Peggy Kamuf - Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty

Like many if not all books, this one began in another book, Jacques Derridas Death Penalty, Volume I, which is the transcript of the first year of a seminar given from 19992000. This highpoint, so to speak, being reached in the execution chambers of the U.S. justice system regularly left its mark on the seminar.

Later, when I was able to read the typescripts of the lectures, this mark especially held my attention. It signaled a particular place, I ventured, in the actual struggle over the U.S. death penalty, a location that Derrida could not have named precisely in 1999 but that his analysis nevertheless points us to. I sought to work this out in an essay that brought Derridas analysis of what he called the anesthesial logic of the modern death penalty into line with the crisis currently shutting off the supply of anesthetic for lethal injections in the United States.

Once The Death Penalty existed as an English book, I designed a graduate seminar in comparative literature around it. I titled it Literature and the Death Penalty, Our own seminar followed Derridas closely, especially for its readings of literary texts, but we also adopted the principle of supplementing his reading list with other works. I added the short text by George Orwell A Hanging, Kafkas In the Penal Colony, Baudelaires prose poem A Heroic Death, and Hugos The Last Day of a Condemned Man, a text that Derrida leaves aside in his long discussions of this writer. The students in the seminar added other texts: Roberto Bolaos The Part about the Crimes, from 2666; Oscar Wildes Salome; Krzysztof Kielowskis A Short Film about Killing; and many others. After the seminar ended, I kept thinking about the topic and before long realized I had begun to imagine this book in my head. Soon enough I started writing it, and its first two chapters came quickly because they could be drawn straight from the seminar. But I did not see where it would turn in subsequent chapters, in which I wanted to focus each time on a specific literary work.

Meanwhile, I was reading everything I came upon that might set me on a fruitful path. I lingered long with Invitation to a Beheading, which was the first of his novels that Vladimir Nabokov translated into English. As a somewhat conscientious comparatist, however, I could not think about writing seriously on this fascinating novel, which I was able to read only in translation, albeit a translation by the author. these literary studies accumulated insight into the specifically American institution of capital punishment, which I was coming somewhat reluctantly to recognize as perhaps the most pertinent framing of the book I was trying to write. I say reluctantly because the pertinence of the questions I wanted to raise and worry with this book could not be contained, so I believed, by the peculiarity of the American context and the very particular history there of the persistence of a legal death penalty.

The reluctance to feature the American experience of the death penalty dissolved more or less when I read Robert Coovers extraordinary 1977 novel The Public Burning (see Chapter 3 ). This exhaustively researched fictional recasting opens on the eve of the day, June 18, 1953, originally set for the execution in the electric chair of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg at Sing Sing prison for the crime of espionage. Coover, however, has exercised the extreme fictional license of moving the execution from a prison enclosure into the open of Times Square and staging there a hyperbolic public spectacle, which one can read as the correlative of the frenzied atmosphere that surrounded the Rosenbergs arrest, prosecution, conviction, sentencing, imprisonment, and final punishment. Although legal wrangling with the publisher delayed it, Coovers novel had first been scheduled to appear in 1976, the American bicentennial year, which also happens to be the year the Supreme Court issued the opinion in Gregg v. Georgia that in essence restarted executions in the country after a ten-year de facto moratorium. Naturally, this coincidence is nowhere remarked in the novel itself, whose meticulous reconstruction of the Rosenberg affair stays strictly within its historical frame. Nevertheless, it weighed on the scale with which I had begun to measure the novels pertinence for the post-Gregg era of the American death penalty, during which the secrecy surrounding executions has, over the past decade, reached a high degree of obsessiveness in state legislatures and among prison authorities. An important precipitating factor for all this secrecy, as I had analyzed in my earlier essay, was the withdrawal from the market of the anesthetic favored in lethal injection, the execution method invented in the wake of Gregg. With its central device of hyperpublicity, The Public Burning inverts this drive toward secrecy and, in the process, which is the process of fiction, exposes phantasmatic investments that maintain and sustain the practice of the death penalty. For if indeed, as Derrida argues, the death penalty survives on the strength of a phantasm, which is the phantasm of a sovereign power over death and the end of finitude, then it draws on the power of fiction. It is a phantasm, however, insofar as it disavows the fiction in favor of belief. Fiction that does not disavow but rather remarks itself, fiction such as The Public Burning, can make readable the phantasm as such, as well as its remains.

If the coincidence between the publication of Coovers novel and the resumption of executions in the United States was just that, a coincidence, the same can most definitely not be said of Norman Mailers enormous novel