CHAPTER 3

The Future Anterior of Blood

There will have been blood:

When the blade cuts through the neck of the condemned one, three unequal jets spurt out forcefully: the two cariotids project blood in powerful jets that can exceed two meters; in the center there is a lesser whitish jet extending 30 centimeters, namely the cephalorachidian fluid that, brutally compressed, spurts from the severed vertebral column. The recipient that the head falls into has an external wall high enough to stop these spurts of blood. But there is some splashing, clumsiness. One inconvenience of the job of the executioner is that his clothes are soiled. Sanson was already complaining about that.¹

In France, the country that instituted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and introduced what was conceived of as a humane, instantaneous death penalty in 1792, there will nevertheless have been that blood. And by retaining the guillotine as method of execution up to the moment of abolition, France will have insured that such state-sponsored bloodletting remained in the Western imaginary until 1977.

So there will have been blood, but according to the tense and temporality of the formulation, by the time we get to the present moment, the moment in question, there will be no more; no more blood. Blood will be over; after having been all over, it will all be over. It is tempting to imagine that: no more blood, blood no more. It is tempting to take the time to imagine that: no more blood for all. For there will also have been time, flowing like blood, and coming up against the particular programmed interruption of mortal time that is the death penalty. Time for the condemned one will have run out; for a convict who is executed, the state will have announced the event of no more time. He or she will have lived, will have had time, up to the moment when he or she has no more; he will have had blood flowing until the moment when his blood flows no more.

The French call what will have happened a future anterior; in English we call it a “future perfect.” In the French language the future anterior refers to a future in the past that is nevertheless anterior to, that precedes another explicit or implied event that could be either in the future or the past. It figures in a diversity of constructions going well beyond possible English examples such as “by the time the DNA evidence becomes available you will have already been executed” or “the Supreme Court will have made its decision by this time tomorrow.” In French it is also used in the following invented formulations (transliterations of the French usage appearing in brackets): “as soon as the drugs [will] have been found on the black market, the execution can proceed”; “the public defender missed that important detail as he fell [will have fallen] asleep”; “in 2005, in Roper, Scalia was [will have been] scandalized by the idea that American jurisprudence might be inflected by international opinion or conventions when it comes to executing juveniles.” The choice of the French classification for my chapter title is intended to emphasize a difference between what is done, perfected, achieved in time, and what still seeks to determine the anteriority or posteriority of the thing; how in this quirk of language there is a type of intersection between future and past such that what appeared to be happening within the perspective of its own future gets preempted by the past. For according to my argument in this chapter, that is what happens when the death penalty presumes to abandon the shedding of blood: the more capital punishment claims to move beyond the cruelty such bloodshed represents, the more it appears that blood will still have been a necessary element in its operation; and that is because, according to the hypothesis that I will develop here in detail, blood is a function of time.

My first sentence also serves to imagine some time in the future, a point at which the death penalty will have been practiced in the United States but is no more; imagining also the time it will (or would) have taken, less for the current death penalty to be abolished, than for the casuistry of calculating the permissible quantity of pain and suffering to appear as the absurdity or obscenity that it is. I’d like, and this book would like to imagine a time when that calculation is held to be similar to, and as unconscionably incoherent as determining how to define a slave as a fraction of a whole person: three fifths, as we remember, in 1787, thirty years after Damiens was divided into quarters. Perhaps by 2057 or 2087 we will be able to smile at the manifestly ludicrous seriousness with which Supreme Court justices must currently determine how much it has to hurt to hurt too much as the state puts someone to death, how much more pain there is in a cocktail of midazolam (to render you unconscious), vecuronium or pancuronium bromide (to stop your breathing), and potassium chloride (to stop the heart), than, say, in a single dose of pentobarbital; or how long a condemned person has to writhe on the gurney to demonstrate that their constitution cannot withstand permissible constitutional pain: whether the correct dosage of time is eleven minutes, as it was for Scott Dawn Carpenter in Oklahoma in 1997; or twenty-four minutes, as it was for Raymond Landry in Texas in 1988; or twenty-five minutes for Dennis McGuire in Ohio in 2014; or thirty-four minutes for Angel Diaz in Florida in 2006; or forty-three minutes for Clayton D. Lockett in Oklahoma in 2014.² Perhaps by 2057 or 2087 those good-faith Supreme Court deliberations will seem as offensively quaint as Kant’s lucid sense of how to apply the ius talionis in the cases of rape, pederasty, and bestiality (castration, quite clearly, in the first two cases, permanent expulsion from civil society in the third, obviously).³ In the meantime, however, while there is still the death penalty, that moment will manifestly not have arrived.

In the Anglo-American world, the generalized institution of hanging as preferred form of capital punishment until late into the nineteenth century either answers to, or satisfies by fiat, a desire for a death penalty that avoids the blood-soaked practices of the guillotine, and those of previous times. In 1769, William Blackstone’s Commentaries of the Law of England was able to offer this self-congratulatory observation: “It will afford pleasure to an English reader and do honor to the English law, to compare [the catalogue of English forms of death penalty] with that shocking apparatus of death and torment to be met with in the criminal codes of almost every other nation in Europe.” And as recently as 1999, in Provenzano v. Moore, when the Florida Supreme Court weighed, and confirmed the Eighth Amendment constitutionality of the electric chair following the botched execution of Allen Lee Davis, dissenting Justice Leander Shaw saw fit to compare Davis’s “bloody execution” with France’s use of the guillotine:

As conceded by the State in the present proceeding, the guillotine as used in the French Revolution is a prime example of a method that would fail in this regard [a method of execution must entail no undue violence, mutilation, or disgrace], for while beheading results in a quick, relatively painless death, it entails frank violence (i.e., gross laceration and bloodletting) and mutilation (i.e., decapitation) and disgrace (i.e., public spectacle) and thus is facially cruel.⁴

The frank violence and mutilation of the guillotine makes it prima facie cruel; it cannot avoid gross laceration and bloodletting. For blood is itself cruel: the Latin cruor refers primarily to blood that “flows from a wound, a stream of blood,” in contrast to the less restrictive sanguis, which designates both blood “circulating in bodies and that shed by wounding.”⁵ Externally streaming blood, the effusion produced by a mechanism like the guillotine, points to a conjoined history of cruelty and blood, as Derrida notes beginning in the third session of the first year of his death penalty seminar: “What is the meaning of cruelty? Is it blood, a history of blood, as the etymology seems to indicate (cruor is red blood, blood that flows)?”⁶ But he follows up those two questions with a third, asking whether “one put[s] an end to cruelty on the day that one no longer makes blood flow?” (DP I, 96). That question, which led Derrida to understand differently from Foucault the transformation of punishment in the second half of the eighteenth century, preferring to call it a “de-spectacularization” (DP I, 43), is reposed in the ninth session of the second year, and explicitly related to “the move from decapitation … to lethal injection, or even to the gas chamber, which no longer causes bleeding” (DP II, 220). Thus, a first element of the complicated set of ideas that I will try to analyze here is the question of whether, or how, blood flows in a visibly bloodless death penalty.

Derrida begins his seminar series by invoking four paradigmatic executions: those of Socrates, Jesus, Al-Hallaj, and Joan of Arc (DP I, 21–22). Among those examples, only Al-Hallaj dies a really bloody death—by some combination of torture, crucifixion, and dismemberment reminiscent of Ravaillac and Damiens—in contrast to Socrates’s hemlock, Joan of Arc’s burning, and Jesus’s crucifixion. Blood is already occulted even in Jesus’ case, although the subsequent iconography has often wallowed in it.⁷ For although Jesus was whipped and crowned with thorns, the Gospel of John, the sole gospel to record the fact, states that it was only after he died that a soldier pierced his side so that out flowed blood and water (John 19:34). One might therefore suppose that more primitive technologies of execution, but also contemporary forms, play on a judicious application of pain that works precisely by controlling blood flow, which also involves a play on visibility and, in complicated ways that we have seen, on spectacle. Blood loss is economized in order to prolong the torture in the cases of flaying and crucifixion, and it is as it were bypassed in the case of hanging; blood is purified with elemental fire in the case of burning and infected in order to confound death with anesthesia in cases from Socrates’s hemlock to lethal injection.

