On Cruelty

Judith Butler
BuyThe Death Penalty: Vol. I by Jacques Derrida, translated by Peggy Kamuf
Chicago, 328 pp, 24.50, January, ISBN 978 0 226 14432 0

Whence comes this bizarre, bizarre idea, Jacques Derrida asks, reading Nietzsche on debt in On the
Genealogy of Morals, this ancient, archaic (uralte) idea, this so very deeply rooted, perhaps indestructible
idea, of a possible equivalence between injury and pain (Schaden und Schmerz)? Whence comes this
strange hypothesis or presumption of an equivalence between two such incommensurable things? What can
a wrong and a suffering have in common? By way of an answer, he points out that the origin of the legal
subject, and notably of penal law, is commercial law; it is the law of commerce, debt, the market, the
exchange between things, bodies and monetary signs, with their general equivalent and their surplus value,
their interest.
In the first volume of The Death Penalty, Derrida considers the jus talionis, the principle of equivalence
according to which a relation is set up between the crime and the punishment, between the injury and the
price to be paid. Debt, in On the Genealogy of Morals, gives Nietzsche a way of understanding how the
consciousness of guilt, bad conscience came into the world. Earlier he laments that whole sombre
thing called reflection, in which the self becomes its own object of relentless scrutiny and self-punishment.
If one wants to keep a promise, one must burn memory into the will, submit to or submit oneself to a
reign of terror in the name of morality, administer pain to oneself in order to ensure ones continuity and
calculability through time. If I am to be moral and keep my promises, I will remember what I promised and
remain the same I who first uttered that promise, resisting any circumstances that might alter its
continuity through time, never dozing when wakefulness is needed. The promise takes on another meaning
in Nietzsche when what I have promised is precisely to repay a debt, a promise by which I enter into, and
become bound by, a certain kind of contract. What I have apparently burned into the will, or had burned
there, is a promise to remember and repay that debt, to realise the promise within a calculable period of
time, and so to become a calculable creature. I can be counted on to count the time and count up the money
to make the repayment: that accountability is the promise. I can count on myself, and others can count on
me. If I prove capable of making a contract, I can receive a loan and be relied on to pay it back with
interest, so that the lender can accumulate wealth from my debt in a predictable way. And if I default, the
law will intervene to protect his interest in the interest he exacts from me.
Nietzsche asks how debt and restitution became the primary framework for conceptualising criminality and
punishment. Tracking the persistence of Roman law in 19th-century German jurisprudence, he argues that
any injury is conceptualised as a debt, and every punishment understood as a payment. Hence the field of
suffering is pervasively economised, and the contract becomes the salient model for human exchange.
According to Nietzsche, all manner of injury is now modelled on the creditor-debtor relation. As injury
comes to be conceived as payment in default, the psyche develops a penitentiary logic. The psychic form
that payment takes is guilt, understood as a kind of perpetual payment, the debt never finally discharged.
Punishment thus becomes a form of subjectivation: in punishing the criminal for having inflicted an
injury/incurred a debt, a subject is formed who punishes her or himself for having failed to be calculable.
And if she or he had proven to be calculable, would no injury have occurred? Not quite, for the only way to
become a promising and calculable animal, according to Nietzsche, is precisely by inflicting injury on
oneself, burning a memory into the will such that the memory burns time and again, every time the promise
is broken and all the time until the promise is fulfilled.
Guilt becomes the psychic modality of the debtor who can neither quit nor fulfil the contract. What, then, is
the psychic modality of the creditor? Nietzsche remarks on those Roman laws that allowed for debtors to be
dismembered by their creditors or their legal proxies. Derrida continues the thought:
The creditor is granted a psychic reimbursement Instead of a thing, instead of something or someone, he
will be given some pleasure, some enjoyment [jouissance], a feeling of well-being or greater well-being
(Wohlgefuehl), he will be given a pleasure that consists in the voluptuous pleasure of causing the other to
suffer faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire, that is, of doing harm for the pleasure of it In place of
some equivalent, something or someone, one grants in return, as payment, the pleasure of doing violence
(Genuss in der Vergewaltigung).
