Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty by Peggy Kamuf

Abstract

Reviewed by: Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty by Peggy Kamuf Jeremy Tambling Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty. By Peggy Kamuf. New York: Fordham University Press. 2018. 161 pp. $25. ISBN 978–0–8232–8229–6. Peggy Kamuf translated the first of two volumes of Jacques Derrida’s seminars, published posthumously, called The Death Penalty; these transcripts appeared in English from Chicago University Press in 2014 and 2015. She says nothing about her work of translation, but her book offers footnotes, as it were, to Derrida’s work, which itself gives a fascinating range of arguments against the death penalty, drawing many examples from French literature: thus Hugo and Camus appear in both Derrida and Kamuf, and Kamuf analyses Baudelaire through the récit given in Le Spleen de Paris, translated here as ‘A Heroic Death’. Kafka appears here; while there are chapters on Orwell’s ‘A Hanging’, an account of an execution he was responsible for in colonial Burma (Myanmar), and on two American texts: Robert Coover’s A Public Burning (1977), his treatment of the electrocution of the Rosenbergs in 1953, and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979). The American emphasis reflects Kamuf’s desire to concentrate on America’s history: apparently ending capital punishment in the early 1970s, only to reintroduce it, Gary Gilmore being the first to die under the new permission to kill in 1977. Gilmore (Mailer’s subject), shot for a double murder, brings out an irony Kamuf explores: Gilmore wanted to be executed and refused to appeal against his sentence; lawyers tried to save him because of the precedent that would give for capital [End Page 108] punishment to resume in America. And where much of the rest of the world has abolished the death penalty, America, Kamuf says with further irony, ‘is struggling to survive in a largely hostile world’ given the protection of secrecy, everything to do with execution even being exempted by law from the Freedom of Information Act (pp. 65–66). The interest in discussing the death penalty through literature comes from Derrida claiming that literature, not philosophy, has advanced the cause of abolition, and that literature always speaks against it: ‘literature’, as Derrida considers it, is distinct from ‘belles-lettres and poetry’ (Kamuf’s quotation, p. 19); it is modern, post-French Revolution, metatextual, almost halfway towards theory; Kamuf quotes Derrida saying that it ‘has the right to say anything’ (p. 23)—that being almost a definition of modern literature, as with Blanchot, another writer discussed. (This modernism cannot really claim Orwell, but interestingly, Kamuf has good things to say about him.) Such a literature is essential for a democracy and can only live in one; its power is to question the death penalty, which is read as a particular aim to define the limits of life, terminating its openness to chance. Kamuf makes good points about literature as a witness to capital punishment—a witness being essential to say that an ‘execution’ (a word whose etymology she traces) has taken place. The chapter on Coover shows how modern executions demand secrecy, and how they relate to the obscene. The death penalty is ‘driven by the urge to indecent exposure, which has to call up the contrary drive to keep hidden what should not be exposed’ (p. 82): in this novel, the Rosenbergs are made to die publicly, as a way of bringing home what that shamefulness involves; Kamuf here invokes Freud’s idea of the passage à l’acte, an acting out of unconscious desires (p. 85)—disavowed desires projected in front of spectators who can see what they have repressed. The book is full of sharply suggestive points, mostly unusual in debates of this sort, affirming literature’s inherent value in contesting the absoluteness of the death penalty, cutting off life and language together. Jeremy Tambling SWPS Warsaw Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association