We have also seen in some detail how the post-Enlightenment period appeared to transpose or deflect the question of blood, and relations between blood and cruelty, by concentrating on mechanisms of an instantaneous capital punishment, by eliminating the duration that is conceptually consonant with sensibility, and therefore with pain. But Shaw’s dissent in Provenzano again combines the idea of cruelty deriving from the duration of an execution with that due to a presence of blood.⁸ That is because blood, as a function of cruelty, is necessarily articulated through time: how much flows or for how long. Bloodshed belies the instant; a bloodless execution, it is presumed, enables it, but as we analyzed, identifying the instant proves elusive. My overarching presumption in this chapter will be that the flow of blood and the passage of time are indeed inseparable, and that it is once again the death penalty that enables us to interrogate particulars of the strangely prosthetic relation that obtains between the human and its forms of temporality: Time is the fulcrum where blood meets cruelty beyond any etymology, and via the instant of putting to death the supposed naturality of blood comes to be doubled by an uncanny mechanicity.

Derrida’s question about the cruelty or noncruelty of a bloodless death penalty is put into relation with two broader ideas. First, blood is for Derrida the site of a homo-hematological nexus whereby “the cultural history of blood, and also the imaginary, symbolic, phantasmatic, techno-scientific history of blood … ultimately merges with the history of what is called man” (ibid.). And that nexus extends through the history of “what one conceives as blood, blood conceived [le sang conçu], a history of the treatment of blood, a history of bloodletting, of the blood one sees flow, of the blood one lets flow, of the blood one causes to flow, of the blood that one does or doesn’t staunch” (ibid.). In terms of what I have just stated, the merging of the history of blood with the history of humanity derives from the fact that blood marks the time of the human. Blood is the temporal measure of life, specifically human (or mammalian) life.⁹ It is therefore a crucial question for the death penalty as interruption of that measure; and conversely it makes the death penalty a crucial question not just for those who suffer it, but as well for the human in general: Capital punishment disrupts life as bloodflow of time.

Derrida’s second broader idea is implied in the formulation “what one conceives as blood.” He expresses it in these stark terms at the beginning of the session:

The concept and blood.

How to conceive, how to conceive of it, the relation between the concept and blood?

How to conceive of blood? Can blood be conceived? And how might a concept bleed, how might it, this concept, lead to an effusion [épanchement] of blood? (DP II, 214)

In this clear reference to Hegel, as canonical conceiver of the concept and of speculative dialectics in the Western tradition, Derrida draws on ideas published in Glas some twenty-five years earlier. He returns to the importance given, in Hegel’s development of the concept and of absolute knowledge, not just to Christianity as the supreme moment of revealed religion, but to blood as that which, in that moment, is shed without for all that being lost: “we have had to conclude, since Hegel, that the blood that Christ lost on the cross, he didn’t lose, it wasn’t lost. The concept, the history of spirit, the history of truth or the history of God will in a certain way have staunched its flow. The absolute concept will have staunched the blood by giving it meaning” (215). As Derrida reads Hegel, Christ’s blood managed to flow as a result of his cruel execution, yet at the same time be sublated and invisibilized by the concept. Blood gives the concept its sense; blood underwrites the concept, and a primary sublation would be a type of transfusion: the sublation of blood by the concept: “A first philosophical and Hegelian, dialectical response to the question of the relations between the concept and blood is that the concept, well, the concept is the end of blood” (ibid.). The concept therefore succeeds, in Hegel’s thinking, at the price of blood.

The discussion to follow will culminate in an analysis of how Hegel’s dialectics causes blood to flow uncannily both inside and outside the body. What his concept thus introduces, contemporaneous with the de-spectacularization of a cruel death penalty, is effectively an artificial blood flowing like an external prosthesis to the human, a prosthesis whose name will again be time. My examination of the conceptual nexus of blood, time, and the death penalty begins, however, with Socrates. His capital crime, as we know, was that of perverting the youth of Athens by teaching them, among other things, to make of life a preparation for death. Many centuries later, Heidegger will have revised Socrates’s version of a life spent in expectation of death by means of a very different conception of human time on the basis of which we might resist our static capture within the drudgery of the present. Heidegger’s ex-static time challenges the presumption that time consists of a succession of “nows,” a presumption that, he believes, has persisted since Aristotle and continued through Hegel. However, as I have suggested, time in Hegel is more complex, the particular complexity of interest to me being time’s relation to blood.

Socrates is the obligatory philosophical or historical antecedent for any discussion of the conjunction between human temporality and the practice of capital punishment. His death penalty, recounted in the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, was carried out in as anesthetic a manner as was available in 399 BCE, by means of a death penalty that approximated current practices of lethal injection. His death by lethal ingestion resembled a forced suicide—if that is not an oxymoron—rather than the violence that continues to plague even the most contemporary practices of execution. Yet, for all that, it was an execution whose timing appeared wholly determined by the clock, even if the ticking of that clock had to deal with elements of chance, in particular with a reprieve provided by meteorological whim.

We are told that almost a month elapsed between Socrates’s being sentenced to death and the carrying out of that sentence. On the day before the sentence the Athenian state had sent a ship to Delos for the ritual commemoration of the safe return from Crete of Theseus’s seven youths and maidens, and custom required that nothing like an execution be allowed to disturb the social and religious balance before the ship returned safely. As Phaedo recounts: “They have a law that as soon as this mission begins the city must be kept pure, and no public executions may take place until the ship has reached Delos and returned again, which sometimes takes a long time, if the winds happen to hold it back.”¹⁰ The eventual arrival of the ship is narrated in Crito’s dialogue: “It hasn’t actually come in yet, but I expect that it will be here today, judging from the report of some people who have just arrived from Sunium and left it there. It’s quite clear from their account that it will be here today, and so by tomorrow, Socrates, you will have to … to end your life.”¹¹

It becomes clear, on the one hand, that the timing of Socrates’s execution involves a complicated set of aleatory effects, which are as if programmed into it: how many days will it take to sail to Delos and back; how much time will elapse between the moment the ship is sighted from Cape Sounion and the moment when it docks in Athens; presuming it stops first on the peninsula, when precisely will it arrive in Piraeus; how strictly will “what the authorities say” concerning Socrates’s having to “die on the day after the boat arrives” be interpreted?¹² And indeed, what if the ship were to be wrecked at sea, never to return?

On the other hand, in the ancient Greek context, those seeming chance effects would in fact be controlled by the Fates. Indeed, in Socrates’s case, the commemoration that gives him a reprieve is that of a tragic fatality, the ritual trip to Delos being made to honor Apollo in thanks for, and in memory of Theseus’s victory over the Minotaur. But prior to that victory, seven youths and maidens had to be sacrificed on a regular basis by being sent to appease King Minos of Crete, where they were either consumed by the Minotaur or lost in the Labyrinth. The voyage to Delos was therefore a memorial to the fateful and fatal sacrifice of Athens’ innocents; it was the city’s autoimmune death sentence, a regular inoculation that continued until Theseus decided to settle things with the Minotaur by taking it upon himself to sail with the victims. Thanks to Daedalus’s advice and Ariadne’s thread, he was able to kill the beast and exit the Labyrinth safely. Thereafter Athens would be able to avoid the slaughter of its innocents, but not without another tragic fatality, the needless sacrifice not of the youngest and finest but of the revered monarch himself: state infanticide thus became regicide. For Theseus, having told his father, King Aegeus, that he would rig a white sail to signify victory over the Minotaur and a black sail to signify failure, omitted to hoist the correct sail (perhaps because of his indecent haste to abandon Ariadne on Naxos). As a result, the sighting of his ship from Cape Sounion brought about a self-imposed sentence of death for King Aegeus, who, seeing the black sail and presuming his son was dead, threw himself into the sea.

