THE VANISHED FACE UNDER THE DEATH PENALTY SYSTEM: SEEING THE FACE OF THE OTHER THROUGH ART
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17501/23572744.2025.12103Keywords:
death penalty, mass psychology, performance art, alterity, desireAbstract
This paper will study the persistent public support for capital punishment in Taiwan and explore how it serves as a symbolic social ritual closely linked to the mass psychology, desires and fantasies. A few famous works of research have been cited in this paper, including Foucault's idea of biopolitics, Agamben's theory of the state of exception, Butler's theory of subject formation, and Lacanian/Žižekian theories on desire and fantasy. This paper studies the idea that capital punishment is not only a type of legal punishment but also a way to perform rituals and create a scene to meet deep-seated psychological needs. These symbolic performances reinforce social order but deterring ethical reflection. Thus, the fantasy of justice endures and engagement with the deeper causes of punitive desires is thus avoided. Building on Levinas's idea of the "face of the Other", this paper proposes performance art to intervene in ethical perception by means of embodied alterity. Performance-based artistic analysis is used to explore how the body, alterity, susceptibility and repetition can achieve consciousness states outside of oneself, disrupt normative frames, uncover complicity in punitive rituals, and develop ethically responsible encounters. Rather than substituting one fantasy (punitive justice) with another (ideal abolitionism) through art, this study proposes tense, reflective spaces that reveal the subject's inner divisions and the many, often contradictory, senses of self. Thus, fixed ideas of the self can be dismantled, and the community can be led to confront its own complicities and shared vulnerabilities. The community in this view is not guaranteed by the state or moral ideals. Rather, it is based on an acceptance of the state of lack of being and a fragile relationship with others.
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Copyright (c) 2026 YU HENG CHOU, Haisang Javanalikhikara
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
