La pena de Muerte: eL teatro de La crueLdad y La iMaginación soberana

Jacques Derrida devotes two of his last seminars, between 1999 and 2001, to analyze the death penalty as a central issue in understanding sovereignty as an exceptional decision on life and death. My aim in this article is to analyze, from what Derrida calls a scopic drive, the relationship between the creation of power and the theatre of cruelty. This involve, adding one more vector to Derrida’s analyses, from a reading of Beccaria: Imagination, which I will analyze both in relation to how the sovereign is represented in the imagination of citizens and how, from the death penalty, he imagines his sovereignty.