Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty

Peggy Kamuf

Description

Why have generations of philosophers failed or refused to articulate a rigorous challenge to the death penalty, when literature has been rife with death penalty abolitionism for centuries? In this book, Peggy Kamuf explores why any properly philosophical critique of capital punishment in the West must confront the literary as that which exceeds the logical demands of philosophy.Jacques Derrida has written that "the modern history of the institution named literature in Europe over the last three or four centuries is contemporary with and indissociable from a contestation of the death penalty." How, Kamuf asks, does literature contest the death penalty today, particularly in the United States where it remains the last of its kind in a Western nation that professes to be a democracy? What resources do fiction, narrative, and poetic language supply in the age of the remains of the death penalty?Following a lucid account of Derrida's approach to the death penalty, Kamuf pursues this question across several literary texts. In reading Orwell's story "A Hanging," Kamuf explores the relation between literary narration and the role of the witness, concluding that such a witness needs the seal of literary language in order to account for the secret of the death penalty. The next chapter turns to the American scene with Robert Coover's 1977 novel The Public Burning, which restages the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as an outlandish public spectacle in Times Square. Because this fictional device reverses the drive toward secrecy that, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, put an end to public executions in the West, Kamuf reads the novel in a tension with the current tendency in the U.S. to shore up and protect remaining death penalty practices through increasingly pervasive secrecy measures. A reading of Norman Mailer's 1979 novel The Executioner's Song, shows the breakdown of any firm distinction between suicide and capital execution and explores the essential affinity between traditional narrative structure, which is plotted from the end, and the "plot" of a death penalty. Final readings of Kafka, Derrida, and Baudelaire consider the relation between literature and law, showing how performative literary language can "play the law. "A brief conclusion, titled "Postmortem," reflects on the condition of literature as that which survives the death penalty.A major contribution to the field of law and society, this book makes the case for literature as a space for contesting the death penalty, a case that scholars and activists working across a range of traditions will need to confront.

Sujets

• Western philosophy
• Literary theory

Informations

• Publié par: Fordham University Press
• Date de parution: 16 octobre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780823282326
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

LITERATURE AND THE REMAINS OF THE DEATH PENALTY

LITERATURE AND THE REMAINS OF THE DEATH PENALTY

PEGGY KAMUF

Fordham University Press

New York 2019

Copyright © 2019 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kamuf, Peggy, 1947– author. Title: Literature and the remains of the death penalty / Peggy Kamuf. Description: First edition. | New York : Fordham University Press, 2019. | Series: Idiom: inventing writing theory | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identîiers: LCCN 2018010819| ISBN 9780823282302 (coth : ak. paper) | ISBN 9780823282296 (pbk. : ak. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Capîta punîshment în îterature. | Amerîcan ictîon—20th century—History and criticism. Cassîicatîon: LCC PS374.C357 K36 2019 | DDC 809/.933556—dc23 LC record avaîabe at https://ccn.oc.gov/2018010819

Printed in the United States of America

21 20 19

First edition

5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Introduction

Begînnîng wîth Lîterature

Orwell’s Execution

Is Justîce Burnîng?

The Sentence Is the Story

Payîng the Law

Postmortem

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Index

1

1

7

4

6

9

1

1

5

123

145

149

151

159

Every language artist is an artist of the struggle against the condemnation to death. —Hélène Cixous

INTRODUCTION

Lîke many îf not a books, thîs one began în another book, Jacques Derrida’sDeath Penalty, Volume I, which is the transcript of the 1 irst year of a semînar gîven from 1999–2000. have had a long I and varied relationship with this book over the past almost twenty years. I irst heard these ectures at UC Irvîne, în two successîve spring quarters when Derrida was in residence there and reprised in English the lectures he had written and delivered initially in French, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. As auditors, already, the lectures made a strong impression on the mostly American audience in California, if I may judge by my own response. Because the îssue of the death penaty had and stî has urgent pertinence here, where it remains in actual practice under the law of many states and the federal government, Derrida repeat- edly challenged his listeners to question this singular remainder of capital punishment in a world that has widely abolished it. When he delivered the lectures for his UC Irvine audience, this American context often pressed itself on the analysis, for the death penalty that year was frequently in the news. No one could have realized then, however, that 1999 would in fact set the mark for the most ex- ecutions in the United States in any year since 1977, whenGregg v.

1. Jacques Derrîda,Séminaire, La peine de mort, Volume I (1999–2000), ed. Geoffrey Ben- nîngton, Marc Crépon, and Thomas Dutoît (Parîs: Édîtîons Gaîée, 2012).

1