The apparent clockwork of Socrates’s death penalty does not, therefore, function within a mortal temporality conceived of in the way that we Moderns understand it. The mythology and ontology of ancient Greece prescribes a time that functions outside any human reckoning, and what the state imposed on Socrates may be called less a death sentence than a mortality sentence regulated by fate. With or without that sentence, however, Socrates famously inaugurated a negotiation of the fate of mortality that we continue to understand in terms of “preparing [oneself] for dying and death,” following the example of “true philosophers” who spurn the body and instead “make dying their profession.”¹³ Within that logic, which has of course been revived by any number of thinkers throughout the Western tradition, the chronometric interruption of mortality constituted by capital punishment is tempered, even transcended by forms of philosophical serenity in the face of death. As Socrates argues in the Apology, “to be afraid of death … is to think that one knows what one does not know. No one knows with regard to death whether it is not really the greatest blessing that can happen to a man, but people dread it as though they were certain that it is the greatest evil.”¹⁴ Preparing for death, making death one’s profession means in that respect renouncing the whole clockwork of mortality; Socrates’s preparation for death takes place as it were outside of life, at least outside of a life measured by mortal time. That allows him both to reproach his judges for their worthless and hence wasteful economy of time—“for the sake of a very small gain in time you are going to earn the reputation … of having put Socrates to death … [whereas] if you had waited just a little while, you would have had your way in the course of nature”¹⁵—and to reject Crito’s invitation, at the end, to stave off the inevitable, by insisting that there is “no need to hurry.” Socrates replies: “I believe that I should gain nothing by drinking the poison a little later—I should only make myself ridiculous in my own eyes if I clung to life and hugged it when it has no more to offer.”¹⁶ The example taught by Socrates’s death penalty would be an acceptance of one’s fate such as judicial logic presumes and encourages to this day—assume the crime, make amends to the victim, consent to the punishment—in exchange for an execution without violence or suffering. And indeed, as we noted, his execution would seem to be in accord with all the norms of a humanitarian post-Enlightenment death penalty whose evolution we have discussed at length. In Albert Camus’s famous abolitionist text “Reflections on the Guillotine” (1957), the French writer makes reference to the Greeks who, “after all, were more humane with their hemlock” and the “relative freedom” they afforded their condemned.¹⁷ Camus ends his text by arguing that if France is unable to abolish the death penalty, the execution should at least be carried out by means of “an anesthetic that would allow the condemned man to slip from sleep to death (which would be left within his reach for at least a day so that he could use it freely and would be administered to him in another form if he were unwilling or weak of will),” thereby putting “a little decency into what is at present but a sordid and obscene exhibition.”¹⁸ Above all, Camus is insisting, his country needs to move beyond the “revolting butchery” of truncation with its “spurts of blood dat[ing] from a barbarous period,”¹⁹ namely the period when execution was inseparable from torture and when blood shed was the sign of a suffering body, a body suspended in the passive time of its torment.

Socrates’s bloodless, anesthetic death is therefore alleviated further by his preparation for it, by his renouncing the temporality of mortality that regulates the span of life for the greater part of humanity. Much closer to us, Heidegger undertook a thorough recasting of the relation to time of the “being [Seiende], which we ourselves in each case are and which includes inquiry among the possibilities of its being,” namely Dasein.²⁰ Heidegger’s recasting, of course, took place by means of an investigation of how Dasein finds itself thrown into a world of other beings in which it has to “take care.”²¹ That is something it may do inauthentically, by falling prey to the everydayness of the world, being “tranquilized,” “lost in the publicness of the they,” or “tangled up [verfängt] in itself” (BT 169–71). Or it may do so authentically, which does not mean achieving some superior, uncorrupted version of the inauthentic but consists rather in “a modified grasp of everydayness” (172).

Now, as Heidegger comes to conclude Division One of his analysis (Being and Time will complete only two of six projected divisions), he returns to the question of care as if to displace the sense of how Dasein phenomenologically is. He seeks to move from the inevitable, or seeming, spatial connotations of being-in-the-world toward the temporality that is, for him, its primordial sense. Falling prey to everydayness means, most importantly for Heidegger, falling prey to a particular version of the present, one that neither provides existential enjoyment of the moment, nor frees Dasein from the stasis of the present, understood more precisely as the stasis of the instant as objectifiable unit of time. As we have seen, it would be that very conception of the instant—the condemned person’s institutionally imposed, codified, and implemented instant of death—that is appropriated by capital punishment.

The lever for Heidegger’s shift into temporality is the uncanniness produced by an “anxiety” that “fetches Dasein back out of its entangled absorption in the ‘world’ ” (182). Thanks to anxiety Dasein recognizes that it has fled from itself (in the they), and comes to understand a potentiality of its being-in-the-world that orients it instead toward the future. Dasein’s manner of being-in-the-world, defined as care, thus leads it not only to understand its situation vis-à-vis other beings but also to realize its own unrealized potential: “As long as Dasein is, something is always still outstanding: what it can and will be” (224). By means of that argument Heidegger will have effectively rejoined being to time: by simply being, by simply being in the world, by simply taking care of what is thereby encountered, Dasein is futurally invested in what it can become in relation to that world. Dasein therefore comes into time, its being becomes temporal: What it takes care of above all else is time.

It is also on that basis that Heidegger will define the specific temporality of Dasein as being-toward-death. The idea of Dasein’s potentiality as something “always still outstanding” cannot avoid the implication of an end signified by death: “the ‘end’ itself belongs to what is outstanding [and] the ‘end’ of being-in-the-world is death” (224). So the ultimate uncanniness of being-in-the-world derives not from some nonspecific anxiety but rather from being thrown into a relation with death; as soon as Dasein is, it is ahead of itself, but we understand that what lies ultimately ahead, is death: “Death is a way to be that Dasein takes over as soon as it is” (236). As soon as it is, Dasein is involved in caring, it has no choice in that; being involved in caring, its understands its potential, for example the potential to care otherwise but also the potential simply to exist from one day to the next; but in realizing those potentials, let’s say as passively or as actively as it wishes, as authentically or inauthentically as it cares, it is at the same time potentializing itself toward, and in death. That logic functions less, however, in the sense of being afraid of one’s demise, than as an unsettling existential mood that, at the same time, works as an extreme challenge. For there is no stepping out of that existential situation, no handing it over for someone else or something else to deal with. Death—when it actually comes, as well as in the way it clouds life—has to be dealt with all alone: “Insofar as it ‘is,’ death is always essentially my own” (231).

From that perspective, Heidegger’s ontology produces a way of being for Dasein that resembles Socrates’s insistence on making a profession of dying. Although death counteracts, logically speaking, the dynamic potential that was presumed as soon as Dasein came to be in the world, it will nevertheless constitute the finite terminus of that potential, hence its fulfillment; there will, after all, be no Dasein beyond it. Death is the term and endpoint of a mortal’s time. Once one understands that “with death, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality of being,” once being-in-the world becomes “the possibility of no-longer-being-able-to-be-there” (241), then everything lived goes into the effort of dealing with that potentiality. As we shall see further in Chapter 4, that potentiality means this paradox: Dasein’s most extreme possibility also represents its “absolute impossibility” (ibid.). Not only, then, must Dasein face the fact that life and all the effort one puts into living comes to an end in death, but it must also prepare for something that it cannot know or experience in advance. In turn, one can make all that the pretext for various forms of avoidance, for example an “everydayness” that modifies one’s empirical certainty (yes, I will die) with another (I am still alive, so I’m not dying just yet); or an everydayness that simply allows supposedly more pressing, immediate concerns to get in the way: “Everyday taking care of things makes definite for itself the indefiniteness of certain death by interposing before it those manageable urgencies … nearest to us” (248).

If Dasein were to hold death before itself as its most “eminent possibility” (250), it would be able to relate to it as a form of actualization and so attain authentic existence, transforming the mood-defined everyday into a life of “unshakable joy [gerüstete Freude]” (296). Death will not as a result be overcome, nor will one find a way of experiencing it before the fact, nor will one be able simply to treat it as an expectation (or conversely, convince oneself it will never happen). Heidegger instead asks us to prepare for death by means of a combination of resoluteness and anticipation, to transform being-toward-death into what he calls, by means of a double typographical emphasis, “passionate, anxious freedom toward death” (255).²² Furthermore, in a move that returns us more closely to the terms of reference given in Socrates, such a freedom is related to “fate.” On the one hand, of course, the certainty that Dasein will die necessary makes death its destiny or fate. On the other hand, by referring to fate, Heidegger is putting a seemingly modern concept of freedom, that of freedom toward death, into a paradoxical relationship with a fate that—from that modern point of view—it is difficult not to conceive of as deterministic: “Only being free for death gives Dasein its absolute goal.… The finitude of existence thus seized upon tears one back out of [the] endless multiplicity of closest possibilities offering themselves—those of comfort, shirking and taking things easy—and brings Dasein to the simplicity of its fate [Shicksals]” (365).²³

In fact, though, Heidegger wants to make the simplicity of Dasein’s fate a function of its freedom, which is what he presumes to do by radically rewriting the concept of temporality. However much death be inevitable or fated, freedom for death is a liberation, out of the “now” of a classical concept of time, into ecstatic temporality, allowing Dasein as it were to stretch along the span of time while at the same time living—double emphasis again—“in the Moment for ‘its time’ ” (366). It is as if Dasein, in its authentic possibility, were living along a parallel axis to the operations of fate, or indeed, by running ahead toward its destined death, were able to bring that predicted future to bear on the moment. Whereas we would normally understand fate as the events of our lives preordained beyond our control, written in stone in some supernatural register, a freed Dasein goes ahead of itself to meet the inevitability of its death, and in so doing undoes the obstructionist pall that death casts over life. At the same time, it imports that type of preemptive strike against death into everyday existence, as though fating itself in all its moments: “We call fate the anticipatory handing oneself down to the there of the Moment that lies in resoluteness” (368).