And though Derrida accepts the translation of Vergewaltigung as violence (usually Gewalt), it is also the
German word for rape, raising the problem of whether it is possible to distinguish between sexualised and
desexualised forms of destructiveness in forms of legal punishment. Indeed, the move to cast injury as a
debt that requires restitution produces both guilt and sadism: the debtor becomes the one who is always
paying in a situation in which nothing can finally be paid off; the creditor is always punishing, and always
enjoying that apparently infinite task. The idea of equivalence, introduced first by jus talionis, allows one
thing to substitute for one another by way of restitution. The point, though, seems not really to become
whole again, but to profit and punish more joyfully for an indefinite period of time. Keeping his parts
circulating is what brings the creditor his pleasure, and punishing debts, establishing them as unpayable,
opens up a potentially infinite future for sadistic delight. The prison is established on the model of social
debt, so that sentencing becomes a way of regulating, and extending, the time of debt.


For Nietzsche, and in this Derrida follows him closely, legal punishment, apart from serving its stated
purposes, maintains a furtive vocation in which sadism operates through the terms of both law and
morality. Nietzsche found that cruelty indeed, festive cruelty pervaded these two domains. This is
explicit in Benthams reflections on punishment, but it can also be found operating in a more subtle fashion
in Kants categorical imperative, which, Nietzsche claimed, reeks of [reicht nach] cruelty. When Kant
justifies the death penalty on the basis of the categorical imperative, he demonstrates the Nietzschean point
that cruelty can be, and is, masked as morality, and that the pleasure in inflicting cruelty can be, and is,
rationalised as moral duty. Presaging Lacans Kant avec Sade, Nietzsche seeks to expose the joyous
cruelty of Kants morality. Derrida takes it all a step further, figuring Meursault, the absurdist murderer in
Camuss LEtranger, as a paradigmatic Kantian:
If I know why I kill, I think I am right to kill and this reason that I give myself is a reason that one must be
able to argue for rationally with the help of universalisable principles. I kill someone, and I know why,
because I think that it is necessary, that it is just, that whoever found himself in my place would have to do
the same, that the other is guilty towards me, has wronged me or will wrong me and so forth given that
the crime is meaningful, deliberate, calculated, premeditated, goal-oriented, it belongs to the order of penal
justice and is no longer dissociable from a condemnation to death, from a properly penal act. At that point,
the distinction between vengeance and justice becomes precarious.
But Nietzsche also writes something more, namely that commercial contracts model the social contract,
which requires that humans undergo an internalisation of their aggressive drives. What is internalised or,
indeed, repressed by entering into the social contract is hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking,
in change, in destruction. This internalisation can operate as sublimation, giving rise to the soul, the entire
inner world, bad conscience and guilt everything that makes man interesting. The development of this
capacity comes at a very high price, what some would call neurosis, and what Nietzsche describes as that
serious illness that man was bound to contract under the stress of the most fundamental change he ever
experienced that change which occurred when he found himself finally enclosed within the walls of
society and of peace. The social contract, which requires the subject to forfeit the option of acting
aggressively and destructively, produces a psychic formation in which the subject pummels her or himself
and thereby risks becoming her or his own executioner.
Can those who oppose the death penalty escape cruelty? Nietzsche intimates that cruelty may well be
primary. It can be repressed, which is a way of turning cruelty on oneself, or directed towards others in
some moralised version, for example by preferring imprisonment to the death penalty (protracted cruelty,
that is, over immediate death). The prohibition on aggressive action is an aggressive attack on aggression
which paradoxically preserves, or redoubles, aggression even as it seeks its eradication. No one can finally
do away with it. The figure of abolition, Derrida writes, is that of a death of the death penalty.
*
Derrida turns to Freuds reflections on aggression and the death drive in order to pursue this broader
question about cruelty. Beyond the Pleasure Principle calls into question the exclusive operation of the
pleasure principle as the organising principle of psychic life. Are there modes of destructiveness that cant
be explained by the pleasure principle? The death drive emerges as a way of explaining repetition
compulsions that fail to establish any kind of sustainable mastery. They appeared to Freud first as part of
war neurosis and were set apart from forms of neurosis organised by wish-fulfilment. These forms of
compulsive repetition were not in search of gratification: they were unwanted repetitions that wore down
the ego. Derrida is frank: At issue is a diagnosis of a cruelty that has no contrary because it is originary.
This dialectical inversion characteristic of bad conscience the redoubling of aggression in the effort to
establish its opposite proves important for Derridas approach to the death penalty and to abolitionism.
