Reflections on the guillotine

Name: Reflections on the guillotine
Brand: Totvsrj-record-dc
SKU: 9786555874068
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Autor: Albert Camus

Conteúdo do livro

CÓDIGO DA OBRA9786555874068

Sinopse

In Reflections on the Guillotine , an essay by Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus, which has never been published in Brazil, the author outlines his opposition to the death penalty. The book also includes a foreword to the Brazilian edition written by Manuel da Costa Pinto.

In 1914, Camus's father, described as a good man, attends a public execution. After the killer's beheading, considered by many to be too lenient a punishment for his crimes, he returns home in shock, in complete silence, feeling ill and vomiting. How can this "justice" leave a man in this state? asks the Algerian author. What's wrong with this sentence?

This is the starting point of Reflections on the Guillotine , an essay in which Camus, one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, discusses the death penalty, especially death by guillotine. To this end, he criticizes any argument in favor of capital punishment. For Camus, in a desacralized society, there can be no definitive punishment. While for the Catholic Church, the death penalty is not the end—after all, it is provisional: the condemned is removed from society, but with a chance of redemption in the afterlife—in our society, capital punishment is, indeed, definitive. It is an assertion that someone is absolutely evil while society is absolutely good, and it places the judge in the place of God.

Furthermore, Camus argues that, to believe that death by guillotine would be exemplary, one would have to start from the assumption that the death of a criminal convicted in a judicial process, subject to flaws, would prevent crimes that might otherwise never have been committed. In other words, a person is killed for the sake of a hypothesis.

Camus sees the death penalty as nothing more than a societal law of retaliation—an "eye for an eye." And he sees a contradiction in it: how can a law respond to a natural instinct when the role of legislation is precisely to inhibit humanity's most animalistic impulses? In his analysis, the State and society, more than accomplices, are responsible for these deaths; the State kills the individual condemned to death twice: once when it condemns him and makes him live with the expectation of the end; again when it actually ends his life.

The last death by guillotine in France occurred in the 20th century, in 1977. The author of great books such as The Stranger , The Plague and The Myth of Sisyphus pointed out the contradictions of this practice in 1957 in a very specific context of France, but his arguments still reverberate in our society today.

ISBN	978-655-587-406-8
Tradutor	Valerie Rumjanek
Altura	175 mm
Largura	115 mm
Profundidade	7 mm
Lançamento	14/03/2022
Páginas	96

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Conteúdo do livro

CÓDIGO DA OBRA9786555874068

Sobre o autor

Albert Camus

Albert Camus foi um jornalista, filósofo e escritor francês nascido na Argélia, em 1913. Seus trabalhos contribuíram com o crescimento da corrente de pensamento conhecida como absurdismo. Um dos grandes autores do século XX, recebeu o Prêmio Nobel de Literatura em 1957, três anos antes de sua morte. Entre suas maiores obras estão O estrangeiro, A peste e A queda.

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