Killing Times

Killing Times
Author :
Publisher : Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages : 230
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780823283507
ISBN-13 : 082328350X
Rating : 4/5 (07 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Killing Times by : David Wills

Download or read book Killing Times written by David Wills and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.


Killing Times Related Books

Killing Times
Language: en
Pages: 230
Authors: David Wills
Categories: Philosophy
Type: BOOK - Published: 2019-03-05 - Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Killing Times begins with the deceptively simple observation—made by Jacques Derrida in his seminars on the topic—that the death penalty mechanically interr
Killing Time
Language: en
Pages: 439
Authors: John Hollway
Categories: True Crime
Type: BOOK - Published: 2010-05-18 - Publisher: Simon and Schuster

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In 1984, John Thompson was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of a prominent white man in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was sent to Angola Prison and
Conspiracy of Silence
Language: en
Pages: 298
Authors: Timothy Bottoms
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2013 - Publisher: Allen & Unwin

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

As Europeans moved into new lands in Queensland in the 19th century, violent encounters with local Aboriginals mostly followed. Drawing on extensive original re
Killing Times
Language: en
Pages: 427
Authors: David Fraser
Categories: Fiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 2011-12-01 - Publisher: A&C Black

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Veronica Gaisford. Most men desired her, many loved her, some mistrusted her, but none was indifferent. Amid the violence and bitterness of the First World War
Greenwich Killing Time
Language: en
Pages: 176
Authors: Kinky Friedman
Categories: Fiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 1997-04 - Publisher: Gardners Books

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The place is New York City's Greenwich Village. The corpse is found holding 11 pink roses. The suspects are as strange as the crime. And the detective just happ