INTRODUCTION
1. Indeed, as discussed in chapter 1, on June 29, 2015, the Supreme Court decision in Glossip gave rise to important new positions taken by different justices with respect to the constitutionality of the death penalty.
2. UN resolution 69/186, cosponsored by ninety-five countries, was adopted on December 18, 2014. The following countries voted against the resolution: Afghanistan, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belize, Botswana, Brunei Darussalam, China, Dominica, Egypt, Ethiopia, Grenada, Guyana, India, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Japan, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Qatar, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and Grenadines, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sudan, Syria, Trinidad and Tobago, the United States of America, Yemen, and Zimbabwe. See Amnesty International, “Death Sentences and Executions in 2014” (https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/act50/0001/2015/en/), Annex IV.
3. See https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/death-penalty; and https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/states-and-without-death-penalty.
4. See Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, trans. Katrine Pilcher Keuneman (London: Continuum, 2007 [Critique et vérité. Paris: Minuit, 1966]); On Racine, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Macmillan, 1972). See also Raymond Picard, Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture (Paris: Pauvert, 1965).
5. See attempts to explain the outlier status of the United States in relation to the death penalty in Franklin E. Zimring, The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), esp. 42–66; and David Garland, Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 20–24.
6. Furman v. Georgia 408 U.S. 238 (1972), 406. Further references in text.
7. Most recently, on March 14, 2018, Oklahoma announced that it would henceforth perform executions using nitrogen gas, although a protocol for such usage has yet to be developed.
8. See my Prosthesis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), Dorsality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), and Inanimation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
9. Michel Foucault, ed., I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother, trans. Frank Jellinek (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982).
10. Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, Vol. I, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 219. See also The Death Penalty, Vol. II, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). Further references to these two volumes will appear in text, preceded by the mentions DP I and DP II.
1. MACHINERY OF DEATH OR MACHINIC LIFE
1. Callins v. Collins, 510 U.S. 1141, 1143–45 (1994). Following initial citation, references to this and all subsequent Supreme Court decisions appear in text and are identified by petitioner’s name (e.g., Callins) followed by page number.
2. See Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972); Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153 (1976).
3. See Baze v. Rees, 553 U.S. 35 (2008).
4. See Glossip v. Gross, 576 U.S. (2015).
5. See, for example, Derrida’s extension of the machinery of death to “so many techno-scientifico-capitalist mechanisms for distributing, in a terribly unequal way, the right to life, to longevity, and which therefore not only condemn to death a calculable number of individuals but also condemn to die prematurely an incalculable number of living beings, human and nonhuman.” Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, Vol. II (hereafter DP II), trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 199–200.
6. See Weems v. United States, 217 U.S. 349 (1910); Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber, 329 U.S. 459 (1947); In re Kemmler, 136 U.S. 436 (1890); Wilkerson v. Utah, 99 U.S. 130 (1879).
7. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 179, 181, 182–83. See also Kant, Critique, Transcendental Aesthetic, sect II, esp. “Elucidation”; and Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, Vol. I (hereafter DP I), trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 225–26: “Time is sensibility or receptivity, affection (a major vein of philosophy from Kant to Heidegger …); time is suffering; the time of execution is endurance, passion, the pathetic, pathological paskhein—which sometimes means not only ‘to undergo’ but ‘to undergo a punishment,’ and the fact of passively undergoing can already be interpreted as the suffering of a punishment: sensibility is in itself a punishment.” As Derrida also suggests, a converse reasoning emerges to challenge any trend toward an ever more instantaneous death penalty. For if suffering is a function of duration, any reduction in the time of the punishment tends to eliminate punishment itself: “One might often be tempted to say: … No one suffers the death penalty. The condemned one, once executed, disappears before even being able to pay any penalty whatsoever.” Derrida, DP II, 50.
8. The 1888 State Commission complied the following list of possible modes of execution: auto-da-fè, beating with clubs, beheading/decapitation, blowing from cannon, boiling, breaking on the wheel, burning, burying alive, crucifixion, decimation, dichotomy, dismemberment, drowning, exposure to wild beasts, flaying alive, flogging/knout, garrote, guillotine, hanging, hara-kiri, impalement, Iron Maiden, peine forte et dure, poisoning, pounding in mortar, precipitation, pressing to death, rack, running the gauntlet, shooting, stabbing, stoning, strangling, suffocation. Cited in David Garland, Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 70.
9. Such an assessment is reinforced by Justice Alito in the 2014 Missouri case of Russell Bucklew, who had his execution temporarily stayed on the basis of a claim that, because of the disease from which he suffered, administering pentobarbital would produce excruciating pain. See Bucklew v. Lombardi, Missouri, No. 14–2163 (8th Circ. 2015), and Bucklew v. Lombardi, 134 S. Ct. 2832 (2014).
10. Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86, 101 (1958).
11. McGautha v. California, 402 U.S. 183, 241 (1971); Kennedy v. Louisiana, 554 U.S. 407, 420 (2008); Baze, 80.
12. Thompson v. Oklahoma, 487 U.S. 815 (1988); Stanford v. Kentucky, 492 U.S. 361 (1989); (1989), Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002); Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005); Kennedy, 407.
13. Coker v. Georgia, 433 U.S. 584 (1977).
14. See Derrida’s complicating the question of age as a singular concept in relation to the execution of juveniles: “Suppose that I kill: at what age will I have killed, or will I have been killed? … There is in us simultaneously … something of the old man and of the child but also of the man of the twenty-first century, of the fifth century BCE, of Cro-Magnon man of the Neanderthal.” DP II, 12–13.
15. Order, Rehearing denied No. 07–343, Statement of Justice Scalia, 554 U.S. (2008), 948–49.
16. Carol S. Steiker and Jordan M. Steiker discuss obstacles to progress in Eighth Amendment jurisprudence because of the understanding, prior to 1962, that it applied only to federal law. See their Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), 29–32, 52–53; and Franklin E. Zimring, The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 68–70.
17. See Enmund v. Florida, 458 U.S. 782 (1982).
18. Lockett v. Ohio, 438 U.S. 586 (1978).
19. Woodson v. North Carolina, 428 U.S. 280, 304 (1976). Cf. Callins, 1149.
2. THE TIME OF THE TRAP DOOR
1. See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/04/north-carolina-pardons-brothers-pardoned-1983-rape-murder-of-girl. McCollum was North Carolina’s longest serving death-row inmate. He petitioned the Supreme Court in 1994 but his Writ of Certiorari was denied (McCollum v. North Carolina, 512 U.S. 1254 (1994). Blackmun was the sole dissenting judge, acting on his vow made in Callins earlier that year, but also on the question of mental retardation, which, as we saw in the previous chapter, was resolved in Atkins in 2002.
2. Henry McCollum’s innocence was a factor in Breyer’s Glossip dissent (Glossip, Justice Breyer dissenting, 5, 30), discussed later. Despite the fact that Breyer drew attention to McCollum’s being innocent of the rape and murder for which he was convicted—Scalia’s example in rebutting Blackmun in Callins—neither Scalia nor Thomas mentions that injustice in Glossip, preferring to draw on, and draw, the graphic cases I mention here.
3. Jeffrey Toobin, “Clarence Thomas’s Disgraceful Silence,” The New Yorker, February 21, 2014.
4. See Thomas’s statement at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/clarencethomashightechlynching.htm. For the Beitler photograph, see https://iconicphotos.org/tag/lawrence-beitler.
5. See, for example Austin Sarat, When the State Kills (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), which devotes a whole chapter to “Narrative Strategy and Death Penalty Advocacy.” Sarat acknowledges that “all lawyers traffic in narrative,” but emphasizes its “particularly important role in the work of lawyers trying to end state killing” (181). My intention here is not to discount the importance of narrative itself, but to point to the specific rhetoric of what I will call “photo-graphic visuality” within certain narratives. I return to the question of narrative in Chapter 6.