For Derrida, those who oppose the death penalty as he did are caught up in the same problem as those
who are for it, but why? Are abolitionists perhaps seeking to eradicate the death drive the hostility to
life, as Derrida puts it, that is inherent to life itself? Is that their furtive purpose? Surpassing cruelty by
an apparent non-cruelty, he continues, would be merely a surpassing in cruelty, a surfeit of cruelty. He
notes that Robespierre changed his mind from opposing to affirming the death penalty in the space of two
years, depending on what seemed more useful to him whether he feared for his own life or wished for the
death of his opponents. Those who oppose the death penalty, such as Beccaria and sometimes Bentham,
seem to prefer a long, drawn-out form of cruel imprisonment, which raises the question: which camp in this
debate stands for the more humane form of punishment? Wary of forms of aggression disguised as
benevolence, Derrida asks whether some abolitionists are committed to other forms of cruelty that are
masked by elegant moral formulations, ones that rationalise prolonging the time of cruelty and the tenure of
sadistic delight.


Just as Nietzsche found Kants categorical imperative to be soaked in blood, so Freud thought that the
Christian dictum love thy neighbour as thyself was pretty much impossible to realise. Why should my
neighbour love me? he asks. And why should I love my neighbour? It is very probable that my neighbour,
when he is enjoined to love me as himself, will answer exactly as I have done and will repel me for the
same reasons. Freud suggests that we can only really love those we know and that it is absurd to ask us to
love the rest of humankind: hostility seems a more reasonable default position.
What seems to be at stake here is neither a random attitude of hostility nor even an occasional propensity
towards cruelty, but the broader problem of the death drive. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle and then in
Civilisation and Its Discontents, written ten years later, in 1930, Freud writes about a kind of
destructiveness that seeks to dismantle social forms constructed on the basis of aim-inhibited social bonds,
such as family, community and nation. He remarks on several occasions, in particular when considering the
ambivalence constitutive of love, that the pleasure principle and the death drive work in tandem, but they
should be distinguished nonetheless in terms of their final aims. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud
makes two inverse kinds of claim about the relationship between pleasure and the death drive: first, he
gives the example of sadism, in which the death drive enters the service of the sexual function; second,
just pages later, the pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts, which are especially on
guard against increases of stimulation from within, which would make the task of living more difficult. So
each can be at the service of the other, which means that neither is necessarily primary. The death drive
leads us towards death, in a circuitous return to the inorganic that militates against a progressive sense of
time, repeatedly taking apart the social relations we build and returning us to a state of quiescence. So the
two drives or principles, if you prefer seem to meet up again in this final quiescence in which all that is
built is undone, scattered, returning the fading ego to an inorganic condition in which the organism is
relieved of all excitation.
We know that civilisation produces unhappiness because social norms demand that we not act on all the
desires on the docket for gratification. Ideally, aim-inhibited social bonds create communities, and the
sublimation of immediate desires creates artworks or institutions or works like Freuds. But the other
problem with civilisation is that it seems actively to dismantle what it has built, to destroy what one brings
into being and to attack those one loves; it takes aim at its own creations and attachments, pursuing a
furtive vocation repetitive, unknowing that works in a contrary direction to its forward-oriented tasks
and all conceits of progress. Freud ends Civilisation and Its Discontents, remarking that civilisation runs
the risk of being undone by its own aggression, going so far as to voice his anxiety about the prospect of
extermination.
A brief passage in the book proves quite important for Derridas argument. Freud is writing about the death
penalty: One is irresistibly reminded of an incident in the French Chamber when capital punishment was
being debated. (I take it that this is the 1790s.) A member had been passionately supporting its abolition
and his speech was being received with tumultuous applause, when a voice from the hall called out: Que
messieurs les assassins commencent! It is as if the call to let the assassins begin their work is of a part
with the passions aroused by abolitionist discourse itself. Are abolitionists like anti-pornography
campaigners who end up exciting their supporters with their graphic descriptions of the porn they would
get rid of? Abolitionism has a different problem, since here it isnt so much desire but the death drive that
cloaks itself in moral opposition to its own expressions. Does Derridas reading suggest that opposition to
the death penalty can quickly be converted into its opposite, unleashing a celebratory affirmation of its
destructiveness?
