Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty

Peggy Kamuf

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780823282296, 9780823282302
• eBook ISBN: 9780823282319
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Why have generations of philosophers failed or refused to articulate a rigorous challenge to the death penalty, when literature has been rife with death penalty abolitionism for centuries? In this book, Peggy Kamuf explores why any properly philosophical critique of capital punishment in the West must confront the literary as that which exceeds the logical demands of philosophy.Jacques Derrida has written that "the modern history of the institution named literature in Europe over the last three or four centuries is contemporary with and indissociable from a contestation of the death penalty." How, Kamuf asks, does literature contest the death penalty today, particularly in the United States where it remains the last of its kind in a Western nation that professes to be a democracy? What resources do fiction, narrative, and poetic language supply in the age of the remains of the death penalty?Following a lucid account of Derrida's approach to the death penalty, Kamuf pursues this question across several literary texts. In reading Orwell's story "A Hanging, " Kamuf explores the relation between literary narration and the role of the witness, concluding that such a witness needs the seal of literary language in order to account for the secret of the death penalty. The next chapter turns to the American scene with Robert Coover's 1977 novel The Public Burning, which restages the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as an outlandish public spectacle in Times Square. Because this fictional device reverses the drive toward secrecy that, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, put an end to public executions in the West, Kamuf reads the novel in a tension with the current tendency in the U.S. to shore up and protect remaining death penalty practices through increasingly pervasive secrecy measures. A reading of Norman Mailer's 1979 novel The Executioner's Song, shows the breakdown of any firm distinction between suicide and capital execution and explores the essential affinity between traditional narrative structure, which is plotted from the end, and the "plot" of a death penalty. Final readings of Kafka, Derrida, and Baudelaire consider the relation between literature and law, showing how performative literary language can "play the law. "A brief conclusion, titled "Postmortem, " reflects on the condition of literature as that which survives the death penalty.A major contribution to the field of law and society, this book makes the case for literature as a space for contesting the death penalty, a case that scholars and activists working across a range of traditions will need to confront.

1

BEGINNING WITH LITERATURE

“Why, on the death penalty, begin with literature?” asks Jacques Derrida early in the first year of his seminar on the death penalty.1 The very formulation of the question implies this is such a surprising place to begin that it demands explanation. Why indeed speak of literature just as one is beginning to address the life-and-death issue of capital punishment? Especially if, as Derrida remarks elsewhere, one must profess oneself dumbstruck, “stupefied,” by the fact that “never, to my knowledge, has any philosopher, as such, in his properly philosophical discourse, never has any philosophy as such contested the legitimacy of the death penalty.”2 This stupefying fact (he calls it “for me the most significant and the most stupefying—also the most stupefied—fact in the history of Western philosophy”) should be a goad to undertake what “to my knowledge” no other philosopher in the tradition has done: contest the legitimacy of the death penalty with the means of properly philosophical discourse. To be sure, the effects of this goad are sensible in the seminar, in particular when Derrida goes head to head with Kant, who is positioned as the tradition’s most rigorous defender of the death penalty. But even these direct confrontations with Kant’s argument are relatively brief compared to the long passages devoted to close readings of texts by Victor Hugo, Maurice Blanchot, Albert Camus, Jean Genet, or even Robert Badinter, the lawyer and author of The Execution,3 a narrative account of his unsuccessful defense of a famous capital case in France in the early 1970s. Of these, Hugo and Camus are widely known as vigorous and tireless opponents of the death penalty, and Badinter will long be remembered for his efforts to abolish the death penalty in France, which was accomplished while he was minister of justice in 1981.4 Thus, although not one philosopher in the tradition is on record qua philosopher arguing against capital punishment (as if they were all loath to find fault with Socrates’s reasoning in Crito), for at least two centuries writers and poets (and not only French ones, of course!) have not only taken strong public stands in favor of its abolition (in which they were hardly alone) but have given us literary works that work against the death penalty.

