Parallel Gallery| "She fell heavily and motionless to the earth in front of the stake. Eleven bullets were fired and then a cavalry sergeant walked towards the body and delivered the coup de grâce - a final shot into her temple." (Julie Wheelwright, The Fatal Lover, Mata Hari and the Myth of Women in Espionage, Collins & Brown, London, 1992, p. 99)
1. Death is physical, it hardly needs saying. "It is well known that if there is one word that remains absolutely unassignable or unassigning with respect to its concept and to its thingness, it is the word 'death'." (Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1993, p. 22) 2. It is more than can be written or read. Everything to say, but nothing near what 'a certain complete achievement of life' is. Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self, in Technologies of the Self, ed. Luther H. Marin, et al., The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1988, p. 31 ("This achievement is complete at the moment just prior to death.") 3. Death is too much, and too far beyond the memory of living, of to-be-alive, its metaphysicality fades before the sound/sight/smell of the rifle, knife, hand. And fades and fades, while we, as watching beings, fade with that fading, as spirit, intellect, sense, motion: stop (dead). The body knows until its final split second. "Excuse me if I go back to the same point: We are thinking beings. That means that even when we kill or when we are killed, even when we make war or when we ask for support as unemployed ... we are thinking beings, and we do these things not only on the ground of universal rules of behavior but also on the specific ground of a historical rationality." (ibid., p. 148) 4. Execution is power: social, political, military, personal. It's the deliberate making of the corpse, as the evidence, the sign, of correction, order, force, fear. Heinrich Himmler speaks to leaders of the SS in Posen (4 October 1943) "without any circumlocution about the horror of genocide: 'Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lie side by side, or five hundred or a thousand.' But then he adds: 'To have stuck this out and excepting cases of human weakness - to have remained decent .... this is what has made us hard.' He elaborates on this decency by praising the virtues of SS men: their loyalty ... their ability to obey ... their bravery ... their truthfulness ... Despite the annihilation of millions, Himmler could assert that 'our inward being, our soul, our character, has not suffered injury from it'." (James Bernauer, Beyond life and death, in Michel Foucault Philosopher, trans. Timothy J. Armstrong, Routledge, NY, 1992, p. 273) "In his memoirs, Albert Speer identified the state of mind which permitted the monstrous evils our age has endured: 'It never occurred to us to doubt the order of things.'"(ibid., p. 274) 5. The corpse is a return to, and of, like the repressed, that which is (appears) inadmissable. 6. Execution is the excess which deals with excess. It makes the space where emptiness must be, and where forever after, in that hole, a haunting gathers, a ritual repetition of the fragment and the unfinished, of the bringing to and taking away, a rhythm, of the cut which narrates the endless stories that 'become' the ghost. The ghost is the speech, the writing, the sentence, of the executed, who come to be dead for the sake of the live. 7. There are several photographic images which shock me. They show an execution by torture, on April 10 1905, in Peking. The imperial decree read: "'The Mongolian Princes demand that the aforesaid Fou-Tchou-Le, guilty of the murder of Prince Ao-Han-Ouan, be burned alive, but the Emperor finds this torture too cruel and condemns Fou-Tchou-Li to slow death by Leng-Tch-e (cutting into pieces). Respect this!' This torture dates from the Manchu dynasty (1644-1911)." Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1989, p. 204
8. Bataille thought the man had been given opium, which might
explain his "ecstatic ... expression".
9. The torture is called, writes Bataille, the Hundred Pieces,
"reserved for the gravest of crimes".
10. The images are an intolerable-knowledge.
11. The narratives which come to fill the void (life taken by 'law', from
criminal law to gang law) are themselves threads of the death drive,
language re-presentations of the vanished body/person. They are never
enough. It, the void, is interminable, inconsolable. Fire. Language can not
be the thing, just shimmer on the surface, the residual impact of meaning
lost.
12. "In Lacanian theory, seeing, being, talking, thinking, reading,
writing, feeling, and perceiving are all organized in networks of meaning
and affect around a hole or void that pierces through the weave of
introjected representations."
13. Death comes always to everyone, execution (as decree) comes to few.
There are slow and sudden and expected deaths. And execution can be all of
these at once. It is, though, always, somehow, untimely. Out of time, time
taken out, to be the time of dying, the end of 'you', who you 'are', in the
fact of 'being' at all, and in the fact of not being 'something/one-else':
early morning, before the complete arrival of the new day(light): "... at
3am Massard, the representative of the military governor of Paris, was
woken by a phone call announcing that Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, known as
Mata Hari, would be shot at 5.45am that morning."
14. At the moment of death, the person is all that they will ever be, in
the real.
15. The haunting which gathers at, which meets, the death by execution is
aware of that, and of the rest, now a future memory, of what might have
been, imagined. Psyche works forward, drawing from life yet unlived, as
part of the 'living' present, as much as from the past, to be the comprised
subject at any moment, to be 'is'.
16. "Ah, this flash of instants never ends. Will my song of the it
never end? I'm going to end it deliberately, with a voluntary act. But it
continues on in constant improvisation, creating always and forever the
present which is the future.
"This improvisation is.
"Do you want to see how it continues on?