6. Stuart Banner, The Death Penalty: An American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 45–46. Michel Foucault records the first usage of trap door gallows in England in 1760; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 18; see also Austin Sarat et al., Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014): “In 1759, Tyburn’s infamous ‘Triple Tree’ was torn down and replaced by a portable gallows outfitted with a trapdoor” (34).
7. Banner, Death Penalty, 45. See also Sarat et al., Gruesome Spectacles, 32.
8. Cotton Mather, Pillars of Salt (Boston: Samuel Phillips, 1699), 62, cited in Banner, Death Penalty, 45.
9. See Banner, Death Penalty, 46.
10. Casanova, The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, trans. Arthur Machen (New York: Putnam’s, 1959), 3:21, 26–28; cf. Casanova, Storia della mia vita, ed. Piero Chiara and Federico Roncoroni (Milan: Mondadori, 1984), 2:182, 186–88.
11. Cited by Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 3.
12. Ibid., 3–6.
13. A detailed account of the execution of Louis XVI is given by Daniel Arasse, The Guillotine and the Terror, trans. Christopher Miller (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 48–72.
14. Banner, Death Penalty, 25.
15. Hugo Adam Bedau, ed., The Death Penalty in America, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 13.
16. Ibid., 146. Louis P. Masur links the move to private executions to urbanization and the development of middle-class values regarding privacy: “The concern with public assemblies and public space accelerated the shift to a faith in privacy and the creation of an urban environment characterized by class segmentation and social exclusion.… At the same time that classes cut themselves off from one another, middle-class families turned inward to the private realm of the sanctified home.” Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 102–3.
17. The specter of the death penalty as public spectacle returns in debate surrounding photographs taken by the Florida Department of Corrections following the execution of Allen Lee Davis. Those photos were appended to Justice Shaw’s dissent in Provenzano v. Moore, demonstrating again how graphic visuality is not limited to those, like Scalia and Thomas, who are arguing that the death penalty spares criminals the pain that they caused their victims. See https://partners.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/10/cyber/cyberlaw/291aw.html.
18. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility,” Selected Writings. Vol 3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 102.
19. Masur, Rites of Execution, 26.
20. Ronald A. Bosco, “Lectures at the Pillory: The Early American Execution Sermon,” American Quarterly 30 (1978): 163.
21. Banner, Death Penalty, 7.
22. Samuel Danforth, The Cry of Sodom Enquired into (Cambridge: Johnson, 1674), cited in Bosco, “Lectures at the Pillory,” 157.
23. Diary of Cotton Mather, cited in Banner, Death Penalty, 33.
24. Cited in Bosco, “Lectures at the Pillory,” 171–72. See also Banner’s accounts of other execution documents (Death Penalty, 48–51).
25. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 8.
26. Ibid., 9, translation modified. In The Death Penalty, Vol. I (hereafter DP I), trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), Jacques Derrida questions Foucault’s idea of a disappearance of the spectacle of punishment with the birth of the prison, arguing instead that it be understood as a shift in regimes of a visibility that always remains operative in the death penalty (DP I, 43); see also Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, Vol. II (hereafter DP II), trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 220.
27. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 49.
28. Ibid., 257, translation modified: The Alan Sheridan translation includes a number of inaccuracies. Notably, “public execution” is here used for supplices where Foucault is clearly referring to putting to death by torture, even if supplice is elsewhere a synonym for execution. Cf. Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 261.
29. Ibid., 60.
30. Ibid., 61.
31. Ibid., 63, translation modified. For Derrida on autoimmunity, see Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 94–102; Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 2:83–85; and my discussion in Inanimation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 103–5.
32. Ibid., 92.
33. For a full account of the theatrical spectacle of the guillotine in the revolutionary period see Arasse, Guillotine and Terror, 88–132. It was not until 1832 that there began “the slow process by which the guillotine was finally withdrawn from the public eye” (ibid.,109), displaced first to a public square closer to the prison, and in 1852 to the prison gates. In 1872 the guillotine was removed from its scaffold and placed on the ground; the last public guillotining, that of Eugen Weidmann, took place in 1939. See my discussion in Chapter 4.
34. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 33.
35. J. Madival and E. Laurent, E. Clavel, eds., Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860: Recueil complet des débats législatifs & politiques des Chambres françaises (Paris: Librairie Administrative de P. Dupont, 1877), 9:393, all translations mine.
36. Ibid., 11:279, my emphasis.
37. Ibid., 31:326.
38. Le Moniteur, December 18, 1789, cited in Arasse, Guillotine and Terror, 17.
39. Cited in Arasse, Guillotine and Terror, 17.
40. Jacques Delarue, Le métier de bourreau (Paris: Fayard, 1979), 149, all translations mine. See also Arasse, Guillotine and Terror, 22.
41. Quoted in Delarue, Métier, 127.
42. Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, “Note sur le supplice de la guillotine,” Oeuvres completes de Cabanis. Tome II (Paris: Bossange Frères, 1823), 171, all translations mine. See also Delarue, Métier, 128–29.
43. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 13.
44. Madival and E. Laurent, et al., eds., Archives parlementaires (22 February–14 March 1792), 39:686, my translation, my emphasis.
45. Grégoire Chamayou, “La querelle des têtes tranchées: Les médecins, la guillotine et l’anatomie de la conscience au lendemain de la Terreur,” Revue d’histoire des sciences 61, no. 2 (2008): 333–65. English translation (“The Debate over Severed Heads: Doctors, the Guillotine and the Anatomy of Consciousness in the Wake of the Terror”) at http://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_RHS_612_0333—the-debate-over-severed-heads.htm.
46. Chamayou, “Debate,” §57.
47. Chamayou has the latter position represented by the Edinburgh vitalist Robert Whytt (1714–1766); cf. “Debate,” §62–69.
48. Ibid. , §84.
49. Ibid. , §103.
50. Cf. Arasse, Guillotine and Terror, 37.
51. Chamayou, “Debate,” §85.
52. Ibid., §94.
53. Ibid., §108–9.
54. Cabanis, “Note sur le supplice de la guillotine,” 171.
55. Ibid., 170, 176.
56. Ibid., 173. It is important to note that in no way did Cabanis’s faith in the machine prevent him from arguing for the abolition of the guillotine. See ibid., 180.
57. Ibid., 180.
58. Ibid., 172.
59. Arasse, Guillotine and Terror, 35.
60. Journal des états généraux, quoted in Arasse, Guillotine and Terror, 17.
61. Arasse, Guillotine and Terror, 13.
62. Ibid., 35.
63. Ibid., 36.
64. Fernand Meyssonnier, Paroles de bourreau, ed. Jean-Michel Bessette (Paris: Éditions Imago, 2002), 14, all translations mine. See also the novel by Mano Gentil, Le photographe (Paris: Éditions Syros, 2009), narrated by the “photographer” responsible, according to narrative clues, for the last execution in France, that of Hamida Djandoubi in 1977.
65. Patrick Wald Lasowski, “La guillotine dans le texte,” MLN 103, no. 4 (1988): 840, all translations mine. Lasowski’s essay was pointed out to me by Elissa Marder, in her excellent commentary “The Elephant and the Scaffold: Response to Kelly Oliver,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 50 (2012): 95–106. See also Kelly Oliver, “See Topsy ‘Ride the Lightning’: The Scopic Machinery of Death,” in ibid., 74–94. Arasse also analyzes, first, the relation between the guillotine and portraiture, and second, the coincidence of guillotine and photography, but that analysis takes him in a direction that is different from mine here (cf. Guillotine and Terror, 139–40).