In Being and Time, therefore, death is promoted from being the mark of human finitude to become the motor for a thorough reinterpretation of temporality. Starting from a seemingly naïve analysis of how beings attend, by means of “care,” to what is within immediate reach in everyday life, the argument has progressed to dealing with what is outside of reach—the death that is the presumed external limit of living—bringing that back in, both to unsettle the everyday and encourage a more authentic experience of it. Through that argument, Heidegger has not just disturbed the presumptive habits of moment-to-moment existence but also jolted what we call the present moment out of its supposed security. Once Dasein is being-toward-death it can no more revert to living through, or along, something it naively interprets as a “succession of nows” (314); it is, in time, otherwise.

As I recalled earlier, an objectively identifiable instant, a “now,” is precisely what the death penalty requires. The appropriation of the instant of the “now” is both capital punishment’s general condition of possibility and the fantasmatic investment of post-Enlightenment practices of it. In the first place, capital punishment imposes upon the flux of human life a “now” like no other: here is the now of your death; in such and such an instant your life will be terminated; we will choose and give you that instant; your nows will have no succession beyond the instant that we determine. Against the question, posed by every mortal, of how to economize time—“what am I going to do, what must I do to optimize or maximize or intensify the time I have left to live,” as Derrida puts it (DP II, 151)—the death penalty calculates the time of an execution as an idealized instant. In the second place, therefore, from the time the death penalty came to be distinguished from torture, and juridical authorities began to lessen the duration of suffering associated with it, capital punishment presumed to control the now of an execution, to isolate and delimit it. That means defining and comprehending, in absolute terms, the instant of the now as the instant that separates life from death. But the converse effect of that tendency is to infect the time of life with the now of death. As if in grotesque parody of Heidegger’s freedom for death, sentencing to death and thereby determining the precise “now” of the end of life means that the lived nows of the condemned person’s everyday existence no longer function as moments in which death is possible, and which potentialize being. Instead, those lived nows come to constitute “dead” instants, instants of nonbeing that restrict or imprison a condemned person in a time devoid of, vacated by life.

For once “unnatural” death is practiced in the precise form of the death penalty, the present now comes to be staged as instant of death. That was something recognized by Arasse in his analysis of the guillotine as simultaneously instant-making and death-dealing machine, one that, “by its instantaneous action … sets before our eyes the invisibility of death at the very instant of its occurrence.”²⁴ For him:

The guillotine is perhaps the only machine thus to exhibit in plain view the essentially destructive, rending, agonizing potential of very instant. This formidable configuration takes us back to the etymology of the word: instans, that which stands over, that which threatens. The image of the machine is the more frightening in that its very reliability suggests but a single instant of time, that of death in its unerring stroke, a mechanized and more “productive” version of the immortal reaper’s scythe.²⁵

What impresses Arasse is precisely the idea that life is placed on the knife-edge of the guillotine blade and violently severed from itself by death. It is therefore as if death were endowed with a new form of technological precision that then comes to define, as it were to retrofit life, producing the “blinding immediacy [of] what lies between the last quiver of life and the instantaneous and fatal ‘afterwards’ of truncation.”²⁶

Such an objectifiably instant “now,” a “now” conceived of as minimal unit in a succession of such units, constitutes for Heidegger the “vulgar understanding of ‘time’ ” (291), in the sense of the everyday presumption to isolate a present moment, to separate it from both past and future. We saw how he begins Being and Time by resisting the tradition within which Dasein, the being that raises the question of its being, is treated as something objectively present, separated from other similarly present objects that it observes existing around it, according to the duality of subject and world that has persistently dominated Western thinking. And we saw his subsequent shift from treating being-in-the-world as spatial to temporal. Thanks to its thrownness and resolute anticipation, the being called Dasein, as being in time, is not objectively present in a now, but is instead ecstatic, outside any stasis of a given instant: “the ecstatic unity of temporality—that is, the unity of the ‘outside itself’ … is the condition of the possibility that there can be a being that exists as its ‘there’ ” (334). Dasein’s ecstasies are plural. First, it is taken outside of stasis toward the future in being-toward-death; one removes oneself from the trap of the now by entertaining one’s future possibility. But second, in running forward in that way Dasein necessarily relates back(ward) to what it has been. Indeed that relation to what has been is imposed on Dasein as if from the beginning, in its constitution, from the moment it found itself being-there [da-sein]. So third, Dasein starts out in media res, there in the world without having decided to be at all. If you wish, Dasein arrives on the scene with a past that is not of its making but that nevertheless puts it where it finds itself, and any movement it makes into the future depends on realizing how that involves leaving behind.²⁷

Thanks to those ecstasies, the presentness of Dasein avoids being a simple “now.” It is rather a temporalizing of temporality—“Temporality … is not, but rather temporalizes itself” (314)—an idea that is in stark contrast to the tradition inherited from the Greeks. Based on a moment that is in tension with and even in opposition to a now—“the phenomenon of the Moment can in principle not be clarified in terms of the now” (323)—it differs radically from how, in Aristotle’s Physics, the sense of temporal continuity, but also discontinuity, derives from understanding time “as a kind of number” (219b), indeed “the number of continuous movement” (223a). For in the Aristotelian schema each number represents, or occurs precisely as a momentary “now.” Time, therefore, “is both made continuous by the ‘now’ and divided at it” (220a).²⁸ Aristotle’s emphasis on the static instant as a divisible unit epitomizes what is for Heidegger the vulgar understanding of time, and “all subsequent discussion of the concept of time fundamentally holds itself to the Aristotelian definition” (BT 400); time consists simply in counting the nows, accumulating them “as an endless, irreversible succession” (401).

Heidegger’s intense interest in being-toward-death does not lead him to discuss the death penalty, which so clearly imposes on the condemned person a very different kind of ecstatic time.²⁹ Nor does he develop a relation between time and blood. The reason for my detailed representation of his ideas in this context is twofold. First, the ecstatic temporality of being-toward-death thoroughly revises the Socratic preparation for death, recasting it as a resistance to the singular appropriable instants of time that the death penalty trades on in presuming to designate and circumscribe one such instant as it terminates a life. Second, Heidegger’s critique, in Being and Time, of Aristotle’s vulgar “now” includes explicit reference to Hegel. In filling out Hegel’s thinking on time in relation to Heidegger’s somewhat reductive dismissal of it, we discover a temporality operating at the beginning of life itself, as if on the other side of it, as a prosthesis to it; and we are in turn led back to blood, as uncannily internal and external flow of both life and time.

In a scant few pages in the penultimate section of his major work, Heidegger argues that whereas Hegel claimed to have produced a different conceptualization of time based on the point, and on his sense of negation, he does not in fact move beyond Aristotle. Indeed, Heidegger states, “we do not need any complicated discussion to make it clear that in his interpretation of time, Hegel is wholly moving in the direction of the vulgar understanding,” falling back on a “primary orientation toward the now” (BT 409).³⁰ In an article from 1968, Derrida provides a different perspective from that given by Heidegger at the end of Being and Time. His overarching argument, which will form a basis of his lifelong development of what has come to be known as deconstruction, is this: The consistent recourse had by philosophy, from Aristotle to Hegel (indeed from Parmenides to Husserl), to a conception of time articulated through the present moment, or Now, points to an unavoidable necessity for Western thinking, that of privileging the present to the extent that “no thought seems possible outside its element.”³¹ If one wanted to get to the bottom of what is for Heidegger the vulgar concept of time, one would have somehow to undo that structure, and stricture of our thinking, somehow to undo “the tie between truth and presence.”³² So Derrida wonders to what extent Heidegger himself manages to move beyond the Aristotle-Hegel axis that he critiques; whether the “vulgarity” that Heidegger attributes to their conception of time is not in fact an inextricable function of a whole range of metaphysical concepts that continue to rely on the concept of presence, and that therefore render a nonvulgar, primordial, authentic temporality more elusive than Heidegger imagines.³³

Hegel defines time, in contradistinction to space, in his Philosophy of Nature, part II of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, first published in 1817. Space consists of a continuity that would be interrupted, negated by the point, and it is therefore maintained only by what Hegel calls a “negative punctiformity.”³⁴ “The point has meaning only in so far as it is spatial” (ibid.); it does not itself make space. We might imagine an infinite number of conjoined points stretching out across space, but space itself would be constituted not by those points but by the uninterrupted spatiality found as it were on the other, negative side of them; besides, one must also consider the spatial extensions existing above and below that “line” of space. When it comes to time, though, the point is accorded actuality. In the case of time, “difference has stepped out [herausgetreten] of space … it is for itself in all its unrest” (Nature, 34). That is to say that unlike space, a continuity deriving from negated points, time instantiates the point as a “Now, which, as singularity, is exclusive of the other moments” (37), which is precisely where Heidegger directs his critique. But, in accordance with Hegel’s dialectical thinking, the Now that steps out in its difference and exclusivity to constitute the present point or moment instantiates itself in that way only to be better preceded by, superseded by or sublated into those other moments. As soon as the Now steps out, its exclusivity is negated, returning it to the temporal continuity. That makes time a “perpetual self-sublation” (34), the process whereby no sooner is it punctuated by a now than “this proudly exclusive Now dissolves, flows away and falls into dust” (36). It might therefore be said that whereas space has a negative, time is the negative, the “negation of the negation, the self-relating negation” (34). The flux of time derives from the continuous dialectical motion of point and dissolution of the point, a now that steps out only to be reabsorbed.