Now, in light of this stark contrast, Derrida’s question—“Why, on the death penalty, begin with literature?”—starts to seem rather less surprising than at first blush. And indeed, after posing the question, he will proceed to remind us of the abolitionist strain in modern literary discourse. But he does so by way of posing a certain “hypothesis,” which, he writes, “in its main features would come down to this”:

If the history of the general possibility, of the largest territory of the general conditions of possibility of epic, poetic, or belle-lettristic productions (not of literature in the strict and modern sense) supposes or goes hand in hand with the legitimacy or the legality of the death penalty, well then, on the contrary, the short, strict, and modern history of the institution named literature in Europe over the last three or four centuries is contemporary with and indissociable from a contestation of the death penalty, an abolitionist struggle that, to be sure, is uneven, heterogeneous, discontinuous, but irreversible and tending toward the worldwide as conjoined history, once again, of literature and rights, and of the right to literature. (DP I, 30; emphases added)

I have added emphases at two points to bring out the key articulations of this hypothesis, the points that most need to be tested or argued. First, there is the idea that the modern institution of literature is not just contemporary with but indissociable from the struggle for abolition of the death penalty. In other words, the contemporaneousness of these two historical currents is not contingent but expresses some necessary relation. But what is that relation? The second emphasized phrase, the right to literature, points the way toward an answer.

Although the phrase “right to literature” is going to recur twice more in the course of these lectures (on pages 108 and 117), it is not in The Death Penalty seminar that Derrida explains how he understands it. For that, one may turn to an essay from 1993 where he spells out this right in terms that echo closely the passage just quoted from the seminar.

I have often found myself insisting on the necessity of distinguishing between literature and belles-lettres or poetry. Literature is a modern invention, inscribed in conventions and institutions that, to retain only this trait, secure in principle its right to say everything. Literature thus ties its destiny to a certain noncensure, to the space of democratic freedom (freedom of the press, freedom of speech, etc.). No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy. One can always want neither one nor the other, and there is no shortage of doing without them under all regimes; it is quite possible to consider neither of them to be unconditional goods and indispensable rights. But in no case can one dissociate one from the other.5

Manifestly, the indissociable relation posed here between literature (in the modern sense) and democracy accounts for the claim in the seminar that, as we just read, “the institution named literature in Europe over the last three or four centuries is contemporary with and indissociable from a contestation of the death penalty.” Moreover, by glossing the right to literature as “the right to say everything” (“le droit de tout dire”), Derrida in effect prepares his later claim. But how so? How is the right to say everything necessarily associated with opposition to the death penalty?

First, it must be remarked that this right (to say everything) is not someone’s right but the right of literature as literature in the modern sense. Even though someone may exercise it (for example, an author), it is nevertheless not an individual’s right, the way the right to vote or freely assemble are individual rights upheld (at least in principle!) in a democratic polity. To be sure, this makes this right rather anomalous, but it is just this anomaly that is recognized and protected by democratic codes of law. It is recognized and protected, for example, by boilerplate language printed on copyright pages of books that call themselves novels, novellas, short stories, or, more generically, fictions:6 for example, “This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.”7 As we all know, such statements function formally and publicly to disclaim responsibility to “tell the truth” in the work in question. More broadly speaking, however, they invoke literature or fiction as a right of nonresponse.

Which brings us to a second remark about this right to say everything. It is also the right to say nothing, or rather the right and even the obligation not to respond to a demand to know, to divulge the hidden or unapparent, to make public what is secret. In the pages we are reading from On the Name, Derrida calls this the right to secrecy and acknowledges that only with literature does one encounter something resembling an unconditional respect of secrets. Morality, religion, politics, and law, as well as all disciplines of knowledge and technology, are constituted as authorities entitled to demand accounts and responses of whichever responsible subjects fall under their purview. Literary fictions, by contrast, figure a space of nonresponse to the demand to know and therefore a reserve of unconditional secrecy. (Even writers deluded enough to believe they know and can therefore divulge secrets of their characters or the events that happen in their fictional worlds are constrained by the radical dissociation between author and character to do no more than invent more fiction when pressed to so—for example, on Sunday morning radio interviews.)

To illustrate this right to nonresponse that literary fiction arrogates to itself, one might recall another text of Derrida’s in which he reads and interprets in a nearly exhaustive manner a short prose poem of Baudelaire’s, “Counterfeit Money.”8 It is a simple enough story: As they are leaving a tobacco shop, two friends encounter a poor man holding out his cap. Both the narrator and his friend put coins in the cap, but the friend is more generous. Noticing this, the narrator is prompted to reflect aloud that his friend is right to be so generous since there is no greater pleasure than causing surprise, meaning the poor man’s surprise at such a windfall. Whereupon the friend calmly replies that the coin he gave the other was counterfeit. This sends the narrator off on some wild speculations about what good fortune or misfortunes might befall the poor man with his counterfeit coin, until the friend shatters the reverie by repeating the narrator’s own words back to him to the effect that there is “no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.” Now the narrator is led to excoriate his friend in his mind for having thought “to do a good deed while at the same time making a good deal.” The story concludes with the narrator condemning the other for doing evil not out of malice but out of stupidity.

