Can I read Killing Times : The Temporal Technology of the Death Penalty on EtoBox?
Killing Times : The Temporal Technology of the Death Penalty by Wills, David is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.
What is Killing Times : The Temporal Technology of the Death Penalty about?
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
Who reads Killing Times : The Temporal Technology of the Death Penalty?
It is typically read by self-directed learners exploring a subject in depth.
Common subject areas: history, science, philosophy, social sciences.
- Author
- Wills, David
- Publisher
- Fordham University Press
- Published
- 2019
- Language
- EN
- ISBN
- 9780823283521
- Category
- nonfiction
- Subjects
- Philosophy, Science, Literary Criticism