We can see how such an unresting time provides a fundamental figure for the perpetually self-sublating dialectical operation that constitutes thinking, represented in the Phenomenology of Spirit as the ability first to progress from sense-certainty and perception to self-consciousness, and, ultimately, to spirit and absolute knowledge. It is time itself that allows difference, produces becoming, and marks the spirit that knows itself as its own concept. That whole movement of self-overcoming that, for Hegel, makes everything happen, could not take place without the operation of time. But it is for the same reason that, at the end of the Phenomenology, upon arrival at absolute knowledge, the time that has, from the start, been becoming, comes to be no more. Time is annulled: “Spirit necessarily appears in Time, and it appears in Time just so long as it has not grasped its pure Notion, i.e., has not annulled Time.”³⁵ As long as thinking is in motion—self-identifying, self-conceptualizing, self-reflecting, self-negating, self-sublating, self-extending—it functions in time; it is a matter of time. As long as thought is about the extension of itself beyond itself, it exists in “unity” with time. But once it has reached the point where it can no longer go beyond itself, where the very operation of extending has achieved an identity with itself, then time separates off from that unity. In a sense it is left spinning its wheels; it appears as difference where there is no longer any need for difference, “difference left to itself, unresting and unhalting time, [which] collapses rather within itself” (Phenomenology, 489, my emphasis).

According to Catherine Malabou, in The Future of Hegel, time’s self-collapse has a whole other side to it that, for referring back to Aristotle, by no means repeats him in the way that Heidegger suggests. Malabou promotes a seemingly marginal notion in Hegel, “plasticity,” in order to account for how time exceeds itself to make a future for itself, but at the same time gives itself the possibility of being surprised by that future.³⁶ For Malabou, if Hegel finds in Greek thinking “the foundational principle” of his philosophical system it is because that thinking allows him to develop the “idea of subjectivity as support of its own ontological history, that is, of its own temporal self-differentiation.”³⁷ Hegel’s dialectical self-consciousness would derive from that self-differentiation of time, which emerges in Aristotle’s play between the passivity (paschein) and activity (energeia) of the intellect (nous): the intellect receives thought, as if passively, but that receiving can also be understood as an activity inasmuch as the mind is transformed, or rather transforms itself in the process. In Hegel’s words the mind thereby “becomes what it has.”³⁸ That self-activation of a passively receptive intellect is obviously not the result of a decision on its part. It obeys rather the functioning of eksis (habit), which functions in a time that is outside itself in a way that Heidegger appears to ignore. As Malabou explains,

Habit is a mode of presence that cannot be reduced to the present of the now.… Habit is a memory which, like all memory, has lost the memory of its origin. We never know exactly when habit began or when it actually ceases to exist.… In a certain sense the notion of eksis defines a time within time, as if time [could] … exhibit a strange ability to double itself. For eksis, as second nature, involves a second nature of time that does not belong to nature.³⁹

Once one understands time in Hegel as temporalized in that way, then the end, annulling or collapse of time that comes with absolute knowledge correspondingly follows a different logic. Malabou will argue that when Hegel appears to propose “the final banishment of all temporality and the advent of spirit’s unchanging and indifferent present,”⁴⁰ he is in fact restricting himself to the linear time within which he has been outlining the philosophical history of consciousness through reason, spirit and religion to absolute knowing. But what also operates there, as if in a subterranean way, is the return of time’s second nature, the other time within a time of successive Nows, a type of originating force such as was identified in Aristotle, which means that what is, at a supposed given point in time, never could simply be, because it is informed by past habit that is not past in the sense of having no origin, and because it anticipates a future that it will nevertheless be unable to foresee.

Derrida extends Malabou’s argument in a long review article written on The Future of Hegel in 1998. There he emphasizes how the plasticity of a temporal self-differentiation, such as we have just seen determining the history and operations of subjectivity in Hegel, similarly informed the latter’s conception of the concept:

The concept gives itself or receives from itself its own sensuous figures, its own rational imagination, its own intellectual intuition, etc. This giving and receiving, this giving to itself to receive, which is the very process of plasticity, the very movement of being as becoming-plastic, this would be the speculative and reflexive power of the Hegelian concept.⁴¹

More important for my discussion, Derrida underscores how the dialectical transformation by which Hegel’s concept moves thinking toward a future, doesn’t structure organic operations only, but introduces a plasticity that is ultimately a prosthesis of natural and technological that would be found at the beginning of life. Malabou seems to have opened that possibility in her chapter on “Habit and Organic Life,” where she shows that although, as Hegel follows Aristotle in assuming, inorganic bodies cannot self-differentiate and therefore “lack the power to contract habit,” the living organism nevertheless synthesizes the inorganic in a manner that amounts to “contracting all that comes before it [ce dont il procède].”⁴² In other words, the inorganic participates in the process of contraction; the organism is, as it were, always already automatic contraction of the noncontractable inorganic that somehow constitutes it: “What results from such a contraction is, literally, habitus, at once the internal disposition and the general constitution of the organism.”⁴³

In that respect, plasticity is more “fundamental” than the self-differentiation that renders possible subjectivation and hence conceptualization; it would, in Derrida’s words, “begin with life itself, within its very first contraction and with the first idealization of animal habitus. With the very appearance of life …”⁴⁴ As the originary temporalization whereby the organism habitually contracts, as the hardwired programmation that contrives in what lives an automatic capacity to self-differentiate and become other than what it is, plastic is, in a way that Hegel no doubt will not have foreseen, at once natural and technological. In Derrida’s words:

A continual transformation and radical interruption, a process and an explosion, plasticity and gelignite [la plastique et le plastic]. But also physis and techné, nature and culture, nature and the technological, nature and art, if you like: on the one hand, the natural or organic transformation of living forms, their plasticity, and on the other, plastic art, and the artificial or synthetic, indeed prosthetic technology of “plastic matter.”⁴⁵

We have there a concept of time that is far from the succession of nows that Heidegger set out to critique. Already reconceived by him as a temporality that stretches out from an inescapable past to an inevitable death, it is further understood here as a self-starting motor or type of artificial intelligence that enables every transformational development of the animal organism from the most elementary self-adaptation all the way through consciousness and conceptualization to self-generated obsolescence. But that is also to say that—structurally similar to, but different from Heidegger’s stretching from thrownness toward death, closer perhaps to Freud’s concept of the drives⁴⁶—time is a machinic impulse functioning from beginning to end, of life and of itself. If, as Malabou suggests, we are to read the collapse of time in Hegel’s absolute knowing not as its end but as yet another enfolding, then we might similarly imagine a self-differentiation that sublates all the way from an initial contraction of the inorganic to an ultimate transition into death, another plastic transformation, albeit back into the inorganic. Rather than give death back its traditional sense of a transition to an afterlife, however, that would suggest a plasticity of life up to and including death, or a plastic death within life. It also points, as we are progressively noting, to two questions: first, regarding the presumption that an instant separates life from death, the very presumptive instant from which, as I argued earlier, the death penalty derives, and on the basis of which it maintains its power; and second, regarding the prosthetic operation by means of which a machine is attached to the human body in order to bring about its death.

