Deconstructing Death: Derrida and the Scene of Execution

Abstract

I would like to begin with a rather spectacular vision of the death penalty, one that brings together, with great irony, the death penalty, the possibility but also the impossibility of its abolition, and the 'American spirit'. Here is that vision:I would like to see a law passed which would abolish capital punishment, except for those states which insisted on keeping it. Such states would then be allowed to kill criminals provided that the killing is not impersonal but personal and a public spectacle: to wit that the executioner be more or less the same size and weight as the criminal (the law could here specify the limits) and that they fight to death using no weapons, or weapons not capable of killing at a distance. Thus, knives or broken bottles would be acceptable. Guns would not.The benefit of this law is that it might return us to moral responsibility. The killer would carry the other man's death in his psyche. The audience, in turn, would experience a sense of tragedy, since the executioners, highly trained for this, would almost always win. In the flabby American spirit there is a buried sadist who finds the bullfight contemptible - what he really desires are gladiators. Since nothing is worse for a country than repressed sadism, this method of execution would offer ventilation for the more cancerous emotions of the American public.1The author of this fight-club-phantasy - this unadulterated AmericanGladiators-meets-Thunderdome scenario - is Norman Mailer. The same Norman Mailer who would, some twenty years later, go on to write the Pulitzer Prize-winning 'true life story' The Executioner's Song (1979), which depicts in 1109 pages the events surrounding the execution of Gary Gilmore by the state of Utah in 1977 (Gary Gilmore was the first person executed in the United States after the re-instatement of the death penalty in 1976). 'The Executioner's Song' is, of course, also the title of a 1982 NBC film starring Tommy Lee Jones and Rosanna Arquette.2But before the book, and before the movie, Mailer wrote a short article, titled 'A Program for the Nation', from which I have just quoted an excerpt. This article was written in response to a survey from Esquire magazine in 1959,3 in which 150 famous people were queried about the 1960 U.S. Presidential election: 'What, to your mind, should be the most important issues in the election' (Presidential Papers, p10)?Now if I turn to Mailer's program for the nation here, it is not only because he addresses capital punishment as an important, presidential issue. It is also because he insists on the scene of execution in America. There is a scene, says Mailer, that is not being seen: a hidden and invisible and perhaps even disavowed scene. This scene, says Mailer, must be made visible; it must be literally seen (this is his irony). America must see what it refuses to see: the scene of execution. What Mailer goes on to describe, however, is a rather unAmerican scene: no lethal injection here (or to put it less anachronistically: no hanging, no electric chair, no gas chamber here). Instead Mailer stages his American scene of execution as an epic historical drama, as an archaic and sadistic scene.Indeed, what Mailer's phantasy makes visible is not only a Roman scene. It is also a second (or even third) scene, which is really a kind of primal scene: 'In the flabby American spirit there is a buried sadist who finds the bullfight contemptible - what he really desires are gladiators'. In the deep, dark, fleshy recesses of the American soul lies a desire that is older, younger, more primitive, more archaic than a desire for (European) bullfights. It's a desire for cutting weapons and a desire for human, rather than animal, sacrifice. Thus, Mailer's insistence on the scene of capital punishment leads him, as it were, behind the scene(s), to the scene's latent structure: 'Since nothing is worse for a country than repressed sadism, this method of execution would offer ventilation for the more cancerous emotions of the American public'. …