Derrida rehearses Baudelaires criticism of Hugos abolitionism in The Last Day of a Condemned Man
(1829), in which the argument is made that the death penalty should be opposed because the right to life is
absolute. Abolitionism in defence of an absolute right to life is, for Baudelaire, as Derrida reminds us,
doubly guilty: it clings to animal existence and abandons the human. The passion of those who oppose the
death penalty is guilty, he remarks, because they are afraid for their own skins, because they feel guilty
and their tremulations are a confession; they confess, with the symptom of their abolitionism as it were, that
they want to save their lives, that they tremble for themselves because unconsciously, they feel guilty of
a mortal sin. So the passion against the punishment is articulated by those who are guilty not for what they
do, but for what they wish they did not wish to do away with someone. But also because they fear losing
their own lives, so formulate their position not from principle, but from fear of being done away with by
another: I want to abolish the death penalty because I am afraid of being condemned.
Derridas move to expose the way that the abolitionists are implicated in the death drive has a certain
intellectual appeal, resting as it does on a dialectical inversion by which those who oppose the death
penalty are implicated in its cruelty, especially when they prefer forms of imprisonment. (At one point he
generalises from the case of abolitionism, remarking on the hypocrisy that animates and agitates the
defenders of just causes.) Here is a rejoinder. Derridas position implies that the only route to an
abolitionist position is through the violent suppression of the aggressive impulse, a redoubling of
aggression that is now conveyed and amplified by moral instruments. But given that aggression can be
interrupted by more relational orientations, why wouldnt opposition to the death penalty emerge from
those? The pleasure principle intervenes to derail aggression time and again, and I have noted already that
for Freud the death drive can be brought within the service of the pleasure principle, and that pleasure can
serve the purpose of creating and reproducing social bonds. In the context of preserved social bonds,
aggression can become agonism, or it can be strictly contained within the rules of a game: a
sadomasochistic sexual scene, for example, or some other rule-bound activity.


But there is a more general argument to be made, concerning Freuds idea of emotional ambivalence. This
idea is there early on in his interpretations of Hamlet in The Interpretation of Dreams; it gets a chapter in
Totem and Taboo and is central to the explanation of melancholia in Mourning and Melancholia. After
1920, it is recast as a mode of entanglement between the pleasure principle and the death drive. There is no
overcoming ambivalence in love, since we are always at risk of destroying what we are most attached to
and vulnerable to being destroyed by those on whom we are most dependent. According to this later model,
Oedipus doesnt necessarily kill the father in order to have the mother (that would be to posit wish-
fulfilment as the final aim of all murderous wishes); he could be moved by various unconscious motives in
killing the father, and sexual gratification may or may not be among them.
So the problem with Derridas dialectical inversion is that it relies on the death drive, or its principal
exponent, aggression, as the only motive operating in the scene. What ethical decisions emerge from the
ambivalent situation of wanting someone to die and at the same time wanting them to live, and even
wanting both things with equal intensity, but at different levels of consciousness? Ambivalence isnt quite
the same as hypocrisy. I am a hypocrite if, however furtively, I want someone to die, or am possessed by a
murderous wish even as I cloak that wish in a moral argument, say, against the death penalty. I am a
hypocrite only if there is a wish I pretend I do not have, but in fact do. In the condition of ambivalence,
however, there are at least two wishes at work, two true motives struggling to coexist despite their
incompatibility. What then works against the inner demand that someone pay for a crime with his or her
life? Is it only when we might enjoy inflicting further pain on the criminal that we wish she or he would
live? Or are there other reasons why we might want them to live? Are there, even within the terms of
psychoanalysis, reasons for wanting to keep the other alive that do not primarily rely on our wish to
continue torturing that other, even when it isnt someone in particular, but an anonymous other or the
general population?
To answer that question, we have also to ask whether there are social relations outside the terms of debt and
payment, relations that might be understood as being outside capital, or outside the psychic and moral
terms by which injury-cum-debt authorises incarceration and the death penalty. This is already to move
from a drive theory to an account of relationality, but that doesnt mean we can dispense so easily with the
problem of destructiveness. After all, when Freud posits Eros and Thanatos as two separate principles, as
drives which belong to the figural language available to him, he is trying to take account of ambivalence.