Hegel’s time, then, is the engine of difference and becoming, “unresting and unhalting,” until coming to be annulled by Spirit. As a function of habit, though, it operates as a type of automatism beyond any linearity that might lead to its being annulled, revealing instead what Malabou calls a second nature “that does not belong to nature.”⁴⁷ And as we saw Derrida argue, its self-differentiating drive is also that of the concept. At a key point in The Phenomenology of Consciousness, Hegel writes, as if in passing, that the absolute concept “may be called the simple essence of life, the soul of the world, the universal blood [das allgemeine Blut]” (100, my emphasis). That passing reference to blood comes at a critical moment. It appears during discussion of the emergence of self-consciousness, toward the end of the chapter regarding force and understanding, which is the third “level” of consciousness following sense-certainty and perception. This is also one of the places in Hegel’s argument where speculative dialectics receives a particularly explicit elucidation, as he moves from explaining opposite forces by means of physical examples, such as electricity and magnetism, to thinking “pure change or … antithesis within the antithesis itself … inner difference or difference in its own self” (99). That idea of a world wherein same and difference both subsist (99–100), a world that “is itself and its opposite in one unity,” is called by Hegel “difference as an infinity” (99), and he chooses to give it fluid form. Here is the passage in full:

This simple infinity, or the absolute concept, may be called the simple essence of life, the soul of the world, the universal blood, whose omnipresence is neither disturbed nor interrupted by any difference, but rather is itself every difference, as also their supersession [Aufgehobensein]; it pulsates within itself but does not move, inwardly vibrates, yet is at rest. (100)

Blood is here a fluid infinity, a universal formlessness that nevertheless carries difference within itself: no difference, every difference; inward vibration, rest. The idea of flow, flux and fluidity as the figure for “a difference into which the many antitheses have been resolved … an absolute universal difference that is absolutely at rest and remains selfsame” (90) is in fact a constant in Hegel’s Phenomenology, and it is emphasized repeatedly in the chapter—on The Truth of Self-Certainty as a function of self-consciousness (104–11)—that follows the passage having recourse to the figure of blood.

For the fluid infinity of “absolute universal difference” is in fact that of the dialectical process itself, and also the process of life itself:

Life in the universal fluid medium, a passive separating-out of the shapes [independent objects] becomes, just by so doing, a movement of those shapes or becomes Life as a process. The simple universal fluid medium is the in-itself, and the difference of the shapes is the other. But this fluid medium itself becomes the other through this difference; for now it is for the difference which exists in and for itself, and consequently is the ceaseless movement by which this passive medium is consumed: Life is a living thing. (107)

In fluid life there is both “every difference” and a “general dissolution” (108) of differences; fluidity is both form and medium of “infinity as the supersession of all distinctions … its self-repose being an absolutely restless infinity … flux, as a self-identical independence … simple fluid substance of pure movement” (106–7).

But if blood makes an appearance, in the Phenomenology, as a figure for the “simple infinity” of a generalized, universal fluidity, it seems, there at least, not to be the blood that circulates in a finite body. For that, one turns to the Philosophy of Nature, where, in contrast to an immobile pulsation of consciousness on the way to spirit, real animal blood is under discussion. Somewhat predictably, perhaps, by the end of the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel returns to a fluidity that clearly recalls the Phenomenology, understanding how, with the death of the individual, “from this dead husk, proceeds a more beautiful Nature, spirit” (Nature, 443). In concluding the text, Hegel explains that death means the sublation of the opposition between the singularity of an individual nature and the universality of spirit. Thus, when an individual animal dies, “the last self-externality of Nature has been sublated and the Concept, which in Nature is present only in principle (an sich seiende Begriff), has become for itself. With this, Nature has passed over into its truth, into the subjectivity of the Concept … and this is spirit” (443). The Zusatz notes to that same section put it this way: “Herewith the Idea exists in the self-subsistent subject, for which, as organ of the Concept, everything is ideal and fluid” (443–44). It would not be exaggerating, in my opinion, to read the “organ” mentioned there as the blood that was universalized in the Phenomenology; the self-subsistent, self-conscious fluid subject has once again become the blood whose sublation produces the concept. Indeed, in following the thread, or stream, of blood on one side and concept on the other, one finds in the Philosophy of Nature a persistent comparison between restless blood and a restless time, which is ultimately the pulsating motionlessness or vibrating rest of the absolute concept.

Animal blood, we are first told, is characterized by irritability, which, along with sensibility and reproduction is one of the three properties that define the organic (Nature, 357): irritability is “inward activity, pulsation, living self-movement, the material of which can be only a fluid, the living blood, and which itself can only be circulation” (360). Conversely, blood is the “irritable concentration of everything into the interior unity” (368). Even plants live thanks to irritability, and indeed have their own blood circulation, thanks to the sap that “circulates through the entire plant. This quivering of vitality within itself belongs to the plant because it is alive—restless Time. That is the blood circulation in plants” (329). However, the sap of a plant is not sufficient to transcend the vegetal dehiscence into two independent elements: A plant divides to produce a bud and does not reunite. The life of the animal, though, attains the “highest point of Nature [as the] absolute idealism of possessing within itself the determinateness of its bodily nature in a perfectly fluid form” (352, my emphasis). Animal blood, then, is not just the universal essence of life, the soul of the world, but also “the individual life itself” (368). Life achieves its ideal form in the perfect fluidity of the blood.

Now, Hegel’s simple fluid movement is never in fact simple but complicated by an ambiguity between fluidity and mechanicity. The universal blood of the Phenomenology was said to “pulsate” (Phenomenology, 100), and the “restless infinity” of “universal flux” was also “the pure movement of axial rotation” (106). That ambiguity returns in The Philosophy of Nature, where a perfectly fluid mammalian blood nevertheless retains enough mechanicity to be called a “fluid magnet” (Nature, 355). Blood flows through interruptions, however modulated, of that flow, such that its circulation is recognized to be an “oscillatory circulation” (370). But such a modulation of blood flow does not, as one might expect, derive from the heart as mechanical pump that regulates, and produces blood circulation. The heart is described less as a sluice that controls blood circulation than the seat of pulsation, as it were the repository of vital irritability: “No nerves are found in the heart, but what pulsates is the pure vitality of irritability present as muscle in the centre” (369). We are told twice in the space of half a page of the Philosophy of Nature that any attempt to explain the physiology of the blood and the heart in terms of mechanical operations is misplaced, for it ignores the fact that “the blood must be regarded as itself the principle of [its] movement” (ibid.). The irritability of blood is thus to be understood as a “self-movement” on the basis of which we can conceive “the universal, the ground, the simple, which is the unity of opposites and consequently the immovable which yet moves” (ibid.). Indeed, blood is finally “absolute motion, the natural living self, process itself”; it is “not moved but is motion” (ibid.).

The circulation of blood within the animal organism described in The Philosophy of Nature thus returns to the idealism of universal blood as absolute concept that was posited in the Phenomenology. Blood is a fluidity that remains unfazed by any mechanist interruption, a flowing that manages also to be a stepping, a liquid that is able to separate itself into opposing parts. It very much resembles the time that we saw earlier, “stepping out” of space to be “for itself in all its unrest” (Nature, 34). In the chapter on the animal organism that concludes The Philosophy of Nature, blood is said to be “the ground and the movement itself. But also, it steps to one side [es tritt … auf die Seite] as one moment, for it is the distinguishing of itself from itself. The movement is precisely this stepping aside of itself … and the supersession [das Aufheben] of its standing aside, so that it overlaps itself and its opposite” (369). Blood, like time, indeed like the concept on the way to Spirit, produces and sublates mechanist difference; in circulating, animal blood becomes “this endless, unbroken unrest of welling forth” (368).

Somewhat strangely, however, the grand advantage of blood as a figure for dialectical sublation in the concept is a type of visibility that it affords. In welling forth, blood becomes all but visible: “The endless process of division and this suppression of division which leads to another division, all this is the immediate expression of the Concept which is, so to speak, here visible to the eye” (368, my emphasis). By “looking” at blood, one is able to see the operation of the Concept, the uninterrupted fluidity that is nevertheless “every difference [and] their supersession” as the Phenomenology had it, both inward vibration and restfulness.

But of course blood that was visible to the eye would not be blood flowing and circulating—except in a couple of liminal cases, as we shall see—but blood being shed; it is “visible to the eye” only “so to speak,” in a nonliteral sense. How then does it gain its sense of visibility and its figurative force? Precisely from the idea that blood does in fact participate in a system of externalization, in a type of visibilization: It steps not just to one side, but outside, as it were, where it transforms the air. Blood circulation operates both internally, and, by means of pulmonary action, externally; it functions in a more literal sphere of visibility by sublating air: “The blood in the pulmonary circulation, having its own movement, is this purely negative immaterial life for which Nature is air and which has here the sheer victory over it” (367). In the dialectic between blood and air, blood effectively steps outside; though the air has been sucked inside, it is as if the blood had gone out to meet it. As a result we can finally “see” the fluid overcoming of mechanical interruption that we could previously only intuit, when blood was stepping aside of itself to become both difference and the dissolving of difference in general.

