Killing Times ― The Temporal Technology of the Death Penalty

Killing Times begins with the deceptively simple observation—made by Jacques Derrida in his seminars on the topic—that the death penalty mechanically interrupts mortal time by pre-empting the typical mortal experience of not knowing at what precise moment we will die. Through a broader examination of what constitutes mortal temporality, David Wills proposes that the so-called machinery of death summoned by the death penalty works by exploiting, or perverting, the prosthetic machinery of time that already regulates human existence.

Killing Times traces the logic of the death penalty across a range of sites. Starting with the struggles of American courts to articulate what methods of execution constitute “cruel and unusual punishment,” Wills goes on to show the ways that technologies of death have themselves evolved in conjunction with fraught ideas of cruelty and instantaneity, from the guillotine through today’s lethal injections—and beyond the justice system to the opposed but linked practices of suicide bombing and drone warfare.

Grounded in a deep ethical and political commitment to death penalty abolition, Wills’s engaging and powerfully argued book pushes the question of capital punishment beyond the confines of legal arguments to show how the technology of capital punishment defines and appropriates the instant of death and reconfigures the whole of human mortality.