Eros may well be defined as building social bonds through sublimation, but love, we should remember, is
also constituted by ambivalence. This is the very point from which Melanie Klein departs, suggesting that
the ambivalence of all human bonds is the basis of an ethical demand to preserve precisely the life it is in
ones power, and sometimes also in ones interest, to destroy.
The power of love which is the manifestation of the forces which tend to preserve life is there in the
baby as well as the destructive impulses, Klein writes in Love, Guilt and Reparation. The fantasy of
destroying becomes coupled with the fear of losing those on whom one is absolutely dependent. To do
away with the one on whom I depend for food and shelter and survival is to imperil my own existence. The
fear of losing emerges time and again in Klein: There is in the unconscious mind a tendency to give
[the mother] up, which is counteracted by the urgent desire to keep her for ever. This form of ambivalence
emerges developmentally as an emotional bind when individuation isnt complete. But since individuation
is never complete, and dependency never really overcome, a broader ethical dilemma emerges: how not to
destroy the other or others whom I need in order to live. It isnt a matter of calculating that destroying them
would probably be a bad idea. Rather, it is a matter of recognising that dependency fundamentally defines
us: it is something I never quite outgrow, no matter how old and how individuated I may seem. And it isnt
that you and I are the same; rather, it is that we invariably lean towards and on each other, and it is
impossible to think about either of us without the other. If I seek to preserve your life, it is not only because
it is in my self-interest to do so, or because I have wagered that it will bring about better consequences for
me. It is because I am already tied to you in a social bond without which this I cannot be thought. So,
what implications does the thesis of emotional ambivalence in love have for thinking about alternatives to
the death penalty and for legal violence more generally? Is there a way to move beyond the dialectical
relation between the punishment of the death penalty and the life sentence?
*
Following Benjamins Critique of Violence, Derrida underscores the toxic intimacy between crime and its
legal remedy. The law distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate forms of the death penalty,
establishing the procedures by which that distinction is made. It also establishes the grounds on which the
state can inflict deadly violence either in war or through such legal instruments as the death penalty. The
death penalty, for Derrida, considered as a form of legal violence, closes down the distinction between
justice and vengeance: justice becomes the moralised form that vengeance assumes.


Its striking that this view is held in common by Derrida and the activist and scholar Angela Davis. Both
called for the retrial or release of Mumia Abu-Jamal (a political prisoner sentenced to death in 1982 for the
murder of a policeman: his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment without parole in 2012), arguing
that his overarching crime was his affiliation with the Black Panthers. Davis understands the alternative
between the death sentence and imprisonment as dialectical:
As important as it may be to abolish the death penalty, we should be conscious of the way the
contemporary campaign against capital punishment has a propensity to recapitulate the very historical
patterns that led to the emergence of the prison as a dominant form of punishment. The death penalty has
coexisted with the prison, though imprisonment was supposed to serve as an alternative to corporal and
capital punishment. This is a major dichotomy. A critical engagement with this dichotomy would involve
taking seriously the possibility of linking the goal of death penalty abolitionism with strategies for prison
abolition.
Like Davis, Derrida understands that the death penalty and imprisonment are hardly opposites, but form
two modalities of an economy of vengeance. When the state kills, and justifies doing so, it enacts
vengeance through its reasoning process; legal violence becomes no different from non-legal violence,
except that now the state performs the act and supplies its justification. But for Davis, the task is to move
beyond vengeance. Her mentor was at one time Herbert Marcuse, who in Eros and Civilisation, his
rejoinder to Civilisation and Its Discontents, suggested that Eros might be expanded to create forms of
community that would counter the force of Thanatos, or the death drive augmented under capitalism. He
referred to the surplus aggression created under capitalism, and suggested that Freud was describing a very
specific social organisation of aggression, not a pre-social death drive. He also thought that revolutionary
energy, as it were, could be marshalled against repressive institutions, among them capitalism and the
family. There is no drive theory in Daviss work, as far as I know: both sexuality and aggression are
socially organised. At the same time, however, there is a clear understanding that political resistance has
both to build and destroy. There is no way of getting round that double demand. Davis calls for the
abolition not only of the death penalty but of the institution and industry of imprisonment. The negation of
exploitative and violent institutions makes use of destructiveness, but also seeks to establish and strengthen
social bonds through repair and restorative justice rather than vengeance and retribution.
