Legal Punishment and Its Limits: The Future of Abolitionism Catherine Kellogg 1 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016 Abstract Derrida notes that while many discourses—like law, politics, morality and theology—make use of the term cruelty, psychoanalysis alone takes psychical suffering as its own object of study. He is therefore incredulous that psychoanalysis has had so little to say about such important legal and political questions as the death penalty and other forms of state-sanctioned cruelty. His diagnosis is that insofar as psychoanalysis remains attached to a logic or a fantasy of sovereignty— one in which subjectivity is understood as individual or indivisible—its revolu- tionary force remains blunted. Thus, Derrida calls for ‘a psychoanalysis to come’, a psychoanalysis for whom ‘cruelty’ is delinked from moral or theological approa- ches, a psychoanalysis which is delinked from its reliance on sovereignty—the sovereign subject, the sovereign nation or sovereign knowledge. Significantly, the ‘to come’ here is not the positing of some horizon of possibility for psychoanalysis, as if this were just an Idea (in a Platonic or regulative, Kantian, sense) that we must move towards. Rather the ‘to come’ expresses the dislocation that structures the very possibility of psychoanalysis from within. I conclude by asking how this psychoanalysis to come might shed light on what Angela Davis called the ‘great feat of the imagination’ required to ‘envision life beyond the prison’. Keywords Abolitionism Á Autoimmunity Á Cruelty Á Derrida Á Psychoanalysis & Catherine Kellogg ckellogg@ualberta.ca 1 Department of Political Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada 123 Law Critique DOI 10.1007/s10978-016-9196-x