To reformulate and summarize: Blood is presumed to suffer some internal interruption of its circulation, caused if not by the heart, then at least by muscular movement: “muscular movement is the elastic irritability which … posits a peculiar, self-dividing movement which arrests the circulatory flow” (366). But, on the inside, such interruptions are overcome by the pure force of fluidity itself; blood “steps to one side” of such an arrest of its flow, it detours around such an “inert persistence,” as Hegel calls it, and that “stepping aside of itself” is understood as an “overlapping” of itself and its opposite. In that way blood remains united in spite of its self-division; it is “the organism which through its own interior process returns into itself” (366). That overcoming of its interruptions, the smoothing over of interrupted fluidity, has its own paradoxicality smoothed over by the pulmonary operation: the “dissolution of this [arresting, inert] persistence is the pulmonary system, the true, ideal process with the outer world of inorganic Nature, with the Element of air” (366). By interacting with air, blood achieves a whole other level of stepping aside and returning to itself, and that idealizing sublation carries through into any other opposition between fluid and structural mechanics. Quite simply: “The self of the organism is the unity of its blood or pure process, and of its structure … [which is] completely sublated in the fluidity of the blood.… The organism is thus raised into pure ideality, perfectly transparent universality” (381).

However, the apotheosis that blood achieves by sublating air and rendering the concept visible has another side to it. On the one hand, blood’s sublation of air, of nature’s negative, consists of a “sheer victory” (Nature, 367) over immaterial, inorganic life. And thanks to the same operation the constant and more general problem of an articulation between the living organism and an inassimilable external nature is resolved back into the body. For that has been the general problematic for the organism from the beginning: it becomes a living organism by contracting the inorganic, and that struggle seems never to be over, permanently defining “the organism [as] that which preserves itself in the face of the outer world” (381). The organism is involved in a constant operation of assimilation that requires it to “posit what is external as subjective, appropriate it, and identify it with itself” (ibid.). Yet that assimilation is also a fluidization: “the organism is in a state of tension with its nonorganic nature, negates it and makes it identical with itself. In this immediate relation of the organic to the nonorganic, the former is, as it were, the direct melting of the nonorganic into organic fluidity” (397, my emphasis).

On the other hand, therefore, the sheer victory that blood achieves over air is but one front in the constant state of tension that obtains between the organism and nonorganic nature; in its continuous contracting of the inorganic an organic body is always externalizing itself. Blood is held up as the paradigm for that externalizing process because it appears to be the ideal assimilator. It is represented as almost vampiric in its thirst for achieving “being-for-itself through negativity of its otherness” (392), functioning as a sort of insatiable sublation machine: “Now why is the blood connected with this ideal assimilation of the abstract Element [by means of the respiratory process]? The blood is this absolute thirst, its unrest within itself and against itself. The blood craves … to be differentiated” (ibid., my emphasis).

A blood that craves to be differentiated, one surmises, must expose its differentiations as much while circulating inside the body as it does once it comes outside to assimilate inorganic nature. In fact, the unresting blood, self-dividing only to better sublate into a new unity, competes for paradigmatic status with a generalized organism that melts the inorganic into organic fluidity. Whereas in the first case differentiation remains invisible, in the second case that differentiation is a radical opposition. When it comes to the air we breathe, the organism has to deal with a differentiation that is different enough to represent the inorganic exterior to organic life in general. In negotiating or transacting with air by means of its blood, the organism steps more problematically to the side of itself, indeed outside itself. For what begins with air as inorganic nature extends all the way into the space of artificial mechanicity.

It is the heart that is called upon to figure that problematic. Logically speaking, the heart produces an internal articulation or mechanical interruption of blood flow, whereas it seems not to be recognized as interruptive by Hegel. But, to paraphrase Shakespeare, the heart will out. The radical step out into otherness that is performed in the transaction between blood and external air gives rise to versions of the heart on, or near the outside, and the heart, whose operation “inside” the blood seemed barely significant, is seen operating to maximum effect on the organic surface.

That occurs in general terms as circulation through different organs produces a heart said to be “everywhere,” such that “each part of the organism is only the specialized force of the heart itself” (Nature, 371). But it happens more clearly in the specific case of the sex organs. According to Hegel, what makes the male the active and the female the receptive principle is a difference in their organs that keeps the ovaries enclosed and prevented from emerging “into opposition” and from developing “on [their] own into active brain” (413). Similarly:

the clitoris is inactive feeling in general. In the male, on the other hand, we have instead active feeling, the swelling heart, the effusion of blood into the corpora cavernosa and the meshes of the spongy tissue of the urethra.… In this way, the reception (Empfangen) by the uterus, as a simple retention, is, in the male, split into the productive brain and the external heart. (413, my emphasis)

Putting aside Hegel’s obviously phallocratic conception of human sexuality, one can see the following logic operating here. Given that the real interruption between the organism and its other is constituted by inorganic externality, then the heart cannot avoid being externalized, as it were in spite of itself. If the blood goes outside to conquer inorganic nature the heart will have to accompany it, swelling like a penis, becoming an external heart. It will have to circulate its force “everywhere,” and especially into those extremities—the penis, and sexual activity—where the animal organism enters into relations with an external difference that it is unable to sublate. In the penis the heart swells toward externality, going out to meet the outer world of inorganic nature, ready to sublate and assimilate it; but it is unable to do so. Instead, this external heart turns the organism inside out. As the penis swells and its blood effuses, it tends toward producing a heart that beats, and, presumably, blood that circulates, on the outside.

But how could that not be, for not only are we told that the organism “preserves itself in the face of the outer world” (381) by assimilating that world, but also that “the nature of the organism is to produce itself as something external to itself” (404)? Indeed, “the self-subsistent being from which the animal distinguishes itself is posited not merely as something external, but also as identical with the animal” (ibid., my emphasis). Accordingly, blood, as animal internality itself, will necessarily also be produced in externality. Blood flowing would thus articulate with blood shed as a function of organic unity.⁴⁸

The idea or figure of a pulsating yet unperturbed “universal blood” as simple infinity, or absolute concept, central to the development of the speculative dialectic in the Phenomenology, cannot in fact permit inassimilable difference. The paradigm prioritized in The Philosophy of Nature is therefore intact blood circulation, operating in conjunction with a nonmechanical or minimally mechanical heart:

The heart moves the blood, and the movement of the blood is, in turn, what moves the heart. But this is a circle, a perpetuum mobile, which would necessarily at once come to a standstill because the forces are in equilibrium. But, on the contrary, this is precisely why the blood must itself be regarded as itself the principle of its movement. (369)

The importance of the blood—as well as blood circulation and the blood’s articulation with exteriority—clearly answers to Hegel’s sense of a teleology that also manages to be circular. But it is in the same terms that his blood as autokinetic perpetual motion becomes time: “The blood as axially rotating, self-pursuing movement, this absolute interior vibration, is the individual life of the whole in which there is no distinction—animal time” (366). Even plants, as we saw, to the extent that they have blood, live thanks to the “quivering vitality [of] restless time” (329). Hegel’s definition of time, in the opening section of the Philosophy of Nature, as a difference that “is for itself in all its unrest,” the difference that “step[s] out of space” (34), that cures itself of paralysis, can thus be said to derive from the circulation of blood. The same, bloodlike, restless time will reach its apotheosis as “difference left to itself, unresting and unhalting time, [which] collapses rather within itself” (489), as it were spinning its wheels, at the end of the Phenomenology.

When Derrida asks about the relation between the concept and blood in his final two death penalty seminars, he first evokes attempts at what one might call conceptual staunching,⁴⁹ supposed to prevent opposite terms that have been discussed in previous sessions—for example, cruelty and noncruelty, hetero- and autopunishment, Kant’s poena forensis and poena naturalis—from bleeding into each other (DP II, 217–8). But the discussion then comes into focus in this explicit form: “Is there a future for blood?” (219). That is to wonder, in the first place, whether we might not be witnessing a shift away from the seemingly universal cultural force of blood, what he calls its “imaginary, symbolic, phantasmatic, techno-scientific history” (220), something that he finds folded into the history of humanity as a form of homo-hematocentrism referred to at the beginning of this chapter. He will not exclude the possibility that such a hematocentric basis for thinking the human is coming to an end, that “what is happening today presents itself [as] a transformation of our experience, etc., in relation to blood in all of its registers: culture, religion, but also medicine, genetics … our perception of blood is changing” (245). But he is also asking, in the second place, whether the death penalty can survive once it is no longer a function of the bloody sacrifice from which, in its ontotheological roots, it appears to derive: “when it came to question of the death penalty and execution, we also registered something that looked like a disappearance of blood, of the effusion of blood, of the flowing of blood” (ibid.).