If we stay within the problem of crueltys relation to the death drive, we may wonder to what extent the
death drive, or aggression, can be fully directed by conscious political programmes such as those proposed
by Davis, and whether there is always an excess to destructiveness that cant quite be controlled or
explained by the social organisation of life. The important question here seems to be whether social bonds
should be understood within the framework of civilisation, or in some other way. As Freud makes clear in
Civilisation and Its Discontents, civilisation will hardly save us: the moral face of civilisation, after all, is
vengeance, and prisons are its exemplary institutions. In their place, Davis imagines communities that focus
on healing and repair, on forms of responsibility that forge new social bonds for those who may have
broken them. These bonds would be explicitly anti-capitalist, and would put an end to racist forms of
exploitation. She insists that in the United States, both prisons and the death penalty have to be understood
as part of the legacy of slavery, given that the disproportionate number of people in prison and on death
row in the US are black or Latino men and, increasingly, black or Latino women. (The NAACP reports that
African Americans now constitute nearly a million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population. African
Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites. Together, African American and
Hispanics comprised 58 per cent of all prisoners in 2008, even though African Americans and Hispanics
make up approximately one quarter of the US population. Those numbers have increased in recent years.
In the US today more than three thousand people are on death row, all of them poor, and most of them
African American or Latino.) Davis also argues that love and forgiveness must be pursued as alternatives to
retribution. This is not to imply that there is no destructiveness in this picture, but that it takes the form of
negating prisons, whose form of destructiveness damages life that ought properly to be repaired and even
restored to a broader social world.
Are we really so far from the death drive here? What if we understand the death drive not only as
manifested within the individual psyche, or in terms of group psychology, but as something that takes hold
of institutions and guides their aims, sometimes with furtive tenacity? The call for an end to imprisonment
and to prisons may not be possible, or practical, but it establishes a perspective from which we can see the
way that legal remedy is engaged in cruelty. To call for an end to cruelty is to call for the destruction of the
institutions of cruelty; the only question that remains is whether it would be possible to control the
destructive effects that would follow from the deinstitutionalisation of criminals. The fact is that the
destructive consequences of acts that seek to destroy destruction cant be fully known in advance. This is,
perhaps, where Freud on the unconscious operation of the death drive seems to have the last word,
indicating a future of destruction whose exact contours we cant know, but about which we can only feel
anxiety.


For Davis, abolitionism refers to the demand to abolish both the death penalty and prisons, but also to the
abolition of slavery, which remains a global phenomenon, active not only in the sweatshops of the
developing world but also in coerced agrarian work in the US. Prisons too continue the legacy of slavery,
acting now as the institutional mechanism by which a disproportionate number of people of colour are
deprived of citizenship. The fact that the death penalty is disproportionately applied to people of colour
implies that it is a way of regulating citizenship by other means and, in the case of the death penalty,
concentrating state power over questions of life and death that differentially affect minority populations.
Yet this power is not simply or exclusively sovereign. With the idea of a demographics of the condemned,
we enter the terrain that Achille Mbembe has called necropolitics. That security companies have taken
over the public administration of prisons in the US, the UK and elsewhere exposes the link between who is
owned, who is put out of play, whose unpayable economic or social debt now defines who they are and
who profits. The people, the public, are established as those who must be protected from the criminal
class, producing one class of people whose lives are worth preserving, and another whose lives can be
easily lost or destroyed.
Does debt forgiveness enter into this picture? What would be its psychic equivalent? Would it perhaps be
the operation of pardon as a deinstitutionalising force, including the deinstitutionalisation of sovereignty
and the death penalty? Derridas reflections on pardon were the focus of his seminar in 1997-99, directly
preceding his seminar on the death penalty. One question raised was whether forgiveness and pardon must
be figured as sovereign acts, or can be ways of deconstituting established forms of sovereignty. Is there a
way to conceptualise forgiveness and pardon as forms of institutional life, perhaps as the driving force that
undertakes the deinstitutionalisation of both the prison and the death penalty? Perhaps the opposition to the
death penalty has to be linked with an opposition to forms of induced precarity both inside and outside the
prison, in order to expose the various different mechanisms for destroying life, and to find ways, however
conflicted and ambivalent, of preserving lives that would otherwise be lost.