Derrida, as I said, reads this short fiction in an almost exhaustive fashion, virtually word for word, drawing from it countless connections to his own reflections in his book on the gift and giving in their supposed distinction from exchange and economy. But for our present purpose what is most telling in this interpretive performance is the very succinct question Derrida asks about the friend’s truthfulness when he claims to have given the poor man a counterfeit coin. The narrator never wonders whether his friend was in fact giving him, the narrator, a truthful account of his action, even though this friend has just confessed to passing counterfeit money. “What if,” Derrida asks, “with the simulacrum of a confession, he were passing off true money as false?”9 This possibility would reverse the whole moralizing direction of the narrative, making of the narrator rather than his friend the stupid, credulous, and self-righteous one of the two. The point is, however, that this question can never receive any response that would decide once and for all what was counterfeit, who was duped, and who was generous. And this nonresponse to questions that seek to know is emblematic of what Derrida calls “the secret of literature: what literary fiction tells us about the secret, about the (non-) truth of the secret, but also a secret whose possibility assures the possibility of literature” (153). Or, to put it in more paradoxical terms: “The readability of the text is structured by the unreadability of the secret, that is, by the inaccessibility of a certain intentional meaning or of a wanting-to-say in the consciousness of the characters and a fortiori, in that of the author who remains, in this regard, in a situation analogous to that of the reader” (152).10

This inaccessibility, unreadability, or inviolability of the secret, writes Derrida, “depends on nothing other than the altogether bare device of being-two-to-speak” (153). Baudelaire’s tale is constructed by means of this altogether bare device. Being-two-to-speak, however, is not as such a condition of literature, of course, but a general one. Derrida points to this general condition when he remarks: “to the extent . . . that there is dialogue, there can be lie and inviolate secret” (151). What the literary work exposes, however, is the inviolability of a secret that no interpretation, investigation, or interrogation can overcome. Rather, it is and must be unconditionally respected, which, as we have already noted, sets literature apart from all discourses of knowledge and all forms of social authority (religion, morality, politics, law, science) that act to penetrate secrecy in their authorized, truth-seeking capacity.

It is this distinctive feature of literature that can take us back to our questions: How is the “right to say everything”—and therefore also nothing, nonresponse—indissociable from opposition to the death penalty? And once again: “Why, on the death penalty, begin with literature?”

Another fictional text can take us further into these questions. At the beginning of the second part of Camus’s crime and punishment novel The Stranger, the main character and narrator Meursault describes his interrogations by the examining magistrate after his arrest. There are in particular two questions to which the magistrate seeks responses from the narrator: First, why did he pause before firing four more times into the body of the unnamed Arab man he has already gunned down? And second, did he love his mother? The first question is put repeatedly, and each time Meursault makes no reply:

“Why did you pause between the first and second shot?” Once again I could see the red sand and feel the burning of the sun on my forehead. But this time I didn’t answer. . . .

“Why, why did you shoot at a body that was on the ground?” Once again I didn’t know how to answer. . . .

“Why? You must tell me. Why?” Still I didn’t say anything.11

To the other question, “he asked me if I loved my mother,” Meursault does respond, but his laconic reply, “Yes, like everybody,” sets off a little crisis in the machinery of justice: “The court clerk who up to this point was typing steadily on his machine must have hit the wrong keys because he got mixed up and had to go back” (103–104). These nonresponses drape a silence over two discrete events—the death of the Arab man, the death of the mother—that, though unrelated, are going to communicate secretly as, precisely, secrets, that is, as holes in knowledge that the prosecutor, jury, and judge are going to have to fill in however they might in order to ground their judgment of guilt. They thus open up the two gaps in Meursault’s account that will finally condemn him to death.

Camus’s novel is almost exactly divided between its two parts, the first of which famously begins “Today, Mother died” and ends with Meursault’s killing of the Arab man, the same two events that the second part will reconstruct, examine, and pass judgment on through the formalities of interrogation and trial. Although the novel is continuously narrated in the same first person, t...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Beginning with Literature
• 2. Orwell's Execution
• 3. Is Justice Burning?
• 4. The Sentence is the Story
• 5. Playing the Law
• Postmorten
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index