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This chapter presents a case study of one hotly contested but largely unseen controversy: whether a particular method of killing rats — decapitation in a table-top guillotine — inflicts excruciatingly intense or totally negligible pain. It discusses how scientists and veterinarians in this controversy vie to determine how much conscious perception of pain animals experience during or subsequent to this technique. It also considers why pain is the high-priority question in the first place when animal's lives are at stake.

Mme Roland's last days are described: romanticism has coloured accounts, but her composure and self-control are not in doubt. Her interrogations are described: letters found on a Girondin correspondent, after Charlotte Corday's assassination of Marat are used as evidence. She is condemned to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal and her journey to the guillotine is reported in the words of eye-witness Sophie Grandchamp. The circumstances of Jean-Marie Roland's solitary and less well-known death are described in this chapter from contemporary records: leaving his hiding place, he kills himself after hearing of his wife's trial.

Striving for a method of capital punishment that was, as much as possible, painless for the victim as well as for the spectator, legislators in the National Assembly settled upon the idea of a decapitating machine. This machine, almost immediately dubbed the guillotine after the lawmaker who first proposed the idea, promised a public death that happened so quickly that it was invisible to the naked eye. While, at first, there was a good deal of public fascination with the speed with which the guillotine could transform a living human being into a lifeless head, over time the spectacle of the guillotine proved somewhat disappointing to spectators, particularly during the Terror when it was repeated with great frequency. The executioners of France became a casualty of the machine, as the complex craft which they had practiced for generations was now reduced to the simple act of pulling a cord.

With the end of the Terror, government officials and many townspeople expressed abhorrence of the spectacle of execution, and guillotines throughout France were gradually moved from city centers to more remote locations. Although the law insisted that executions be public, and although many still clung to the idea that public punishment served the purposes of exemplary deterrence, contemporary sensibilities frowned on those who actually showed up to watch. Consequently, officials did everything in their power to dissuade the public from attending executions, and to limit the visibility of those who did. Executions were performed at twilight and with little warning; elevated scaffolds were banned. Although the number of executioners in France was reduced to a single practitioner, he continued to perform the vestiges of the penal spectacle until the curtain finally came down in 1939, after which all executions would be performed behind closed doors.

This chapter explores the French Revolution as an attempt to realize the millennial dream of an egalitarian society articulated by some of the currents within the Enlightenment. It identifies the enthusiastic response to the King's calling of the Estates General in 1788 as the onset of apocalyptic time, and traces the shifting emphases from transformational (largely peaceful and legislative attempts to dismantle the prime divider) to increasingly violent and paranoid actions in response to the failure of the earlier efforts. As opposed to many historians who either argue that 1789 had little to do with the Terror of 1793, or that they were one and the same, an apocalyptic model suggests that it was the revolutionaries’ response to disappointment that produced the Terror.

Chapter 4 builds on the analysis of accountability, classification, and ontologically moral constitution of governable people and things, by considering the place of evidence in mundane governance. It focuses on the work of a local authority in constituting evidence of the recycling habits of the local population. Evidence, the ‘facts’ of recycling, cannot be separated from its morality; the move to constitute metrics for the actions of the local population is simultaneously evidential, moral, and actionable. The classification and accountability of waste, assessments of the adequacy of its presentation, and the governance of household actions is always and already a moral matter, and implies what appropriate actions might be taken.

We humans are a hardy lot. It eventually takes the cellular deterioration of old age to set most of us up for death, which then occurs by cancer, heart disease, pneumonia, or other illness. Death by natural causes is almost always the result of a protracted assault on our bodies. We are hard to kill. But now and then we undertake the technological problem of killing one another intentionally. That is seldom easy to do, and it has to play out against the universal human commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” So the problem is not only a difficult one technologically, it is also one that calls up all manner of creative tactics of self-justification. The motivation for killing takes many forms—the greater good of society as expressed in war and capital punishment, mercy killing, personal gain (often expressed in crime against another person), revenge, anger, or suicide. I expect we all have sanctioned killing by one or more of these means at one time or another, by either words or deeds. We have created little original technology for the purpose of killing one another. However, a great deal of our existing technology has been adapted to that purpose. Weapons for hunting have repeatedly been elaborated into weapons of crime or war. Lisa Meitner, whose 1939 paper described the energy release of nuclear fission, clearly thought she had identified the ultimate peacetime power source. Asked what use the Wrights’ new airplane would be, Orville Wright unhesitatingly shot back, “Sport!” While war was far from the Wright brothers’ minds in the process of invention, their first big commercial sale was to the United States Army. The peculiar relation between creativity and killing comes home to me in my reaction to an event in the late days of World War II, when the war finally came closest to my quiet home in Minnesota. Since Tokyo was more than six thousand miles away, the mutual slaughter of Japanese and the Allies had largely been carried out in the Pacific Ocean. Then in January 1945 we learned about Japan’s secret weapon. She was trying to ignite our mainland with incendiary bombs.