66. Ibid., 840, 845–46.
67. Arasse, Guillotine and Terror, 27.
68. Ibid., 17.
69. Ibid., 10.
70. Meyssonnier, Paroles de bourreau, 114–17. Having watched photographs of the execution of Weidmann in 1939, Meyssonnier accuses that “photographer” of not doing his job, for he seems to have stepped away from the guillotine before the blade falls. He also describes the additional time pressures brought to bear—especially on the photographer who had to dispose of one head, then raise the blade in preparation for the next victim—in the case of multiple executions such as occurred during the Algerian War; and accuses “photographers” of low professional standards in other cases (ibid., 118–23, 127–28).
71. Cf. Sarat et al., Gruesome Spectacles. See also Victor Hugo’s 1832 Preface to The Last Day of a Condemned Man regarding botched executions of the period, the most infamous imputed to an executioner’s valet’s interference with the workings of the guillotine as revenge for losing his job. Hugo, The Last Day of a Condemned Man, trans. Arabella Ward (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2009), xxiv.
72. Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1967), 1:13
73. Ibid., 15.
74. Ibid.
75. Banner, Death Penalty, 53–70.
76. See Arasse regarding the “representative quality” of the guillotine in terms of both physical laws and the rationality that subtends them: “the very shape of the guillotine gave substance to the principle of justice it represented—a justice humane enough, no doubt, but as inexorable as a universal axiom.… The guillotine had something of the simplicity and austerity of a diagram: its abstract shape was a declaration of the universal validity of the laws of geometry and gravity. The decapitating machine made public execution a celebration of the mechanical and geometrical, and so ensured the spectacular triumph of these forms of ‘just’ and ‘reasonable’ thought” (Guillotine and Terror, 55).
77. Ibid., 36, translation modified. I return to this passage in Chapter 3.
78. Bazin, “Ontology,” 13.
79. http://www.amnestyusa.org/research/reports/death-sentences-and-executions-2015
80. Unverified or unverifiable press reports have also included the following among recent methods of execution practiced by Islamic State groups: nitric acid bath, crushing of head with a boulder, explosion, crucifixion, stabbing.
3. THE FUTURE ANTERIOR OF BLOOD
1. Jacques Delarue, Le métier de bourreau (Paris: Fayard, 1979), 384. Charles-Henri Sanson was appointed Royal Executioner in 1778 and continued as High Executioner until 1795, counting among his three-thousand-odd “patients” Louis XVI himself. Sanson was the fourth in a dynasty of six generations of bourreaux that lasted from 1684 to 1847.
2. http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/some-examples-post-furman-botched-executions.
3. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals in Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 498.
4. Justice Shaw dissenting in Provenzano v. Moore, 744 S0.2d 413 (1999), 428–29. The full context of his barbaric spectacle remark is this: “The color photos of Davis depict a man who—for all appearances—was brutally tortured to death by the citizens of Florida. Violence begets violence, and each of these deaths [Davis, Jesse Tafero, Pedro Medina] was a barbaric spectacle played by the State of Florida on the world stage. Each botched execution cast the entire criminal justice system of this state—including the courts—in ignominy” (490). See also the potential return of blood in response to the lethal injection crisis in the United States, in recent proposals by lawmakers in Wyoming, Missouri and Utah to return to the firing squad—permissible in Utah and last used in 2010—as the most humane method of execution.
5. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text? doc=Perseus% 3Atext% 3A1999.04.0059%3Aentry%3Dcruor.
6. See also Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, Vol. II (hereafter DP II), trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 220: “From the beginning of this seminar last year we became aware of a certain necessity … of seeking, if not finding, some correlation, a law of kinship … between the history of the death penalty and the history of blood.”
7. Beyond the history of Western art, see the mythology that developed concerning Louis XVI’s blood at the time of his guillotining. Daniel Arasse, The Guillotine and the Terror, trans. Christopher Miller (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 61–65.
8. The other botched Florida executions to which Shaw refers—Tafero and Medina—were marked by fire, which evokes a different historical form of capital punishment, namely the stake that returns in Resweber and in Sotomayor’s Glossip dissent.
9. See André Leroi-Gourhan on the heart (along with stars, seasons, days, walking) as one of the “few regular rhythms that the natural world offers.” Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 316. I thank Francesco Vitale for drawing this reference to my attention.
10. Phaedo, 58b. Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 41.
11. Crito, 43d. Ibid., 28.
12. Crito, 44a. Ibid., 28–29.
13. Phaedo, 54 and 678e. Ibid., 46 and 50.
14. Apology, 29a. Ibid., 15.
15. Apology, 38c. Ibid., 23.
16. Phaedo, 116e–117a. Ibid., 96–97.
17. Albert Camus, “Reflections on the Guillotine,” trans. Justin O’Brien, in Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays (New York: Vintage International, 1995), 202.
18. Ibid., 233. A somewhat similar sentiment can be found in the thinking behind Nevada’s introduction of the gas chamber in 1921, where some advocated that the execution should take place while the condemned person was asleep. See Sarat, Gruesome Spectacles, 91.
19. Ibid.
20. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 7. Further references to this edition will be included in text, preceded by the mention BT.
21. “To have to do with something, to produce, order and take care of something, to use something, to give something up and let it get lost, to undertake, to accomplish, to find out, to ask about, to observe, to speak about, to determine.… These ways of being-in have the kind of being of taking care of [Besorgen]” (BT, 57).
22. The German words are Entschlossenheit (resoluteness) and Vorlaufen (anticipation). The first expresses both determination and the idea of being unlocked; the second conveys the sense of running forward, or toward, which is obviously very different from avoiding death, or even sitting back and waiting for it.
23. Section 74 of Being and Time, in which the term Schicksal occurs frequently, is also where Heidegger refers to the destiny (Geschick) of a people (Volk) (BT, 366). In the light of Heidegger’s subsequent association with National Socialism, the use of the two terms and their context remain highly controversial.
24. Arasse, Guillotine and Terror, 36.
25. Ibid. See again Derrida on Guillotin’s “four-stroke verbal machine” as “coming from on high … falling, striking down … from the transcendence of the Most High.” Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, Vol. I (hereafter DP I), trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 222.
26. Arasse, Guillotine and Terror, 36. See also Derrida, for whom a gesture such as Heidegger’s deconstruction of the now nevertheless relies on commonsense knowledge, “judged to be indubitable, of what separates a state of death from a state of life … that is, of the supposed existence of an objectifiable instant that separates the living from the dying, be it of an ungraspable instant that is reduced to the blade of a knife or to the stigmē of a point. Without the supposed or supposedly possible knowledge of this clear-cut, sharp limit, there would be no philosophy or thinking of death.” DP I, 238.
27. Dasein’s everyday instants, its state of “entangled being-together-with,” which Heidegger also refers to as “falling prey to [the] things at hand and objectively present that we take care of” (BT, 313), amounts to yet another way in which it gets—as it were ecstatically—taken out of any possible authentic relation to the present. That sense of being too preoccupied with the mundane to enjoy the moment is easily understood. If Dasein does manage to come back to itself it is precisely by being shaken out of its distractedness, being reminded in the blink of an eye or “Moment” (Augenblick) what it is effectively missing. Heidegger’s word for that moment of instantaneous authenticity has a strong mystical sense of ecstasy, being carried away or carried off, enrapt or in rapture (Entrückung).
28. See Aristotle, Physica, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 292–99.
29. See Derrida, DP II, 148: “we have been and might still be surprised (once again drawing significant consequences from this symptom, as is the case with every philosopher), surprised, therefore, to discover … that this great thinker of being-toward-death never shows any interest in the death penalty.”
