Killing Time
"As something possible, death is supposed to show as little as possible of its possibility", writes Heidegger in Being and Time (p.251). Yet what happens if the moment of our death is fully revealed to us, such as through capital punishment?
"As something possible, death is supposed to show as little as possible of its possibility", writes Heidegger in Being and Time (p.251). Yet what happens if the moment of our death is fully revealed to us, such as through capital punishment?
Drawing on the Heideggerian concept of Dasein, in his book Killing Times, David Wills argues that, whether one is for or against capital punishment, it is this very pinpointing of the exact minute of execution that constitutes its power.
This is because, whereas for Heidegger realising the finitude and brevity of life charges it with meaning, for Wills, the pinpointing of the moment of death through execution "means that the lived nows of the condemned person’s everyday existence no longer function as moments in which death is possible, and which potentialize being. Instead, those lived nows come to constitute “dead” instants, instants of nonbeing that restrict or imprison a condemned person in a time devoid of, vacated by life".
Wills then expands this argument, applying it to drone warfare. Because the potential target of a drone strike is unaware of the exact time of impact, or that they may even be a target at all, death becomes doubly concealed: "Under that veil, the time of the sovereign’s judgment accelerates to infinite speed, the no-time of a secretive black hole within which, more dramatically than a trapdoor or falling blade, the missile strikes with lightning speed out of the sky, a rainbow meteoric arc of fire sent from executive executioner to those condemned".
In both cases, whether death is pumped into the blood through lethal injection or reigns down from above through precision strike, the effect is still the same from a Heideggerian point of view: the violent curtailment of ex-static time with its life-giving being-towards-death and its replacement with a technologised death-date is, to quote Wills, "to infect the time of life with the now of death". This, in a Heideggerian sense, gives the death penalty its special horror, or its particular justice, depending on your point of view.