Killing Times

David Wills is Professor of French Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University. His major work, on the originary technicity of the human, is developed in three books: Prosthesis (Stanford, 1995), Dorsality (Minnesota, 2008), and Inanimation (Minnesota, 2016). He has translated various works by Jacques Derrida, including the forthcoming Theory and Practice (Chicago, 2018).David Wills is Professor of French Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University. His major work, on the originary technicity of the human, is developed in three books: Prosthesis (Stanford, 1995), Dorsality (Minnesota, 2008), and Inanimation (Minnesota, 2016). He has translated various works by Jacques Derrida, including the forthcoming Theory and Practice (Chicago, 2018).

Kelly Oliver, Vanderbilt University:
Killing Times shows how technologies of death have affected, or infected, the way we live. No mere academic treatise, Wills’s beautiful, forceful, and mesmerizing book will draw in readers through its confessional style and vivid storytelling.

Allan Stoekl, Pennsylvania State University:
Killing Times makes an enormous contribution to understanding the logic of capital punishment. Ranging widely over American Supreme Court jurisprudence, the history of capital punishment and the Enlightenment (the guillotine in France), the logic of suicide bombing and drone warfare, and the relation between narrative and execution, Wills always comes back to a central issue, one largely ignored by most commentators: time. This groundbreaking approach allows him to link disparate practices, laws, and customs: For the first time we see that capital punishment is not only about retribution through state-imposed death, but it is also and above all about the absolute mastery of time through the creation of a kind of negative prosthesis—technology—that impossibly supplements and completes the human by subtracting and destroying it. This is scholarship and theoretical analysis at the highest level: thorough, wide-ranging, and convincing.