Orwell’s Execution

The question of the chapter is the role of the witness in a capital execution. In contrast to Foucault, who asserted the becoming-invisible of punishment, Derrida insists that “By definition, there will never have been any invisibility for a legal putting to death . . . the spectacle and the spectator are required.” George Orwell’s early short text “A Hanging” is read very closely here to discern how this essential trait of non-secrecy is put to the test when the witness’s testimony is consigned to a literary text and thus to a set of sealed traces.

Playing the Law

This chapter begins with a review of some of the arguments in Derrida’s essay “Before the Law” regarding the relation of literature and the law, each one coming (to stand) before the other. This condition, Derrida asserts, allows literature to do what he calls “play the law.” This idea is then taken up in a reading of a Baudelaire prose poem, “An Heroic Death,” in which a mime condemned to death for plotting against the throne performs before the sovereign and dies mid-performance when this prince engineers a rude interruption. The questions raised about this event by the poem’s narrator and left suspended, as well as other questions that can be raised, let me draw out all the senses in which this performance, including the text’s own performance, plays the law. I show that this play confounds the distinction of condemnation and pardon.

The Sentence Is the Story

This chapter takes up Norman Mailer’s 1979 novel The Executioner’s Song as chronicle of the “modern death penalty” era post-Gregg v. Georgia. Two questions or issues frame my analysis: the relation between narrative structure in general and the death penalty plot; the distinction between execution and suicide. The first issue is explored with the help of narratologists, but especially Walter Benjamin. The second reviews Kant’s argument that “no one can will [capital] punishment” and Derrida’s remarks, contra Kant, on the undecidability of execution and suicide. The chapter concludes with a brief reading of Mailer’s 1964 poem of the same title as his novel and speculates on how these two texts read the recent history of the U.S. death penalty.

Is Justice Burning?

This chapter begins with a survey of several of the explanations historians of capital punishment have put forward for the end of public executions in the West starting in the mid-nineteenth century. Besides well-known arguments of Foucault and others, I cite Victor Hugo’s observation from 1832 that moving the scaffold away from public view was an admission of shame in the practice. Against the background of secrecy laws proliferating around the U.S. death penalty today, I read Robert Coover’s 1977 novel The Public Burning, which restages the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 as an immense public spectacle in Times Square. The novel, I argue, crosses the two senses of its title; by dragging the execution into the public square it also brings out a shameless public sexual display, a public that is burning.

Beginning with Literature

This chapter reviews Derrida’s engagement with literature in The Death Penalty, Volume I. It explicates the notion of “the right to literature” and its relation to democracy (“No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy,” as Derrida has declared elsewhere). It works through Derrida’s reading of texts by Genet, Hugo, and Blanchot. It also recalls Derrida’s analysis in Given Time of the “absolute secret” of literature and includes a brief reading of Camus’s The Stranger.

Postmortem

This brief conclusion remarks that the four fictional works featured in the book all conclude with something like a postmortem, a survival of the narrative after the execution represented. In the case of The Executioner’s Song, it is a postmortem in the clinical sense, which I briefly characterize. This condition of literature’s survival leads me to reflect, finally, on literature’s ambiguous relations to the death penalty; on the one hand, like the witness to an execution, literature can seem to fulfill or enable the executions it represents; on the other hand, these literary survivals are the ashes or remains of a phantasm that would calculate the end and put an end to finitude.

Introduction

This short introduction reviews how this book came about after a long and varied engagement with Derrida’s seminar. It explains both the choice of texts in the chapters that follow and why other texts were not included, such as Richard Wright’s Native Son and Camus’s The Stranger (except for a brief reading in chapter 1).