"Doomed to Live": Reading Shelley's Frankenstein and "The Immortal Immortal" with Derrida's Death Penalty Seminars
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing upon Jacques Derrida’s recently published two-volume seminar on the death penalty, this essay analyzes two parallel cases from Mary Shelley’s fictions: on the one hand, Elizabeth’s objection to the death penalty in Frankenstein, as she visits Justine Moritz in prison; and on the other hand, the eternal life bestowed upon Winzy in the short story “The Mortal Immortal.” In both cases, the calculations at work necessarily incorporate something incalculable as the punishment becomes “capital.” Shelley objects not just to the cruelty of the death penalty or to the possibility of wrongful conviction, but also to the ways that the law is permitted to draw equivalencies between persons and subject them to a calculation. By thinking of the death penalty and “life penalty” as two sides of the same coin, Shelley effectively deconstructs the logical framework for capital punishment and articulates a complex abolitionist position. Shelley offers, in her fictional interrogation of life sentences and death sentences, a contradictory and bleak set of meditations upon the injustice inherent in human equivalence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".