Killing Times: The Temporal Technology of the Death Penalty Paperback - 2019

From the rear cover

"Killing Times makes an enormous contribution to understanding the logic of capital punishment in its disparate practices, laws, and customs. For the first time we see that capital punishment is not only about retribution through state-imposed death, but it is also and above all about the absolute mastery of time through the creation of a kind of negative prosthesis--technology--that impossibly supplements and completes the human by subtracting and destroying it. This is scholarship and theoretical analysis at the highest level: thorough, wide-ranging, and convincing."--Allan Stoekl, Pennsylvania State University

"Killing Times shows how technologies of death have affected, or infected, the way we live. No mere academic treatise, Wills's beautiful, forceful, and mesmerizing book will draw in readers through its confessional style and vivid storytelling."--Kelly Oliver, Vanderbilt University

Killing Times begins with the deceptively simple observation--made by Jacques Derrida in his seminars on the topic--that the death penalty mechanically interrupts mortal time by preempting the typical mortal experience of not knowing at what precise moment we will die. Through a broader examination of what constitutes mortal temporality, David Wills proposes that the so-called machinery of death summoned by the death penalty works by exploiting, or perverting, the prosthetic machinery of time that already regulates human existence.

Killing Times traces the logic of the death penalty across a range of sites. Starting with the struggles of American courts to articulate what methods of execution constitute "cruel and unusual punishment," Wills goes on to show the ways that technologies of death have themselves evolved in conjunction with fraught ideas of cruelty and instantaneity, from the guillotine through today's drugs for lethal injection--and beyond the justice system to the opposed but linked practices of suicide bombing and drone warfare.

Grounded in a deep ethical and political commitment to death penalty abolition, Wills's engaging and powerfully argued book pushes the question of capital punishment beyond the confines of legal argument to show how the technology of capital punishment defines and appropriates the instant of death and reconfigures the whole of human mortality.

David Wills is Professor of French Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University.

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Citations

• Choice, 12/01/2019, Page 0