Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty by Kamuf Peggy;

Author:Kamuf, Peggy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2018-10-14T20:47:23+00:00

In the passage from being “about to see a man die” to having “seen it now,” a knowledge is produced or, rather, a presumed knowledge, in that they now “know what to expect.” The given context here of a double execution works to absorb the otherwise striking ambiguity of this knowledge and this expectation. That is, in this context we understand that they now presume to know what to expect when Ethel Rosenberg will be executed a few minutes after her husband. The idea is that one execution must be just the same as any other, that they’ve seen it once, so now they know it and know what to expect the next time they see a man—or a woman—executed in this manner. They thus presume that death can be calculated, made knowable, predictable, foreseeable as an iterable event, for now “they know what to expect.”

But if one lets that phrase dangle free of this context for a moment, then its phantasmatic charge can register. For indeed, can anyone ever know, fully know what to expect in the way of death? Is not such foreknowledge and mastery of death the phantasm of the death penalty, which may be the origin of all other phantasms? As we will see, even in the context announced again by this final chapter’s title, which is “The Burning of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,” even in this context of an apparent repetition, first one then the other, there will have been no knowing what to expect, no knowledge at all therefore. No doubt the retrospective provided by this interruption of knowledge, repetition, and expectation shows up the error of believing one knew what to expect as death, the other’s and, by projection, one’s own, “my” own. This is the great phantasm produced by the desire that Derrida describes as the desire to give oneself one’s own death as a calculable, calculated, known, expected event. Finitude, which means above all that I can never “know what to expect,” is canceled, suspended, ended—finie la finitude—in-finitized, as it were. This “as it were” is the remains and trace of the phantasm, which the fiction retrieves and registers for us to read.

When Ethel Rosenberg comes on stage, her person, carriage, and expression announce that something unexpected is happening. Her very presence declares “that, unlike Shaw’s Saint Joan, she will not be burned offstage—indeed, even had this been the plan, she would not have allowed it” (PB, 512). (Notice we are still in a theater, but in the theater of a death penalty where there is no offstage.)43 The narrator observes the effect on the crowd. Some of them, “feeling they’ve seen all there is to see the first time around,” have become restless, “but Ethel’s entrance has changed all that” (PB, 512–513). Here is how the narrator explains what has changed for them:

Julius shared his terror with them all, and so they were able to sympathize with him, get inside and suffer what he suffered, then survive—but Ethel is

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