30. So little does Heidegger feel compelled, in concluding his volume, to engage in any complicated analysis, that he consigns substantial elements of his critique of Hegel to a long footnote in which he similarly rejects Bergson’s idea of duration, again insisting that “this is not the place for a critical discussion of Bergson’s concept of time and other present-day interpretations” (BT, 410n). Heidegger’s critique of the Aristotelian-Hegelian(-Bergsonian) axis of temporality forms something of a matching bookend to the pages he dedicates to Descartes and Kant, in chapter 2 of the introduction to Being and Time. There it is stated that “despite all his essential advances, Kant dogmatically adopted Descartes’ position” (23); and later, that “Kant’s fundamental ontological orientation—despite all the differences implicit in a new inquiry—remains Greek” (25), which again means Aristotelian.
31. Jacques Derrida, “Ousia and Grammē: Note on a Note from Being and Time,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 34.
32. Ibid., 38. For Derrida, Hegel repeats Aristotle on two counts: his disappearing of time in the pure Notion of absolute knowledge, discussed below, reverts to an understanding of time as a distraction or degeneration of presence, a contingent means by which presence gets extended toward or into absence; and his subject of self-consciousness, “thinking itself, and assembling itself near itself in knowledge” (ibid., 59), amounts to a transformation of Aristotle’s prime mover conceived of as pure presence.
33. Derrida also critiques Heidegger’s recourse to the primordial and authentic as versions of a “proper” that risks anchoring Heideggerian ontology within the very metaphysics of presence that it seeks to deconstruct: “The primordial, the authentic are determined as the proper (eigentlich), that is, as the near (proper, proprius), the present in the proximity of self-presence. One could show how this value of proximity and of self-presence intervenes, at the beginning of Sein und Zeit and elsewhere, in the decision to ask the question of the meaning of Being on the basis of an existential analytic of Dasein. And one could show the metaphysical weight of such a decision …” (ibid., 64n).
34. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 29. Further references appear in text preceded where necessary by the mention Nature. In quotations from Hegel I have consistently substituted “concept” for “notion” in the Miller translations.
35. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 487. Further references appear in text, preceded where necessary by the mention Phenomenology.
36. “Plasticity … will be presented as the ‘unforeseen’ of Hegelian philosophy.… The process of plasticity is dialectical.” Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During (London: Routledge, 2005), 7, 12. The translation is sometimes slightly modified.
37. Ibid., 53.
38. Quoted in ibid., 54.
39. Ibid., 55.
40. Ibid., 128.
41. Jacques Derrida, “A Time for Farewells: Heidegger (Read by) Hegel (Read by) Malabou,” in Malabou, Future of Hegel, xvi. Derrida’s essay appears as a Preface to the English translation of Malabou’s book. It was originally published in Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 188, no. 1 (1998).
42. Ibid., 58, 59.
43. Ibid., 59. Malabou discusses in more detail the relation between contraction and habit in “Who’s Afraid of Hegelian Wolves,” trans. David Wills, in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, 114–38).
44. Ibid., xxvii. As Malabou also wants to have understood, plasticity is, especially in Hegel, something other than elasticity, malleability or adaptability; it includes the radical transformability or becoming that she will ultimately call “metamorphosis” (Future of Hegel, 134), and renders problematic distinctions between inorganic and organic, artificial and natural.
45. Derrida, “A Time for Farewells,” xiii.
46. See my discussion, in relation both to Jacob’s Logic of Life, and Freud’s death drive, in Inanimation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 13–16, 70–77.
47. Malabou, Future of Hegel, 55.
48. In Zusatz comments in the Philosophy of Nature relating to the practical side of involvements with the outer world, Hegel phrases the organism’s relation to externality or exteriority in particularly stark—psychological if not psychoanalytic—terms, as though the organism were functioning not just according to physiology but as a consciousness. The blood’s struggle with air is repeated by ingestion in general, and by “the whole process of digestion” whereby the organism “angrily oppos[es] itself to the outer world” (402). If the organism is to find a way beyond that anger, it will be in terms that return us again to the logic of the Phenomenology, such that the animal—beginning, presumably, with some lowly organism—advances way past its digestive disorders to achieve a type of self-consciousness:
The animal … is angry with itself for getting involved with external powers and it now turns against itself and its false opinion; but in so doing it throws off its outward-turned activity and returns into itself. The triumph over the non-organic “potency” is not a triumph over it qua non-organic “potency,” but a triumph over animal nature itself. The true externality of animal nature is not the external thing, but the fact that the animal itself turns in anger against what is external. The subject [the animal has now become a consciousness] must rid itself of this lack of self-confidence which makes the struggle with the object appear as the subject’s own action, and must repudiate this false attitude. Through its struggle with the outer thing, the organism … compromises its dignity in face of this non-organic being. What the organism has to conquer, is, therefore, this its own process, this entanglement with the outer thing. (403–4)
49. In French, étancher means “to staunch” (hence étanche, “watertight”), whereas épancher is “to shed (blood), pour out.” In discussing blood here, Derrida plays between those two verbs.
50. In returning to the question in the final session Derrida will concede that the link he establishes “doesn’t mean that I understand what sacrifice is,” but that nevertheless “we must think what ‘sacrifice’ means, if we are to approach the question of the animal, as well as the question of the death penalty, from both sides” (DP II, 245). His subsequent, and last seminar cycle will be on the animal. Cf. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. I, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Vol. II, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
51. Gil Anidjar, Blood: A Critique of Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), xii. Anidjar does not reference Derrida’s death penalty seminars, the first volume of which no doubt appeared after he had completed his study.
52. Ibid., 22, 84.
53. Ibid., 92.
54. Ibid., 156. For Anidjar, even if blood represents a universal cultural “concern,” “the difference—and the distinct range—of this concern clearly leaves Christianity in a class of its own” (ibid.). That will lead him, in a way that my discussion to follow finds highly instructive, to transition in his final chapter from a hemato-political axis produced by the seventeenth-century contemporaries and friends William Harvey and Thomas Hobbes, an axis that links the circulation of blood and of money within the commonwealth called Leviathan, to the nineteenth century of Moby-Dick, where “Melville lays out the history of Christianity as the history of blood” (206) and produces an unmistakable conjunction between consumerism and bloodletting, the original form of “blood for oil” (207).
55. See Rainer Brömer, “The Nature of the Soul and the Passage of Blood through the Lungs: Galen, Ibn Al-Nafis, Servetus, Itaki, Attar,” in Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity to Early Modern Europe, ed. Manfred Horstmanshoff, Helen King, and Claus Zittel (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 339–62.
56. Ambroise Paré (1510?–90) became the surgeon of Henri II of France during the period when there was an exponential increase in battle wounds caused by handheld artillery and mobile cannon. See my discussion in Prosthesis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 215–19, where I argue that ligature of the arteries not only revolutionized surgery but also inaugurated the modern possibility of a prosthetic member.
57. Cf. Malabou, referring to the collapse of time in absolute knowledge: “The dialectical sublation of a specific temporal form, as presented in the chapter on Absolute Knowledge, would not be possible … if teleological time—the circular unrolling of dynamis and energeia—did not lie behind it.” Future of Hegel, 130.
58. See Derrida’s comments on the vulgar or “current” concept of time critiqued by Heidegger but “dominated by the schema of the flux.” “A Time for Farewells,” xxviii.
59. Malabou, Future of Hegel, 76.
4. SPIRIT WIND
1. Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, Vol. I (hereafter DP I), trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 278.
2. Michel de Montaigne, “A Custom of the Isle of Cea,” Essays, book 2, chap. 3, trans. Donald Frame (New York: Knopf, 2003), 306, translation slightly modified. Cf. Michel de Montaigne, Les essais (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 369.
3. Montaigne, “Custom,” 306.
4. Ibid., 311, 316; quotation at 313; for the woman of Cea, see 317–18.
5. Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2006), 35; and Christoph Reuter, My Life Is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing, trans. Helena Ragg-Kirby (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 133.
