Guillotine and Philanthropy

From Derrida,
“What must man be, what must man, the humanity of man have been, to have inscribed, incorporated as it were, the guillotine in the corpus of the rights of man? To have invented such a machine while interpreting it as a sign of man’s love for man, man who is a man and not a wolf for man, human for man, humanitarian or even “philanthropic” — in a moment we will hear the guillotine qualified in these terms: as a visible manifestation of a philanthropy. Moreover, in one of his first texts against the death penalty, the guillotine, and Doctor Guillotin, Hugo says ironically in 1832, “Mr. Guillotin was a philanthropist.”