Peggy Kamuf
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780823282302
- eISBN:
- 9780823284801
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823282302.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book pursues Derrida’s assertion, in The Death Penalty, Volume I, that “the modern history of the institution named literature in Europe over the last three or four centuries is contemporary ...
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This book pursues Derrida’s assertion, in The Death Penalty, Volume I, 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.” The main question this book poses is: How does literature contest the death penalty today, particularly in the United States where it remains the last of its kind, a Christian-inspired death penalty in what professes to be a democracy? What resources do fiction, narrative, and poetic language supply in the age of the remains of the death penalty? These are among the questions that guide the analyses of four literary works, each a depiction or an account of an execution, in the search for deconstructive leverage on the concepts that prop up capital punishment. Different pertinent features are isolated in these texts: the “mysteries” of literary or poetic witness; the publicness of punishment in an era of secrecy around the death penalty; the undecidable difference between death by capital punishment and by suicide—a difference that Kant enforces and that Derrida contests; and even the collapse of the distinction between the sovereign powers to put to death and to pardon, a possibility that is shown up by a poetic work when, performatively, it “plays the law.” In relation to the death penalties they represent, these literary survivals may be seen as the ashes or remains of the phantasm that the death penalty has always been, the phantasm of calculating and thus ending finitude.Less
This book pursues Derrida’s assertion, in The Death Penalty, Volume I, 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.” The main question this book poses is: How does literature contest the death penalty today, particularly in the United States where it remains the last of its kind, a Christian-inspired death penalty in what professes to be a democracy? What resources do fiction, narrative, and poetic language supply in the age of the remains of the death penalty? These are among the questions that guide the analyses of four literary works, each a depiction or an account of an execution, in the search for deconstructive leverage on the concepts that prop up capital punishment. Different pertinent features are isolated in these texts: the “mysteries” of literary or poetic witness; the publicness of punishment in an era of secrecy around the death penalty; the undecidable difference between death by capital punishment and by suicide—a difference that Kant enforces and that Derrida contests; and even the collapse of the distinction between the sovereign powers to put to death and to pardon, a possibility that is shown up by a poetic work when, performatively, it “plays the law.” In relation to the death penalties they represent, these literary survivals may be seen as the ashes or remains of the phantasm that the death penalty has always been, the phantasm of calculating and thus ending finitude.
Richard A. Barney and Warren Montag (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780823281725
- eISBN:
- 9780823284870
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823281725.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid– eighteenth to the mid–nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political ...
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Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid– eighteenth to the mid–nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political economy, and the still emergent sciences of life in that historical moment, the essays collected here reopen the question of how concepts of animal, vegetable, and human life, among other biological registers, had an impact on the Enlightenment project of thinking politics and economics as a joint enterprise. The volume’s contributors consider politics, economics, and the biological as distinct, semi-autonomous spheres whose various combinations required inventive, sometimes incomplete, acts of conceptual mediation, philosophical negotiation, disciplinary intervention, or aesthetic representation.Less
Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid– eighteenth to the mid–nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political economy, and the still emergent sciences of life in that historical moment, the essays collected here reopen the question of how concepts of animal, vegetable, and human life, among other biological registers, had an impact on the Enlightenment project of thinking politics and economics as a joint enterprise. The volume’s contributors consider politics, economics, and the biological as distinct, semi-autonomous spheres whose various combinations required inventive, sometimes incomplete, acts of conceptual mediation, philosophical negotiation, disciplinary intervention, or aesthetic representation.
The Body of Property
How to Be an Intellectual
Personal Effects
Portrait Stories
Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol
The Rilke Alphabet
Shakespeare and Donne
Cinepoetry
Constellation