6. For the history of suicide bombing, see Pape, Dying to Win, 11–15. Pape identifies the first female suicide bomber of the contemporary era as sixteen-year-old Sana Youssel Mhaydali (138; see also 205–10, 226–30). See also Reuter, My Life Is a Weapon.
7. In his thoroughly reasoned and reasonable analysis of suicide bombing, Talal Asad states that, despite the etymological relation between “martyr” and shahīd, “the Qur’an, incidentally—and perhaps significantly—doesn’t make explicit use of the word shahīd to signify someone who dies in God’s cause.… The concept of istishhād as a technique of jihad in which the combatant (mujāhid) annihilates himself is an entirely modern idea.” Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 51–52. Asad convincingly argues that the Western assessment of—especially—the Muslim terrorist as cruel, barbaric, or suicidally fanatical is warped by the role of (holy) sacrifice in the Judeo-Christian tradition (43), and by the paradigm case of the crucifixion: “In short, in Christian civilization, the gift of life for humanity is possible only through a suicidal death; redemption is dependent on cruelty or at least on the sin of disregarding human life” (86).
8. André Malraux, Man’s Fate, trans. Haakon M. Chevalier (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 243. Further references to this edition included in text. Here and elsewhere the translation is slightly modified. Where necessary, page references are added in brackets from Malraux, La condition humaine, in Oeuvres complètes, Vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).
9. Marc Redfield introduces two separate but important ideas for consideration in the context of the “rhetoric” of terror that are apposite to its representation as a form of ecstasy in Malraux. The first is a complex relation to the sublime; the second is his astute acknowledgment of Heidegger’s disturbing use of the word Schrecken to emphasize what Dasein requires as an antidote to everyday emptiness in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Marc Redfield, The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 32–35, 125–26.
10. On this point see Asad, On Suicide Bombing, 89–90.
11. Albert Camus, “Reflections on the Guillotine,” trans. Justin O’Brien, in Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays (New York: Vintage International, 1995), 191, 192. See Derrida’s discussion of this passage by Camus (DP I, 247–49). Earlier (51–52), Derrida comments on the death wish of the infamous Claude Buffet, whose 1972 case is recounted by his accomplice’s lawyer, Robert Badinter, in L’exécution (Paris: Grasset, 1973). Badinter, a militant abolitionist, would go on to oversee the abolition of the death penalty in France in 1981.
12. Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1991), 120–21.
13. Ibid. Cf. Jean Genet, Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 54.
14. Genet, Our Lady, 51.
15. The dedication to Pilorge reads, “Were it not for Maurice Pilorge, whose death never stops poisoning my life, I would never have written this book. I dedicate it to his memory.” Pilorge, who was executed in February 1939 for slashing the throat of his (presumed) male lover, is celebrated in Genet’s poem “Le condamné à mort” (Oeuvres complètes, 177–86). According to Genet’s biographer, Edmund White, the writer falsely claimed to have known Pilorge. Edmund White, Genet: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1993), 180. Derrida calls Genet’s poem “a kind of chant of mourning and resurrection that describes but also poetically provokes, produces, performs, and glorifies the elevation, the ascension of the victims of the scaffold” (DP I, 33). Derrida mistakes the date of Pilorge’s execution.
For the execution of Weidmann, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJdhePPvxjY and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ybp-EZe7PoQ.
16. Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Schocken Books, 1999), 230–31. I return to this text in Chapter 6.
17. In the Kantian context, Derrida’s deconstruction weighs, more precisely, on the former’s distinction, developed in his Metaphysics of Morals, between a self-inflicted (moral) punishment (poena naturalis) and one imposed by a legal authority (poena forensis). See The Death Penalty, Vol. II (hereafter DP II), trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 68–69, 84–86.
18. See Lisa Stampnitzky, Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented “Terrorism” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) for the contemporary transition from policy and academic discussion of “insurgency” to “terrorism,” a shift that she dates to the 1972 Munich Olympics hostage-taking by Black September (21–23). On suicide bombing, see 144–45. See also Derrida’s discussion in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 101–9.
Regarding violence against property, the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act of 2006 provides the “Department of Justice the necessary authority to apprehend, prosecute, and convict individuals committing animal enterprise terror” involving damage to or loss of “any real or personal property (including animals or records) used by an animal enterprise.” See https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-109publ374/html/PLAW-109publ374.htm.
19. “Discours de Robespierre sur les principes de morale politique qui doivent guider la Convention dans l’administration intérieure de la république,” Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur, Convention Nationale (Paris: Henri Plon, 1863), 19:404, my translation. Cf. Marcel Reinhard, Georges Lefebvre, and Marc Bouloiseau, eds., Archives parlementaires de 1787–1860 (Paris: CNRS, 1962), 84:333.
20. http://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/divers/la_Terreur/146370. On the Revolution’s progressive imposition of the state of siege, see Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 4–5, 11–12.
21. I discuss the role of the pamphlet at length in my Dorsality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 183–91. Cf. Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings (New York: Grove Press, 1990), 296–339.
22. Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Work of Fire, trans. Lydia Davis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 320. Further reference in text following the abbreviation “Right to Death,” translation sometimes slightly modified; cf. “La littérature et le droit à la mort,” La part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 310 (earlier version in Critique 4, 20 [1948]: 30–47). Pages numbers from La part du feu are added in brackets where necessary.
23. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xii.
24. Ibid.
25. Space does not permit me to discuss here how the second half of “Literature and the Right to Death” provides what is in many ways a reasoned theoretical explanation for the more programmatic logic of its first half. See, in that regard, DP I, 112ff. One should also note that when Blanchot includes his article in La part du feu the whole essay is printed in italic script, as though it were a particular hypothetical form, a separate opuscule within, or special postface to that volume; or as though it were written in a different mood, quoted, or translated from another language. That special status is not reproduced in the English translation.
Blanchot’s essay is clearly in conversation with Hegel’s chapter on “Absolute Freedom and Terror” in G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 355–63. One should also note its other, very different background source: Jean Paulhan, The Flowers of Tarbes or, Terror in Literature, trans. Michael Syrotinski (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), published in 1941. Paulhan defines terror as “those moments in the history of nations … when it suddenly seems that the State requires not ingeniousness and systematic methods … but rather an extreme purity of the soul, and the freshness of a communal innocence” (24). Blanchot discusses Paulhan’s book in 1943, in “How Is Literature Possible?” without for all that extending the discussion in the directions taken in “Literature and the Right to Death.” In a sense, that makes the latter essay another, very different take on how literature is possible. See Maurice Blanchot, “How Is Literature Possible?” in Faux pas, trans. Charlotte Mandel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 76–84. For a fine reading of these questions, and analysis of Blanchot that overlaps with my own, see Redfield, The Rhetoric of Terror, 81–84.
26. Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, xii.
27. Sade was imprisoned in the Bastille starting in February 1784. It was there that he wrote a number of his works, most notably the unfinished manuscript of 120 Days of Sodom. On July 2, 1789, during his permitted walk along the towers of the prison he created a disturbance by shouting, supposedly with the aid of an improvised loudspeaker, that the jailers were cutting prisoners’ throats, inviting the crowd to come and liberate him. He was transferred to the Charenton asylum two days later and, of course, ten days after that, the Bastille was stormed, launching the Revolution. See Gilbert Lély, Vie du Marquis de Sade, in Lély, ed., Oeuvres complètes du Marquis de Sade (Paris: Cercle du livre précieux, 1962), 2:190–92.
28. See again Dolmancé’s pamphlet in Philosophy in the Bedroom, 318–19, 337.
29. See DP I, 97–122. Derrida’s fourth session of the first year of his seminar, within which the discussion of Blanchot’s “Literature and the Right to Death” is found, begins and ends with Hugo’s appeal to the Constituent Assembly for what would become the Second Republic in 1848: “I vote for the pure, simple, and definitive abolition of the death penalty.” See also my discussion in Chapter 6.
