More than five decades after the publication of Camus' Reflections on the Guillotine (1957), capital punishment continues to wreak havoc around the world, the scene where fanatics and abolitionists confront each other. The fanatics have always supported this punishment on the ground of its supposed deterrent power and/or of its supposed social utility. As to the abolitionists, they oppose this punishment in the name of: the sacredness of every human being (human rights activists); the risk of putting to death innocent people, and the prudence to avoid irreversible punishments, as well as the inability of death sentence to be really deterrent. This article extends the abolitionist argument, but from an existentialist perspective, denouncing the absurdity of sentencing to death a being-for-death and calling into question the juridical status conferred on capital punishment. It argues that, as all humans are sentenced to death from conception, death penalty is only a futile and cruel act, and that, as death sentence aims at the annihilation rather than the moral reformation of the criminal, it does not deserve any juridical status.

It was a commonplace among traditional linguists and literary scholars that their disciplines were far apart from each other, and that there could be only very little interaction between them. In the late 20-th century, however, the fields of conventional linguistics and traditional literary studies were profoundly unsettled by major paradigm shifts like the decisive turn to text linguistics and discourse analysis, and new trends in literary theory (theoretical criticism). It is against the background of these shifts that the present paper investigates the relationship between modern linguistics (in the guise of text linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, transformational-generative linguistics, semantics, etc.) and literary criticism, both theoretical and practical. By grappling with these two questions – 'Is there a common denominator between linguistics and literary criticism?' and 'Are literary texts fully amenable to a strictly linguistic analysis' -, this article traces the historical development of modern linguistics from conventional linguistics and of literary theory from traditional literary studies, while contrasting conventional linguistics and traditional literary studies, and comparing text linguistics/discourse analysis and literary theory. Ultimately, the paper establishes 'text', 'discourse' and 'language' as commonalities between linguistics and literary criticism, and takes the stance in favour of the irreducibility of literary texts to exclusively linguistic methods and techniques of analysis.

This paper is a criticism of the theory according to which the primary aim of literature is to give pleasure, and literature does not teach anything new to human beings. The paper first attempts to place the triad literature-pleasure-ethics in a wide context of literary-critical and rhetorical debates that span centuries, from the Antiquity to the modern times. Then it proceeds to a critical examination of this doctrine of the primacy of pleasure over ethics in literature. In the end, it posits that there is no opposition between pleasure and ethics: literature only delights as it instructs. But inasmuch as ethics is the core layer, and pleasure the surface layer of literature, the former overrides the latter, and so reading involves moving from the outside to the inside of a work.

We are living in a period where public opinion is unanimous in the defence of Human Rights, as the protesters are always far outnumbered by the partisans. This paper neither takes a side nor acts as a judge in disputes between supporters and protesters, but offers a constructive criticism of the theory and praxis of Human Rights. Thus, in an attempt to extend the scope of traditional criticism whose only target was the concept of 'Right,' this essay reflects on the essential identity of Man, the beneficiary of the Rights. It walks in the footsteps of Levinas in the laying of the practice of the 'unconditional duty to the Other' as the foundation of Man's Humanity and as the objective foundation of the Rights.