"Tonight - it's difficult to explain it to you - tonight I dreamed I was
dreaming. Is it possible that death is like that? - the dream of a dream of
a dream of a dream?"
17. Does one long to be killed, glimpsed in longing for end, for
fitting-death, to the day, to the season, to the heat, to the work. Is
there a dream of execution without fear.
18. Execution is about the act of dying, the act of killing, of
being killed, it is only about knowing of the about-to-die. This is
its exact purpose, the penalty of limit, to be there before (facing) the
'sword', taking last breaths, feeling heart beats, while so-very-alive,
probably well, strong, and with all of memory and thought in focus and
imminent.
19. The (w)hole is left, where nothing is ever 'once and for all', where an
economy of relations, a sort of proliferating forum of broken promises, of
processes and struggles, perpetually seeks the real true story of the real
true person, to close the case, to bound the carcass. But there is no
bridging the gap here, of signifier to signifier, of signification. The
rules of execution are determined by courts. This is, perhaps, the bigger
trauma, and where the drawing together of edges, as a mechanism, a
technique, might be itself a body, constituted in the (ir)rational setting
up of language structures to formulate reasons to kill. A body (politic)
which needs other bodies for its rituals.
20. Here the lines of power are written, the death drive falls into the
open, as a matter of 'culling', known as punishment, discipline,
retribution, alignment. Just like, in the individual psyche, the remainders
of events, losses, are marks, knots of unassimilated meanings, made (up) by
an inability or refusal to 'understand' what might be 'the personal
devaluation implicit in them'.
21. And so ... "(a)s untranslated remainders, such knotty material becomes
parasitical archaic letters that constitute death material. These
letters (Lacan plays on l'être as the letter of being)
maintain a power of death over life because and simply because they
are present - embedded in flesh, in-corp-orated, repeated in behaviour and
myth - but are inaccessible to reflection, contemplation, or undoing."
22. What happens when there are knots of unassimilated meanings in the
world beyond the body, that engage with the knots of the body, and not only
that but with combinations of bodies, of groups, and conditions, and times
- like war. What is it that speaks (and explains), both inside, to the
world of oneself, and outside, to the world of others, and re-collects and
re-produces, and de-tours from, the death (of someone). The constellation
of knots - of stop and go, in-the-name-of-love (ourselves, life) - insures,
underwrites, by maintaining tense psychic energy, the (a)parallel contrary
movements of sameness and difference, of an ever present belatedness.
23. What is an execution. The word comes from the latin exsequi,
meaning to follow (in sequence, consequence) ex or out, i.e. to the
end, to the grave, and from (via late latin derivatives)
exsecütio, judicial prosecution or sentence, and from the
feminine word exsecütrix, one who carries out a task (the
guillotine was known as la guillotine or Dame Guillotine).
24. Execution, then, is a sentence, a prosecution, followed, carried, 'to
the grave', sanctioned by the law of any arranged system or order. The
feminine, announced through the suffix 'trix', a feminine agential, is
possibly an abbreviation of the suffix torix (a compound of
male/female), as the true f 'answer' to (L) - or is (L) -rix.
25. So, let it be that the execution is a doubly gendered agent/carrier of
the law (not forgetting that the law is 'her').
26. This is curious, as it places the onus onto the order, not onto those
who order, or that which orders, or the 'one' who executes
the order, the sentence. Execution is the burden of the
(hermaphroditic) group. Hence, the executioner is anonymous at the public
(there are always witnesses) site: torture, hanging, beheading, bullet,
electric chair, lethal injection.
27. The question, continuous, to the grave, of the semantic form of the
execution, of fascination, which produces images of death in speech and
writing, giving voice to violence, in all its subtle and gross aesthetics,
is nothing more, and as much as, a means of confirmation that death is far
off, separate: how did the victim 'look', how was the act carried out, the
details, the fine precise knowledge which allows one to quote, as a gift,
to repeat, to join the conversation, to compensate for the non-spectacle,
and to somehow honour the inevitable.
30. Death is, according to Lacan, more than a fact of life, more than our
'self'. Its 'effects' emanate from loss too intimate to name, around which
swirl love of pain, obsession, belief: symptom. Death is opaque. It is, as
symptom, "a structural imaginary that dwells alongside the ego".
31. It anchors us to the pleasures of our desire, it closes us against what
the ego reads as 'more' loss. It becomes the 'voice' in language, it marks
language by arranging sound/tone via speech and writing. Death is language
work. The subject of execution is always in-the-know. On death row for
months or years.
32. Before the barrel for a second. An execution is exacted upon the
consciousness of the person, they know, that is. Perhaps many murders are
executions, and many suicides. The assassination though is out-of-the-blue.
Kennedy did not see the rifle, or hear the shot. The assassin is hidden.
The executioner is not.
33. An execution is an exercise of executive power. The executive must
execute the body, and the icon that that body embodies, the psyche. The
executive can change (hands): "When the rabble cut off the heads of the
king's officers, they have redefined themselves as the sovereign people.
Literally and physically, they have seized the ultimate power of the
sovereign. Instead of learning, they teach. It is a disturbing lesson to
those identified with the old order; it is an invigorating lesson to those
who identify with the new. As for those identified with the old order who
believe they identify with the new, they ignore the lesson or palliate it."
Janes, p. 245
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