…) It is
tempting to see my sister OncoMouse as a sacrifice (…)” (Haraway 2008, 76), she says. We owe a
significant debt to animals. They share our sensitivity, interact with us, have feelings that fill up
their existence. Derrida was one of the first philosophers that assigned a philosophical status to the
animal existence. The other, in whose eyes I exist, is, for Derrida, certainly a human being, but also
an animal, a cat. The other common experience of all living creatures is death, and its annihilating,
but, at the same time, unifying power.
Heidegger’s philosophy as a meditation and in-depth analysis of being itself also takes
account of the relation of being to death. Da-sein denotes a being that is concerned with the status
and the problem of Being as such. The famous question asked in his Introduction to Metaphysics:
“Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” (Heidegger 2000, 14) throws light at the deep,
fundamental ground that precedes being itself, from which being springs out of, which provides a
deep foundation. Notably, Heidegger says that we should not focus this question on the human
being solely. The question of death is nothing else but the mirror image, the reversal of the ultimate
question he poses: “Why is there nothing instead of beings?”
In principle, there is no limit on forgiveness, no measure, no moderation, no “to what point?”
says Derrida.
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geopolitical scene since the last war, and in an accelerated fashion in the past few years, one sees not
only individuals, but also entire communities, professional corporations, the representatives of
ecclesiastical hierarchies, sovereigns, and heads of state ask for ‘forgiveness’. They do this in an
Abrahamic language which is not (in the case of Japan or Korea, for example) that of the dominant
religion of their society, but which has already become the universal idiom of law, of politics, of the
economy, or of diplomacy: at the same time the agent and symptom of this internationalization.
(Derrida 2001, 78)
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Moreover, Derrida emphasizes that forgiveness should never lose its exceptional and unique
character. It should always be experienced as an exception, making an extraordinary emotional and
political effort for the sake of reestablishing compromise and stability to heal the abysmal wound
and mental and emotional trauma. “Forgiveness is not, it should not be, normal, normative,
normalizing,” (Derrida, 2001, 32) Derrida says. It is always a difficult and long process, the willful
and conscious forgetting and reconciliation, which should not take the form of the uncontrolled
repression of anxiety. It always subverts and interrupts the natural course of history - according to
the principle of justice, however it is a necessary step “in the face of the impossible” (Derrida 32),
for which the Christian tradition of the priority of forgiveness has paved the way. Derrida names
this acts of global political forgiveness a return of the religious and puts them in the context of the
Abrahamic Judaism and Pauline Christianity.
Derrida does not deny that there is the unforgivable, a crime against humanity, a mortal sin,
and truly horrible, traumatic massive crime, but at the heart of the notion of forgiveness, there is an
aporia of forgiving the unforgivable, which become apparent in the 20th century, especially.
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“That is to say that forgiveness must announce itself as impossibility itself. It can only be possible
in doing the impossible” (Derrida 2001, 49).
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The way to reconcile the health and balance goes through the impossible social, pragmatic
process of healing the universal consciousness through what he calls “the work of mourning” (Der-
rida 2013, 50). This is why Derrida calls forgiveness a social and spiritual hyperbole that gives
pragmatic results and may take place at two levels: formal, institutional and personal, public and
private, of which the one devoid of the authoritarian and institutional power proves essential and
pure, declares Derrida.
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