Killing Times starts from the deceptively simple observation— made by Jacques Derrida—that the death penalty mechanically interrupts mortal time, preempting our normal experience of not knowing when we will die. The book examines more broadly what constitutes mortal temporality and how the “machinery of death” exploits and perverts time. It first examines Eighth Amendment challenges to the death penalty in the U.S, from the late nineteenth-century introduction of execution by firing squad and the electric chair to current cases involving lethal injection. Although defining the instant of death ... More

Killing Times starts from the deceptively simple observation— made by Jacques Derrida—that the death penalty mechanically interrupts mortal time, preempting our normal experience of not knowing when we will die. The book examines more broadly what constitutes mortal temporality and how the “machinery of death” exploits and perverts time. It first examines Eighth Amendment challenges to the death penalty in the U.S, from the late nineteenth-century introduction of execution by firing squad and the electric chair to current cases involving lethal injection. Although defining the instant of death emerges as an insoluble problem, all the machines of execution of the post-Enlightenment period presume to appropriate and control that instant, ostensibly in service of a humane death penalty. That comes into particular focus with the guillotine, introduced in France in 1791–92, at the same moment as the American Bill of Rights. Later chapters analyze how the instant of the death penalty works in conjunction with forms of suspension, or extension of time and how its seeming correlation between egregious crime and painless execution is complicated in various ways. The book’s emphasis on time then allows it to expand the sense of the death penalty into suicide bombing, where the terrorist seeks to bypass judicial process with a simultaneous crime and “punishment”; into targeted killing by drone, where the time-space coordinates of “justice” are compressed and disappear into the black hole of secrecy; and into narrative and fictive spaces of crime, court proceedings, and punishment.