An Institution of Waiting: Capital Punishment in Weil and Camus

This paper addresses the apparent tension between Albert Camus’s abolitionist critique of capital punishment and Simone Weil’s seemingly ambiguous remarks on the topic. I argue that Weil’s account of attention, consent, and free depersonalization definitively demands the suspension of the death penalty. By distinguishing natural power—expressed in domination, contempt, and bureaucratic penal systems—from supernatural justice—expressed through attention and the preservation of free consent—I argue that Weil treats abolition not as a precondition for justice but as a necessary consequence of the genuine attention that grounds it.