30. In subsequent pages of Derrida’s analysis of Blanchot’s article, he tempers “the properly terrifying and sinister resonances and connotations of this terrorist, terrorizing thinking of literature, of this literature as Terror” (DP I, 117) by discussing literature’s contradictory language, the relation of death to resurrection, and death as the impossibility of dying (117–20). See the following discussion.
31. The Universal Declaration of 1948 will add more explicitly as Article 3: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.”
32. Montaigne, Essays, 305.
33. According to François Billacois, though the duel remained the principal form of trial by ordeal in the sixteenth century, the continued use of trial by water for sorcery led the Paris Parliament to forbid it as late as 1601. The Duel: Its Rise and Fall in Early Modern France, ed. and trans. Trista Selous (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 15.
34. Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death and Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 3. Although Blanchot’s and Derrida’s texts appear in the same volume in English, further references appearing in text will be distinguished as Instant and Demeure. In one or two instances the translation is slightly modified.
35. For the biographical and historical record see Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot: Partenaire invisible (Paris: Champ Vallon, 1998), 228–31. Cf. also Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1981): “I was made to stand against the wall like many others. Why? For no reason. The guns did not go off” (6).
36. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 67.
37. Ibid., translation modified; cf. Maurice Blanchot, L’écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 110.
38. See Sharon Cameron’s excellent analysis of this episode from Dostoyevsky in The Bond of the Furthest Apart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 44–50.
39. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe points to the noteworthy echoes between Blanchot’s reflection here and Bataille’s “Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice.” Lacoue-Labarthe, Ending and Unending Agony, trans. Hannes Opelz (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 32–33.
40. See, for example, Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, 117. Derrida does not make any connection to Heidegger in Demeure.
41. Since 1326, according to the Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales. See http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/attentat.
5. DRONE PENALTY
1. More than any other chapter in this book, this one remains hostage to current events and to the speed of academic publishing, as discussed in the Introduction. I have attempted to account for new facts based on statistical and other information that was revised for the last time on September 30, 2018.
2. Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: New Press, 2015), 84. Further references will be included in text, preceded where necessary by the mention Drone. The translation is sometimes slightly modified.
3. See https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/projects/drone-war; http://www.reprieve.org.uk/investigations/drones; https://www.facebook.com/DronesWatch; http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com; http://www.longwarjournal.org. The figures cited are those provided by www.thebureauinvestigates.com, restricted to actions in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, accessed September 30, 2018. They do not take into account deaths from drone strikes in Afghanistan from January 2015 to the present (3,918–5,256), or actions in the recently opened or reopened theatres of Syria and Iraq (see https://airwars.org).
4. http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions-year. Accessed September 30, 2018.
5. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 5.
6. https://theintercept.com/2016/02/25/us-extends-drone-war-deeper-into-africa-with-secretive-base.
7. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/27/obama-goree-island_n_3511414.html.
8. On March 6, 2013, Paul filibustered for almost thirteen hours to prevent a vote on the confirmation of John Brennan, Obama’s choice to lead the CIA, drawing attention to the potential for a drone strike against an American citizen on American soil. See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/07/rand-paul-drones-policy-filibuster.
9. “That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.” (https://www.congress.gov/107/plaws/publ40/PLAW-107publ40.pdf).
10. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/us/politics/transcript-of-obamas-speech-on-drone-policy.html. Since that speech, a leaked Pentagon document has become available (https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/14/small-footprint-operations-5-13/); and The Intercept has published its “Drone Papers” with further documentation and extensive commentary (https://theintercept.com/drone-papers).
11. For the current state of play, see Matthew C. Weed, “A New Authorization for Use of Military Force against the Islamic State: Issues and Current Proposals,” https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R43760.pdf.
12. See https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/07/01/executive-order-united-states-policy-pre-and-post-strike-measures; and https://www.justice.gov/oip/foia-library/procedures_for_approving_direct_action_against_terrorist_targets/download.
13. “Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, Philip Alston,” A/HRC/14/24/Add.6, §87. https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G10/137/53/PDF/G1013753.pdf. The report refers to practices by Israel, the United States, and Russia.
14. Ibid., §4.
15. See Peshawar High Court Writ Petition No. 1551-P/2012. If the Peshawar decision cannot have immediate consequences for U.S. policy and actions, unless Pakistan were to develop some vigorous follow-up; and if the United States remains mostly immune to international action by virtue of its not being a signatory to the World Court, that is not the case for allies who are complicit in carrying out the drone program, such as Australia, as has recently been pointed out (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/29/australia-drones-pine-gap).
16. Elements of what follows were outlined in my Matchbook (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 16–18.
17. Carol S. Steiker and Jordan M. Steiker, Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), 7.
18. Ibid., 20.
19. See Stuart Banner, The Death Penalty: An American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 131, 222, 228, 230.
20. Steiker and Steiker, Courting Death, 25.
21. Ibid., 24.
22. Cf. ibid., 67. See also David Garland, Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), which uses an “archetypal Southern lynching scene … to orient [its] study of American capital punishment and its peculiar characteristics” (36); and Franklin E. Zimring, The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 88–99.
23. Steiker and Steiker, Courting Death, 34.
24. Ibid., 40.
25. Ibid., 26.
26. Ibid., 54.
27. Ibid., 55.
28. See Courting Death, 78–115. “Hiding in plain sight” is a section heading at 79. The authors discuss in detail the relative absence of race from the Furman, Gregg, and Coker opinions.
29. Ibid., 97. See also Sheri Lynn Johnson, “Coker v. Georgia: Of Rape, Race, and Burying the Past,” in Death Penalty Stories, ed. John H. Blume and Jordan M. Steiker (New York: Thomson Reuters/Foundation Press, 2009), 171, 190–95.
30. Colin Dayan, The Story of Cruel and Unusual (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007), and The Law Is a White Dog (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
31. Dayan, Cruel and Unusual, 7–8.
32. Ibid., 17.
33. Ibid., 17–21.
34. For a recent, profound analysis of links between drone warfare, torture and illegal detention see Elisabeth Weber, Kill Boxes: Facing the Legacy of US-Sponsored Torture, Indefinite Detention, and Drone Warfare (New York: Punctum Books, 2017).
35. Dayan, White Dog, 89.
36. On animal prosecutions see E. P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (London: William Heinemann, 1906); and, for a more recent assessment, Anila Srivastava, “ ‘Mean, dangerous, and uncontrollable beasts’: Mediaeval Animal Trials,” Mosaic 40, 1 (2007): 127–43. According to Evans, “as late as 1864 at Pleternica in Slavonia, a pig was tried and executed for having maliciously bitten off the ears of a female infant aged one year” (137). Evans also discusses the jurisprudence of the deodand (186–92). Conversely, in the final chapter of White Dog, Dayan takes up the question of contemporary treatments of “wayward” species of dogs.
37. Dayan, White Dog, 147, 148.
38. Cf. ibid., 152–53.
39. Cf. ibid., 96–112. See Boyce v. Anderson, 27 U.S. 150 (1829)
40. Ibid., 195.
41. Cf. ibid., 200–1.
42. Ibid., 181.
43. Cited in Dayan, White Dog, 86. Steiker and Steiker point to the converse characterization of how death row currently functions in California, made by federal judge Cormac J. Carney in 2014, as “life in prison with the remote possibility of death” (Courting Death, 1).
44. Cesare Beccaria, An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (Albany: W. C. Little & Co., 1872), 99–100, 101.
