Life and Law: Derrida on the Bio-Juridicalism of Sovereign Violence

Abstract

This chapter moves from the second to third part of the book and from the biopolitical model to the bio-juridical one. The fundamental problem with the two paradigms outlined up to this point is that they set up a binary opposition between those thinkers that affirm the relationship between sovereign violence and the juridical order and those that affirm its relationship to life. The chapter focuses on Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the sovereign violence inherent in the death penalty to show that he claims that sovereign violence is not simply orientated to juridical legal order or the regulation of life through the creation of social norms, but simultaneously expresses itself through two faces—the juridical and biopolitical, or law and life—wherein the one demands and expresses the other: the juridical expression of sovereignty regulates life, whereas the sovereign’s regulation of life (and death) always takes a juridical form.