Abstract

Within the framework of Ethics and Film Week, Alejandro Ariel gave a Conference on October 16, 2013, at the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Buenos Aires, basing it on the film The Last Hangman, to investigate different matters stemming from an articulating question: what is killing? Ariel ventures a hypothesis: killing may mean tying oneself to an act that renders impossible the disappearance of the life of the other in oneself. Throughout the analysis regarding the future of Pierrepoint, the hangman to which the title of the film alludes, counterpoints arise between legitimacy and the law, between writing and the law and between the act of killing. Pierrepoint, while being hangman for the English State, points out different aspects of his work which make it possible to differentiate murder from execution, especially so as the latter for him represents a technical mechanism of Justice, and it is carried out without cruelty or premeditation. However, is it possible to take a life and not be affected? When flaws in the State system are produced (regarding the excessive number of executions and the possibility of killing an innocent person, in other words a flaw of Justice) and, most especially, flaws of the subject in the abstinence/renunciation of his task (when in his last execution he places himself not in the position of executioner but that of a friend), we see how the subjective dimension of this position, which allowed him to work as a State executioner, ends.

Key Words: responsibility | death | hangman | abstinence.