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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present > Western philosophy, from c 1900 -
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Killing Times - The Temporal Technology of the Death Penalty (Hardcover)
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Killing Times - The Temporal Technology of the Death Penalty (Hardcover)
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Killing Times begins with the deceptively simple observation-made
by Jacques Derrida in his seminars on the topic-that the death
penalty mechanically interrupts mortal time by preempting the
typical mortal experience of not knowing at what precise moment we
will die. Through a broader examination of what constitutes mortal
temporality, David Wills proposes that the so-called machinery of
death summoned by the death penalty works by exploiting, or
perverting, the machinery of time that is already attached to human
existence. Time, Wills argues, functions for us in general as a
prosthetic technology, but the application of the death penalty
represents a new level of prosthetic intervention into what
constitutes the human. Killing Times traces the logic of the death
penalty across a range of sites. Starting with the legal cases
whereby American courts have struggled to articulate what methods
of execution constitute "cruel and unusual punishment," Wills goes
on to show the ways that technologies of death have themselves
evolved in conjunction with ideas of cruelty and instantaneity,
from the development of the guillotine and the trap door for
hanging, through the firing squad and the electric chair, through
today's controversies surrounding lethal injection. Responding to
the legal system's repeated recourse to storytelling-prosecutors'
and politicians' endless recounting of the horrors of crimes-Wills
gives a careful eye to the narrative, even fictive spaces that
surround crime and punishment. Many of the controversies
surrounding capital punishment, Wills argues, revolve around the
complex temporality of the death penalty: how its instant works in
conjunction with forms of suspension, or extension of time; how its
seeming correlation between egregious crime and painless execution
is complicated by a number of different discourses. By pinpointing
the temporal technology that marks the death penalty, Wills is able
to show capital punishment's expansive reach, tracing the ways it
has come to govern not only executions within the judicial system,
but also the opposed but linked categories of the suicide bombing
and drone warfare. In discussing the temporal technology of death,
Wills elaborates the workings both of the terrorist who produces a
simultaneity of crime and "punishment" that bypasses judicial
process, and of the security state, in whose remote-control
killings the time-space coordinates of "justice" are compressed and
at the same time disappear into the black hole of secrecy. Grounded
in a deep ethical and political commitment to death penalty
abolition, Wills's engaging and powerfully argued book pushes the
question of capital punishment beyond the confines of legal
argument to show how the technology of capital punishment defines
and appropriates the instant of death and reconfigures the whole of
human mortality.
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