Abstract

I address the tense relationship between ethics and politics by looking at the case of Troy Davis, an allegedly innocent black man executed in Georgia in September 2011. I begin by analyzing the ways in which two very different thinkers, Kant and Levinas, articulate the tensions between ethics and politics. Moving through Derrida's notion of hyperbolic ethics as a justice to come, I suggest that deconstructive ethics requires that we take responsibility for finding ourselves caught between ethics and politics in the impossible place of respecting the singularity of each life while generalizing principles such that we can live together on the same planet, even if we occupy different worlds. In conclusion, I argue that in order to acknowledge and avow our own investments in violence and death penalties of all sorts, we need a psychoanalytic supplement to deconstructive ethics such that we become responsible not only for what we do or don't do, but also for our unconscious desires and fears that operate as the hidden reasons for those actions.

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