That blood is a totemic element of human culture would hardly be in dispute. That it has been inscribed in cultures of the Abrahamic tradition—Judaism, Islam, Christianity—via the story of Cain and Abel is similarly commonplace. It is such a nexus, and the subsequent divine injunction against murder—“the voice of your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground” (Genesis 4:10)—that leads Derrida to link capital punishment to the question of sacrifice, precisely bloody sacrifice. Punishment more generally, as castigation or chastisement, is etymologically a function of purification or rendering chaste, hence tied to sacrifice as a means of protection or indemnification, making safe.⁵⁰

The anthropological/mythological analysis of that nexus is of course developed by Freud in such works as “The Taboo of Virginity,” Totem and Taboo, and Moses and Monotheism, and Derrida discusses the first of those writings at some length in session 9 of the second Death Penalty volume. Recently, a comprehensive analysis of hematology in the Western tradition has been undertaken by Gil Anidjar, whose Blood: A Critique of Christianity deals with “multiple iterations of blood—medical and anthropological, juridical and theological, political and economic, rhetorical and philosophical.”⁵¹ Like Derrida, Anidjar raises the possibility that “blood is a thing of the past,” and argues that blood is a figure for “that which politics transcends, manages or excludes; what it should at any rate exclude: the archaism of blood feuds, the threat of cruel and unusual punishment—or of menstruation—and the pertinacity of kinship, of tribalism, and finally of race.”⁵² Conversely, however, he finds blood to be “through and through political,” requiring that Western politics, and in particular Christian politics, “be rethought in its hematological registers.”⁵³ As his subtitle announces, Anidjar concentrates on ontotheological concerns that are similar to those that orient much of Derrida’s seminar, and his critique parallels the relation Derrida develops between Christianity and blood in the particular case of Hegel.⁵⁴

Abel’s blood crying out to God from the ground is a perversion of the role of blood as the seat of life: blood belongs in the body, sanguis rather than cruor. We retrace the circulation of blood throughout the body as the conductor of human life to William Harvey’s De motu cordis in 1628, even though Islamic science, culminating in the discoveries of Ibn al-Nafis in the thirteenth century, had established certain principles of pulmonary transit three hundred years prior to the European medical renaissance.⁵⁵ If Europeans prior to Harvey did not understand the principle of blood circulation, they well understood blood shedding. It was what stopped life, and staunching the flow of blood meant preserving life. In 1552, the soon-to-be king’s surgeon, Ambroise Paré, learns from firsthand experience at the siege of Metz that the practice of staunching bleeding, caused by amputation of a member, by cauterizing the wound could be more effectively superseded by ligature of the arteries.⁵⁶

Another three decades would pass before Galileo correlated his pulse with the swing of a pendulum, and only following the latter’s discovery of isochronism in 1602 did Sanctorio Sanctorio develop the pulsilogium on the way to Harvey’s groundbreaking discovery some twenty years after that. Harvey not only detailed the operations of cardiac and pulmonary circulation but also determined that only blood flowed in the arteries, that it was not in fact doubled by vital heat or pneuma; blood itself was henceforth life. One might therefore characterize—albeit arbitrarily—the seventy-five-year period from Paré to Harvey as that of the externalization of the time of blood, according to this logical succession: Blood within the body is the sign of life, bleeding outside of the body is a countdown to death; yet the pulsation of blood functions as the body’s self-chronometrization, and, because it operates on the surface, it can be synchronized with an artificial machine of measurement. Chronometrical time will therefore develop, in that version at least, as an externalized, artificial, mechanical version of the pulse of life.

But the motor for such a rotating time is of course its very self-division, the principle of self-differentiation that might be said to produce it.⁵⁷ By downplaying the mechanical necessity of self-division in favor of a self-dividing, self-reconstituting, and self-perpetuating fluidity, Hegel would seem to preserve the idea of an organic, animal, even human time. In many respects Heidegger appears still to reason within that same concept of it.⁵⁸ But, as Galileo already surmised in relating his pulse to a pendulum, time is the necessarily externalizable self-differentiation machine; always already some form of clock, some type of technology. It begins in the habit that Malabou identified as originary temporalization, some impulse whose clock is already ticking in the first contractions by the organic of the inorganic that it proceeds from. The human has that habitual pulse or impulse built in to its system, we might say in its blood: “Human beings are those who, in order to be, must observe that speculative clock which is habit.”⁵⁹ But Hegel also emphasizes, as we have seen—and irrespective of whether he recognizes it in these terms or not—that the overarching concern for the organism is its “state of tension with its nonorganic nature,” and that the blood itself, in order to achieve its victory over that nature, must assimilate the air; it must therefore externalize itself and externalize its time along with it. Its pulse tends toward that externalization, by means of a heart that beats everywhere, by means of a penis that is a swelling, effusive, external heart. Any victory over, or sublation of the nonorganic air will consequently be achieved at the cost of the technological imposition of time. From then on, time will be that blood pulsating on the outside.

From Galileo to Guillotin, then, or, in another zone, from Socrates to Heidegger, time has been the exteriorized and technologized temporality of the human. And its chronometric obsession has become: how to appropriate the instant. The working out of that obsession through the juridical, medical and mechanical aspects of the death penalty does not just imply a seemingly endless refining of the definition of the instant; it also constitutes, in a precise way, the specific technologization of human temporality that consists in delimiting it. As I explained in the Introduction, once there is capital punishment we know not just that human life is finite, not just that it can be terminated by artificial means, but we also know that its finitude can be counted, its ending timed. By deciding a particular instant for the end of a life the death penalty determines and measures the duration of the temporal “instant” constituting that life. As a result, whether or not blood is shed in a given execution, blood is nevertheless flowing and pulsating outside, mechanically and metronomically; it is chronometronomically technologized outside the body in the way that this chapter has attempted to explain.

By extension or analogy, whether blood is shed outside the body in the manner of the death penalty in its “classic” age of cruelty, or anesthetized and poisoned inside the body by means of lethal injection, it continues to be chronometronomically technologized in the same way. In engineering, and continuing to refine the most explicitly brutal confrontations between animate and inanimate, between the human body and rope, iron or pharmaceutical prostheses, capital punishment will have always negotiated with that more or less technologized, and temporalized blood. Indeed, lethal injection works by parasitizing blood flow in order to infect and arrest the circulatory system; it introduces into the blood a foreign and artificial temporal order to control, by countermanding it, the human pulse. It breaks the time of the blood.

Now, within a traditional logic, employing an artificial mechanistic means to end life would contradict the sense of a prosthesis that is attached to the human body to enhance or prolong it: the death penalty would therefore constitute an antiprosthesis. However, as my Introduction explained, that is not the way I conceive of prosthesis. Every animal body is, from its beginnings or in its constitution, prosthetic, in the sense of being always already involved in negotiating relations with what is external to it, including with the inorganic or inanimate. That originary prosthetic function allows both extensions to the body that enhance or prolong life, and incursions on the body that terminate it. The same originary prosthetic function also allows time to be superadded to human existence, as a result of which the mortals that we know ourselves to be count or account for the flow of our existence, secure in the knowledge that life will end, but in the nonknowledge of precisely when it will end. That is what I have been calling here mortal temporality. We are as if born with time, but of course we know that time is not ours to own, no more than is the language we speak; it is an artificial apparatus that our bodies bear.

Every mortal is technologized by time in that way. But something different occurs once life’s term and terminus come to be programmed by the death penalty. Once one is under sentence of death, mortal temporality is interrupted and one’s temporal technology is reconfigured. A condemned person no longer navigates within the same flow as the rest of us; his or her temporality functions in a different mode, determined by the brutal prospect of the programmed death penalty. He or she is differently prosthetized than are other mortals; his or her temporal technology is no longer that shared by the rest of us. It is as if the everyday mortal prosthetic condition were doubly reversed by the death sentence: first by a time machine that has fallen out of joint to become a shaky contraption, then later by a supposedly infallible execution machine that takes over to end lifetime.

As long as we conceive of time as a pulse of life regulated by blood circulation, as Hegel appeared on the one hand to do, execution by lethal injection will be able to represent itself as a type of organic death penalty, its chemicals dissolved in and sublated by the blood. But once, on the other hand, we syncopate Hegelian dialectics in the way this chapter has attempted, time comes to be seen as a prosthesis in the blood, beating, pulsating, and flowing on the outside. Then there is no bloodless death penalty. Once time is understood as blood circulating on the outside, then stopping the heart and immobilizing the blood effectively means shedding that blood. Once the state concocts, constructs, and sets in motion a machine of death whose basic component is the interruption of mortal time, then it matters little whether an execution takes place by means of decapitation or lethal injection: vis-à-vis the time of blood, both are equally bloody, and, one might argue, equally cruel. The death-dealing prosthesis to the human that is the death penalty, whatever its precise technological mechanism, ruptures human time; it therefore amounts to a cruel bloodletting whether or not the spectacle of blood accompanies a given execution. On one side the uncertainty of not knowing when one will die is what preserves the modality of mortal time; on the other side, interrupting that modality is an act of extreme violence; it means shedding mortal bloodtime.