45. Except for passing reference toward the end of Chapter 1 this study has, for fear of being derailed, refrained from addressing the dubious constitutional justification for the death penalty found in the Fifth Amendment: “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime … nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” However, that dubiousness comes into particular focus in this context. It seems quite clear that the clause that contemplates capital punishment also contemplates slavery, to the extent that a slave is not there presumed to be a person with access to redress for being deprived of liberty. Yet few, if any, of those who today have recourse to the Fifth Amendment for maintaining the death penalty would argue for reinstating slavery.
46. Steiker and Steiker, Courting Death, 77.
47. Ibid., 72. See also Zimring, Contradictions of American Capital Punishment, 89–92.
48. See Obama’s remarks regarding the Connecticut school shootings (http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/12/16/president-obama-prayer-vigil-connecticut-shooting-victims-newtown-you-are-not-alone), and the commentary by George Monbiot (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/17/us-killings-tragedies-pakistan-bug-splats). See also Cornel West’s commentary on Democracy Now on July 22, 2013, provoked by the not guilty verdict in the Trayvon Martin case, accusing Obama of “plantation” politics or being a “global [stand-your-ground] George Zimmerman” in his reckless disregard for Pakistani, Somalian, or Yemeni children’s lives: http://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/22/cornel_west_obamas_response_to_trayvon
49. See also Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).
50. See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2–3, 86–87.
51. See http://www.justice.gouv.fr/histoire-et-patrimoine-10050/proces-historiques-10411/le-proces-de-louis-xvi-22604.html.
52. Maximilien Robespierre, Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, ed. Marc Bouloiseau et al. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958), IX:121.
53. Ibid., 129.
54. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 255.
55. Ibid., 667. The Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War in Europe in 1648. Hobbes’s English background context, of course, was the ongoing Civil War (1642–51), which ended the year Leviathan was published.
56. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5.
57. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. I, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 26.
58. Ibid., 16–17.
59. See Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
60. Derrida, Beast and Sovereign, I:208–9.
61. See Rogues, 102–6, and Giovanna Borradori, ed., Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
62. See Jacques Derrida, “Unconditionality or Sovereignty: The University at the Frontiers of Europe,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, Oxford Literary Review 31 (2009), esp. 121–27.
63. Only two drones strikes are known to have taken place outside the Afghanistan theater of war before Derrida’s death in October 2004. The first recorded strike was in Yemen in November 2002, and the subject of a report by the Special UN Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions in January 2003, in whose opinion it constituted “a clear case of extrajudicial killing.” The second was in Pakistan in June 2004. See https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/projects/drone-war.
64. Derrida, Beast and Sovereign, I:1.
65. “Secret ‘kill list’ proves a test of Obama’s principles and will,” New York Times, May 29, 2012.
66. David Zucchino, “Drone pilots have a front-seat on war from half a world away,” Los Angeles Times, February 21, 2010.
67. See my Inanimation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 179–90.
68. Carl Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Publishing, 2007), 69.
69. Ibid., 16.
70. Ibid., 22. Chamayou extrapolates Schmitt’s “telluric” partisan to the “stratospheric” (Drone, 61).
71. Cf. Schmitt, Partisan, 25–27.
72. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Scwhab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 26.
73. Schmitt, Partisan, 95, 80.
74. Concerning precision, see in particular Drone, 142.
75. “Typically, power based on a slavery system is a striking example of zoopolitics [le pouvoir esclavagiste représente la zoopolitique par excellence],” 269n; cf. Chamayou, Théorie du Drone (Paris: La Fabrique, 2013), 358n.
76. Chamayou also discusses debate over whether drone operators should be awarded medals for valor (Drone, 101–2), and reports—and responses to those reports—regarding operators’ PTSD symptoms (106–11). See also http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/pain-continues-after-war-for-american-drone-pilot-a-872726.html.
77. http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/headtohead/2015/07/blame-isil-150728080342288.html. See also the likelihood that terrorists themselves will, or already do, possess drones of their own (see http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/04/28/terrorists-have-drones-now-thanks-obama-warfare-isis-syria-terrorism).
78. James Brown Scott, ed., The Proceedings of the Hague Peace Conferences: The Conference of 1899 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1920), 343.
79. See Glenn Greenwald, “Obama killed a 16 year-old in Yemen, Trump just killed his 8 year-old sister,” https://theintercept.com/2017/01/30/obama-killed-a-16-year-old-american-in-yemen-trump-just-killed-his-8-year-old-sister.
80. Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007), 9.
81. Ibid., 241.
82. Ibid., 241, 250.
83. Pragmatic copresence is intended to resolve the problem of a “distance” that “covers several dimensions that are confused in our ordinary experience but which teletechnologies both disaggregate and redistribute spatially” (Drone, 116). The argument of “originary prosthesis” works from a similar problematic but tends to treat distance as necessarily technological and disaggregating, while nevertheless acknowledging effects of disaggregation specific to drone warfare such as Chamayou describes on 116–19. One wonders whether a pragmatics of copresence could account for the secret or prayer, which are in no way immune from technology, discussed below.
84. Hobbes, Leviathan, 81. See also Chamayou, Drone, 218–21.
85. Derrida, Beast and Sovereign, I:27.
86. Ibid., 215.
87. Ibid.
88. See again “Secret ‘kill list’ proves a test of Obama’s principles and will,” and https://theintercept.com/drone-papers.
89. On “double-taps,” see http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2013/08/01/bureau-investigation-finds-fresh-evidence-of-cia-drone-strikes-on-rescuers. For further, empirically based analysis of how “spaces of constructed visibility are also always spaces of constructed invisibility,” see Derek Gregory, “From A View to Kill: Drones and Late Modern War,” Theory, Culture & Society 28, nos. 7–8 (2012): 188–215 (quote at 193).
90. For a different perspective, and triangulation of sovereign with terrorist, see Adi Ophir, “Disaster as a Place of Morality: The Sovereign, the Humanitarian, and the Terrorist,” Qui Parle 16, no. 1 (2006): 95–116.
91. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 108. The Matthew 6 section of the Sermon on the Mount has as its refrain, regarding the “privacy” of almsgiving, prayer, and fasting, “Your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” For an excellent, sustained discussion of this topic, see Charles Barbour, Derrida’s Secret: Perjury, Testimony, Oath (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017).
92. Ibid.
93. Glenn Greenwald, “Three key lessons from the Obama administration’s drone lies,” The Guardian, April 11, 2013: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/11/three-lessons-obama-drone-lies.
94. See Glenn Greenwald, “The bombing of Mali highlights all the lessons of western intervention,” The Guardian, January 14, 2013: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/14/mali-france-bombing-intervention-libya.
95. Cf. Derrida’s discussion in Beast and Sovereign, I:7–11.
96. See http://livingunderdrones.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Stanford_NYU_LIVING_UNDER_DRONES.pdf
97. See Derrida, Beast and Sovereign, I:203. On this subject, see also Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” trans. Sam Weber, in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 47–48; and the superb, sustained analysis undertaken by Michael Naas in Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), esp. 119, 150–51.
98. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. II, trans. George Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 203.
99. Paul Celan, The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials, trans. Pierre Joris (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 9. For another reading of Celan’s Meridian address, see my Inanimation, 139–51; and for a different rhetorico-polemical conclusion to the present discussion see the earlier version of it published as “Drone Penalty,” SubStance 43, no. 2 (2014): 174–92.
100. Derrida, Beast and Sovereign, II:233–34, my emphasis.
101. Maximilien Robespierre, Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, ed. Marc Bouloiseau and Albert Soboul (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), X:422, my translation.
102. Ibid., 424, my translation.
103. Georg Büchner, Complete Works and Letters, trans. Henry J. Schmidt (New York: Continuum, 1986), 123. Danton’s Death quotes liberally from historical documents such as those discussed earlier, for example Robespierre’s invocation of terror, and the trial of Danton just referred to.
