January 2017
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19 Reads
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6 Citations
Precisely when it happens, how much time passes between when the first bullet is shot and when a body hits the ground – a few seconds, a couple of minutes – is irrelevant. For dying is an event; for the event, any event, happens. Now the killing of a person is not any event. Always in time and space, always situated, the killing of a person is a social event. Questions of when, where, why, and how belong to it. Because it is a social event, the killing of a person belongs in signification and concerns the law, as the institution responsible for the preservation of collective life. Depending on the legal construction of the killing of a person, the juridical apparatus will determine the adequate punishment. I am moving too fast, because punishment is only applicable after it is decided that the killing of a person is a crime: “an act punishable by law, as being forbidden by statutes or injurious to the public welfare” or “contingency as subjective willing of evil, [which] the universal authority must prevent or bring to justice” (Hegel 1952: 146). A crime takes place when the life that was interrupted has ethical significance, if the person is a member of the moral/legal collective. The killing of Amadou Diallo, in the South Bronx on February 4, 1999, was not considered an “act punishable by law,” nor “injurious to the public welfare”: the four officers were acquitted of two charges of second-degree murder and one charge of reckless endangerment. Neither murder nor sacrifice, the killing of Amadou Diallo is irrelevant before the law and public opinion, juridically and morally insignificant, because the person who lives in the South Bronx – the ethico-juridical thing standing at the entrance of that building on that night – was already dead. While the above statement might remind the reader of Agambenߣs (1998) notion of bare life, this concept cannot comprehend the ethic-juridical position I delineate here because, as will become evident by the end of this chapter, the black subject standing before the police officer(s) who shoot at him/her has never figured in the scene of life – hence the juridical and ethical irrelevance of his/her death is not due to banishment.