This chapter focuses on the scene of execution, on the essentially theatrical and spectacular nature of the death penalty. It argues that this scene involves not a literal seeing but a virtual or phantasmatic seeing. It highlights two moments of Jacques Derrida’s reading of the death penalty in The Death Penalty seminars: the first is Derrida’s insistence on the virtualization of the spectacle (contra Michel Foucault); the second is Derrida’s appeal to the explicitly phantasmatic dimension of the death penalty. As the chapter tries to show, there is no escaping the scene of execution because there is no escaping the dream of execution; one does not simply put an end to a phantasmatic truth. But if this “ready-made phantasy” is the case, if there is something invincible about the dream of execution, then what would it mean, this chapter asks, to think beyond the death penalty?
