As will be argued in what follows, the central question of the death penalty is the question of time. That question begins, in the present case, with the time of a writing that attempts to address what we call current events, particularly an academic writing—as distinct, for example, from journalistic writing—whose rhythms of composition and publication obey particular protocols and render problematic the specifics of what we call political intervention, the relevance or efficacy of which is normally determined by a (...) certain “punctuality.” Hence Zola’s “J’accuse,” a paradigm within the genre of public intellectual intervention, published in L’Aurore on 13 January 1898. I do not know how to resolve the tension .. (shrink)

In _The Gift of Death_, Jacques Derrida's most sustained consideration of religion to date, he continues to explore questions introduced in _Given Time_ about the limits of the rational and responsible that one reaches in granting or accepting death, whether by sacrifice, murder, execution, or suicide. Derrida analyzes Patocka's _Heretical Essays on the History of Philosophy_ and develops and compares his ideas to the works of Heidegger, Levinas, and Kierkegaard. A major work, _The Gift of Death_ resonates with much of (...) Derrida's earlier writing and will be of interest to scholars in anthropology, philosophy, and literary criticism, along with scholars of ethics and religion. "_The Gift of Death_ is Derrida's long-awaited deconstruction of the foundations of the project of a philosophical ethics, and it will long be regarded as one of the most significant of his many writings."—_Choice_ "An important contribution to the critical study of ethics that commends itself to philosophers, social scientists, scholars of relgion... [and those] made curious by the controversy that so often attends Derrida."—_Booklist _ "Derrida stares death in the face in this dense but rewarding inquiry.... Provocative."—_Publishers Weekly_. (shrink)

This essay considers together two recent posthumous publications by Derrida: Geschlecht III, and La vie la mort, both of which raise questions concerning translation. In Geschlecht III that is first of all the problem of how to translate the German word, how Heidegger’s reading of Trakl profits from, or loses in its translation, and how Derrida’s reading of Heidegger either does or does not translate Heidegger’s own interpretive practice. Reference to La vie la mort enables analysis of Benjamin’s concept of (...) translation as a form of life that is “not limited to organic corporeality,” and consequently allows me to understand how Derrida’s thinking, very different from that of either Benjamin or Heidegger, takes us way back to something like originary inorganic lifedeath. (shrink)

The dorsal turn -- Facades of the other : Heidegger, Althusser, Levinas -- No one home : Homer, Joyce, Broch -- A line drawn in the ocean : Exodus, Freud, Rimbaud -- Friendship in torsion : Schmitt, Derrida -- Revolutions in the darkroom : Balázs, Benjamin, Sade -- The controversy of dissidence : Nietzsche.

The notion of a ‘machinery of death’ not only underwrites abolitionist discourse but also informs what Derrida's Death Penalty refers to as an anesthesial drive that can be traced back at least as far as Guillotin. I read it here as a symptom of a more complex relation to the technological that functions across the line dividing life from death, and which is concentrated in the question of the instant that capital punishment requires. Further indications of such a relation include (...) the forms of automatic machinism that regulate, on one hand, the generalisable certainty that death occurs, and on the other, the discursive contagion that the death penalty generates. But it can be analysed most productively in the way in which the putative instantaneity of an execution reveals how life is severed from, but also perhaps tethered to death by means of a machinery of time; how that machinery of time ‘abandons’ its indifference in order to decide the moment of death by execution, and at the same time, by contriving an instant at which death takes over from life, produces the uncanny result of having life and death meet on the same knife-edge. (shrink)

Deconstruction and the Visual Arts brings together a series of new essays by scholars of aesthetics, art history and criticism, film, television and architecture. Working with the ideas of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the essays explore the full range of his analyses. They are modelled on the variety of critical approaches that he has encouraged, from critiques of the foundations of our thinking and disciplinary demarcation, to creative and experimental readings of visual 'texts'. Representing some of the most innovative thinking (...) in the various arts disciplines, these contributions offer important challenges to existing disciplinary orthodoxies. Also included in this volume is a long interview with Derrida, published here for the first time. (shrink)

Doubled lives -- Autobiography -- Automatic life, so life: Descartes -- Order catastrophically unknown: Freud -- The blushing machine: Derrida -- Translation -- The point if at all: Cixous and Celan -- Naming the mechanical angel: Benjamin -- Raw war: Schmitt, Jønger, and Joyce -- Resonance -- Bloodless coup: Bataille, Nancy, and Barthes -- The audible life of the image: Godard -- Meditations for the birds: Descartes.

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 machinery of time that is already attached to human existence. Time, Wills (...) argues, functions for us in general as a prosthetic technology, but the application of the death penalty represents a new level of prosthetic intervention into what constitutes the human. Killing Times traces the logic of the death penalty across a range of sites. Starting with the legal cases whereby American courts have struggled 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 ideas of cruelty and instantaneity, from the development of the guillotine and the trap door for hanging, through the firing squad and the electric chair, through today’s controversies surrounding lethal injection. Responding to the legal system’s repeated recourse to storytelling—prosecutors’ and politicians’ endless recounting of the horrors of crimes—Wills gives a careful eye to the narrative, even fictive spaces that surround crime and punishment. Many of the controversies surrounding capital punishment, Wills argues, revolve around the complex temporality of the death penalty: how its instant works in conjunction with forms of suspension, or extension of time; how its seeming correlation between egregious crime and painless execution is complicated by a number of different discourses. By pinpointing the temporal technology that marks the death penalty, Wills is able to show capital punishment’s expansive reach, tracing the ways it has come to govern not only executions within the judicial system, but also the opposed but linked categories of the suicide bombing and drone warfare. In discussing the temporal technology of death, Wills elaborates the workings both of the terrorist who produces a simultaneity of crime and “punishment” that bypasses judicial process, and of the security state, in whose remote-control killings the time-space coordinates of “justice” are compressed and at the same time disappear into the black hole of secrecy. 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. (shrink)