104. Celan, Meridian, 3, 4. See also the commentary by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in his Poetry as Experience, trans. Andrea Tarnowski (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 50–51.
6. LAM TIME
1. “What is an act?” is one of the fundamental questions Derrida poses at the beginning of The Death Penalty, Vol. II, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (hereafter DP II; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), showing how—along with “What is an age?” and “What is a desire?”—it complicates the operation of criminal justice and the death penalty in particular (3–17).
2. Michel Foucault, ed., I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother, trans. Frank Jellinek (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982). The English translation promotes Foucault to an editorial position that remains more discreet in the original (his name appears on the cover but not on the title page, and the copyright page presents the work as a collective effort); it also omits a series of pages at the end of part I that include a Rivière family chronology, and a map and detailed description of the criminal’s wanderings prior to his arrest.
Further reference to the English edition will be included in text, preceded where necessary by the abbreviation PR. As required, the page reference to the French edition, Moi, Pierre Rivière (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), is added, preceded by the abbreviation Moi.
3. See again the case of Henry McCollum (McCollum, 1994), whose conviction was obtained thanks to a confession.
4. Cf. Foucault, Moi, Pierre Rivière, 234–37.
5. See Foucault’s discussion of how the introduction of a verdict relating to insanity (Article 64 of the 1810 penal code) evolved from preempting guilt to allowing that someone could be both mad and guilty, which, following the introduction of extenuating circumstances, required psychiatric expertise. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 19–21.
6. Following the period of the Revolution and the final defeat of Napoleon, the French monarchy was restored with the accession, in 1814, of Louis XVIII, brother of the guillotined Louis XVI (whose own son and successor had died in prison). Louis XVIII died childless and was succeeded by his brother Charles X, who reigned from 1824 to 1830. Charles was deposed in the “July Revolution” of 1830 by Louis-Philippe, ending the succession of Bourbon kings in favor of the line of Orléans. In turn, Louis-Philippe’s own increasing authoritarianism led to his destitution in the 1848 Revolution and the constitution of the Second Republic, followed, from 1852 to 1870, by Louis-Napoléon’s Second Empire.
7. Corporal punishments for various crimes had been reintroduced in the period 1810–1825. Indeed when an Anti-Sacrilege Act was introduced under Charles X, the penalty for profanation of the consecrated host was first intended to be the same as that for parricide—mutilation followed by execution—but ultimately reverted to the death penalty alone. See Francis Démier, La France de la Restauration (1814–1830) (Paris: Gallimard, 2012), 749.
8. Hugo writes in 1832 that readers of the anonymous 1829 edition supposed it was an English or American story. The Last Day of a Condemned Man, trans. Arabella Ward (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2009), xiv.
9. Hugo, Last Day, xiii–xiv. Cf. Victor Hugo, Le dernier jour d’un condamné (Paris: Hatier, 2012), 8.
10. Ibid., xvi. Coincidentally, Hugo’s word serpe is French for pruning bill, Rivière’s murder weapon (cf. Hugo, Dernier jour, 12).
See Derrida’s extensive analyses of Hugo’s abolitionist militancy in The Death Penalty, Vol. I (hereafter DP I; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), first on the basis of the guillotine’s bloody history, and second regarding Hugo’s casting the question of capital punishment as a question of onto-theological sovereignty, specifically Christianity (DP I 181–83, 207–15).
11. See Derrida regarding Hugo’s view that extenuating circumstances should be considered as the first step on the way to abolition (DP I, 102–4).
12. Morel was appointed director of the Asile d’Aliénés de Maréville in 1848, where he expanded the more humane treatment of the insane begun by Philippe Pinel in the late eighteenth century. He introduced the concept of dementia praecox, often credited with being the first description of schizophrenia. See his Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles, et morales de l’espèce humaine (Paris: Baillière, 1857).
13. Cf. PR, 210–11n. The lamentation is not reproduced in the English translation. It begins: “If, in the splendors of memory famous warriors are inscribed, one [also] preserves the names of certain brigands from history; that of young Pierre Rivière … will figure there forever” (my translation). See Foucault, Moi, Pierre Rivière, 227.
14. Moi, Pierre Rivière (1973) was published two years before Discipline and Punish, in the French original Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). The Archeology of Knowledge, originally published as L’archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969) and “The Order of Discourse,” originally L’ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1970) had been published four and five years before that, respectively.
15. See the groundbreaking codification of narrative temporalities by Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980).
16. One might compare Rivière’s narrative mediation of his crime with contemporary interest on the part of some criminals in filming their acts, which would again call for comparative analysis of prephotographic and twenty-first-century mediatic contexts.
17. See also Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006): “But thought is one thing, and deed another, and the image of a deed yet another. The wheel of motive does not roll between them” (26). I thank Paul Patton for reminding me of this passage.
18. The memoir is organized as follows:
p. 54 (Moi, 73), headed “Particulars and explanation”
p. 55 (Moi, 74), beginning of “Summary”
p. 100 (Moi, 123), “end of the summary of my father’s afflictions”)
p. 101 (Moi, 124), “summary of my private life and the thoughts that have busied me to this day”
p. 105 (Moi, 128), first mention of “the fearful design which I executed”
pp. 105–6 (Moi, 130–31), “Having therefore taken these fatal resolutions I resolved to put them into execution. I intended first to write down …”
p. 112 (Moi, 137), “I committed that fearful crime”
pp. 112–121 (Moi, 137–48), description of wanderings and eventual arrest
p. 121 (Moi, 148), “The End” and signature
19. Two other works by Maurice Blanchot deserve mention here in view of attention paid, in Chapter 4, to his thinking. The first is exactly contemporaneous with “Literature and the Right to Death,” and is entitled precisely Death Sentence, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1998); cf. L’arrêt de mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). It is in two chapters, and stages the instant of death of a young woman—very different from the L’instant de ma mort—understood as an opposition between “lightning” and “final immobility” (29); it also foregrounds the question of the narrator’s culpability in relation to his account of that death. The second chapter is a complicated story involving the narrator: it recasts a number of elements from the first chapter, and is similarly both dramatically decisive and mired in indecision. The second work, a much shorter piece entitled The Madness of the Day, originally La folie du jour (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), could be read in company with either Kafka’s The Trial, discussed below, or the Rivière case. It has in common with the latter a desire or demand for a narrative recounting (récit) and an uncanny convergence of medical and juridical authority, which “constantly gave our conversation the character of an authoritarian interrogation” (18/31). Space does not permit the extensive analysis that those texts call for in the context of the questions I am raising here.
20. See Derrida’s remarks concerning the problematics of abolitionist literary fiction (DP II, 196–98); and the forthcoming book by Peggy Kamuf, Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018).
21. See information provided by the Oklahoma Department of Corrections at http://doc.ok.gov/death-row-monthly-roster. The status of all prisoners on that roster appears currently to be “indefinite stay.”
22. Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, The Complete Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 144.
23. Ibid., 149.
24. Ibid., 150.
25. Ibid., 160. Cf. Kafka, “In der Strafkolonie,” Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1935), 1:205.
26. Ibid. 164.
27. Ibid. 165; cf. “Strafkolonie,” 211.
28. Ibid., 166.
29. Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis,” trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, Complete Stories, 89.
30. Ibid., 110, 120. Cf. Kafka, “Die Verwandlung,” in Gesammelte Schriften, 1:95, 107.
31. Ibid., 134. Cf. “Verwandlung,” 123.
32. Ibid., 135. Cf. “Verwandlung,” 125.
33. Franz Kafka, “Before the Law,” trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, Complete Stories, 3.
34. Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 164–65.
35. Ibid., 167–68.
36. Ibid., 166.
37. Ibid., 168.
38. Ibid., 179.
39. I thank Wolf Kittler for information regarding the etymology of the German word (cf. “Verwandlung,” 69).