The unsacrificeable subject?

Who deserves to die? In a book focused on the death penalty in the United States, a fair assumption is that this question envisages death as a punishment. Recent decisions by the United States Supreme Court have focused the question by limiting the application of the death penalty when defendants are minors, when the defendants are unable to understand the purpose of their execution, or when the defendants committed a crime other than murder. These individuals, we are now told, do not deserve to die. This chapter examines a different tradition in which death is not a punishment, the tradition, still visible in our political culture, of sacrifice. Focusing on sacrifice, we ask less about who deserves to die than who gets to die. Who is permitted to put themselves at risk, in the military, for example, for an honorable death? In its strongest forms, sacrifice purports to invert death into something else: death is no longer punishment and the negation of life but transcendence. Contrasting the "ultimate penalty" with the "ultimate sacrifice" opens up a broader discussion about sovereignty and violence and highlights the diversity of ways in which we encounter and produce death. Do these forms of death-death penalty and sacrifice-come into contact, and what happens if they do?.