Matchbook consists of nine essays written around, or in response to, work published by Jacques Derrida since 1980. The focal point of the essays is the “Envois,” which forms part of Derrida’s Post Card. Particular attention is paid to how that text articulates with the ethical and political emphases of Derrida’s more recent work, but also to its autobiographical conceit. The “incendiary” reference of the book’s title underscores deconstruction’s engagement with questions of reading: relations between (slow) reading and the speed (...) of technology, and the political effects of an internationalized deconstruction in a globalized culture. It is in terms of what deconstruction can have us think about the speed of technology and technologies of reading that Derrida’s work has made one of its most important contributions to philosophy and literary and cultural studies. The book concentrates on that as proof of the continued relevance of such work. (shrink)

‘Postcardlogbook’ is the “travel diary” of a rereading of Derrida's ‘Envois’ more than thirty years after its publication. It was penned during and after a period of research into the 1974–75 ‘La vie la mort’ seminar, undertaken at the University of California, Irvine, and mimics Derrida's own transatlantic voyages that provided the context for his text. My article borrows a series of formal devices that attempt to maintain it as a peripheral reading of the ‘Envois’. Notably, it refrains from quoting (...) directly from the text or from entering into its substance. It nevertheless addresses, however indirectly, the intellectual climate in Paris at the time the ‘Envois’ were written, and draws comparisons with the current scene, with the current status of Derrida's work, and with problems of a more or less post-literary age. (shrink)

This essay begins in the mode of exposition of the problem of the secret as the link between literature and democracy but moves to respond to Derrida's text with a “heretical rewriting,” pursuing the notions of heresy and of rhetorical dissidence and the functioning of the anecdote, which illuminate Derrida's account of democracy.

"Since at least 1980 Godard’s cinema has been explicitly looking for (its) music, as if for its outside. In Sauve qui peut (la vie) Paul Godard hears, and asks about it, coming through the hotel room wall, and it follows him down to the lobby, but remains “off,” like Marguerite Duras’s voice, in spite of his questions, until the final sequence. At that moment, at the end of the section entitled “Music,” the protagonist is at the same time struck by (...) a car and struck by the entrance of the music into the diegetic present of the film, as the camera pans past an orchestra playing on the sidewalk while Paul fades off under the quizzical gaze of his daughter. By 2004, with Notre musique , it would seem to have taken over the whole text, for the film was announced as being about the collaboration between Godard and German record label ECM. In the context of that film it is difficult to determine both what that music is and who we are, although this discussion will try to advance a hypothesis in that regard. In fact, my main contention will be that music in Godard’s films functions as something like the absent image ( s ), not those it has lost but rather its cinema to come, what remains to be discovered and live within it, the survival of it. Not a cinema that cannot be seen, rather the image that can perhaps only be heard; and not the romantic or psychedelic dream of a synaesthetic apotheosis either, rather the technological coincidence of sonimage that has also been the precise direction of Godard’s cinematic research for more than thirty years. For the argument I will be making here is inscribed within my own investigation of what I call “technological life,” the means by which, in “prosthetic” symbiosis, or “dorsal” umbrality, a form lives beyond the simplistic opposition of animate and inanimate, or against the reductive presuppositions of autokinetic ipseity...". (shrink)

_The Gift of Death_, Jacques Derrida’s most sustained consideration of religion, explores questions first introduced in his book _Given Time_ about the limits of the rational and responsible that one reaches in granting or accepting death, whether by sacrifice, murder, execution, or suicide. Derrida analyzes Czech philosopher Jan Patocka’s _Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History _and develops and compares his ideas to the works of Heidegger, Lévinas, and Kierkegaard. One of Derrida’s major works, _The Gift of Death_ resonates with (...) much of his earlier writing, and this highly anticipated second edition is greatly enhanced by David Wills’s updated translation. This new edition also features the first-ever English translation of Derrida’s _Literature in Secret_. In it, Derrida continues his discussion of the sacrifice of Isaac, which leads to bracing meditations on secrecy, forgiveness, literature, and democracy. He also offers a reading of Kafka’s _Letter to His Father_ and uses the story of the flood in Genesis as an embarkation point for a consideration of divine sovereignty. “An important contribution to the critical study of ethics that commends itself to philosophers, social scientists, scholars of religion... [and those] made curious by the controversy that so often attends Derrida.”—_Booklist_, on the first edition. (shrink)

This essay considers together two recent posthumous publications by Derrida: Geschlecht III, and La vie la mort, both of which raise questions concerning translation. In Geschlecht III that is first of all the problem of how to translate the German word, how Heidegger’s reading of Trakl profits from, or loses in its translation, and how Derrida’s reading of Heidegger either does or does not translate Heidegger’s own interpretive practice. Reference to La vie la mort enables analysis of Benjamin’s concept of (...) translation as a form of life that is “not limited to organic corporeality,” and consequently allows me to understand how Derrida’s thinking, very different from that of either Benjamin or Heidegger, takes us way back to something like originary inorganic lifedeath. (shrink)