This chapter analyzes the birth of French psychiatry in conjunction with the invention of the guillotine. While psychiatry invents itself as a new discipline, studying how the body relates to the soul and the brain to the mind, revolutionary terror invents the guillotine, the new “machine of government” that separates the head from the trunk. This coincidence between the political and the medical is not only metaphorical. It can also be read in the lunatic asylums’ registers that report a great number of delusions about beheadings (and erroneous head replacements). As an illustration of the collusion between history and madness, the chapter traces from 1793 onward the motif of the guillotine and its echoes in medical registers and literature of the time, especially in the works that belong to what has been called “frenetic Romanticism.”

Between the summer of 1793 and the summer of 1794, France's new revolutionary regime requisitioned monasteries, churches, and barracks, and used them to hold people arrested on suspicion of counterrevolutionary activities. It was a time that has gone down in French history as the Terror. At the peak of the Terror, in June and July of 1794, more than 1,370 men and women were sentenced to death and executed by guillotine. Those about to be executed were given permission to write farewell letters, of which several hundred have been published. What all the letter writers have in common is the certainty that within 24 hours, often much sooner, they will be dead. In their darkest moments, they seek comfort in the prospect of being remembered. This has been referred to as “the second death”: you are only truly dead when you are gone from the memory of those you left behind. This chapter examines some of these farewell letters, which contain everything from a tear-stained cry from the heart to a five-page document of final instructions almost worthy of a public notary.

This chapter begins with a discussion of an executioner's well-known practice of grasping the decapitated heads of the guillotine's most famous victims by the hair and holding them up before the crowd gathered to witness their deaths. Scholars and historians have noted that engravings of the Revolution's executioner displaying his victims' decapitated heads to the people recall the mythic image of Perseus holding high the head of Medusa. In images from the Terror, however, the focus has shifted from the triumphant hero to the defeated monster. The executioner was often left out of the engravings, which showed a quasi-disembodied hand—the victor, after all, was not a single individual but the people—clutching the hair of the various monsters who had betrayed the nation. For the revolutionaries, it seems, Medusa never died entirely: Perseus's triumph had to be endlessly repeated to ensure victory.

This chapter examines Irving’s 1824 story ‘The Adventure of the German Student’ alongside his two earlier tales, ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ and ‘Rip Van Winkle’, focusing on Irving’s radical rethinking of the historical tale as a site of ghostly returns. The presence of death and ghostly figures at the heart of foundational historical moments makes the telling and retelling of the historical tale a fraught endeavour. Irving’s seemingly harmless ‘ghost stories’ are in effect radical reinventions of ‘History’ as a constant problem to be grappled with in the here and now. In ‘The Adventure of the German Student’, the figure of the guillotine offers a prime symbol for this deathly presence at the heart of the historical event, casting it as always already horrific and showcasing History’s deadly and beheading forces at work on the individual and the collective alike.

In late eighteenth-century France, at the seeming height of neoclassicism in the arts with its goal of idealized form al’antica in the depiction of the human figure, an intensified fascination with the visual experience of viscera emerged.  Picturing viscera became increasingly common in visual culture.  These developments occurred during a period of intense political and cultural upheaval and concomitant violence and bloodshed in France. Graphic anatomical plates, prints, and caricatures as well as wax models of viscera cast from the body parts of corpses, were used for pedagogical instruction as were écorché figures, either sculpted or cast from cadavers. Paintings were made that engaged the subject of death and disembowelment. We also see the actual participation in dissection by artists as well as anatomists. Artists, anatomists, and amateurs (sometimes working in concert) produced compelling images of what lies beneath the skin for a variety of purposes and functions.

This chapter offers an examination of the refining of the instant of execution that takes place with the introduction of trap door gallows in the seventeenth century and, more spectacularly and explicitly, in the late eighteenth century with the French Revolution and the guillotine. The death penalty is thereby distinguished from torture and a post-Enlightenment conception of punishment is introduced, lasting to the present. But the guillotine is bloody, and that underscores a complex visuality of the death penalty that also obtains during the same time period, playing out across diverse genres such as the execution sermon, political and scientific discourses relating to the guillotine, Supreme Court descriptions of crimes, and practices of an entity such as the Islamic State. What develops concurrent with the guillotine—yet remains constant through all those examples--is a form of realist photographic visuality.

This chapter tracks the history of cruelty in the administration of the death penalty. It moves from the history of blood (cruor) and bloody cruelty (e.g., the guillotine) to a history that involves the disappearance of blood and the non-bloody process of interiorization. It argues that psychical cruelty makes cruelty not only difficult to determine but also, as Jacques Derrida insists, one of the horizons most proper to psychoanalysis. This chapter begins by following the signs of the mutation of the death-dealing discourse in the Christian, European West; it ends by reading the Jewish joke as the sign of a psychoanalytico-philosophical alliance that is explosively out of tune with the political theology of the death penalty.

This chapter reviews the major factors influencing the construction of late-modern scientific ethos in light of the findings on the persistent meme of prophetic ethos. It examines the rhetorical tension that developed between the progressive model of scientific ethos as practiced by the early Royal Society and a philosophical model of scientific ethos (is/ought model) derived from Hume's Guillotine. The progressive model posited that since scientists best understood the world, they were best positioned to set policy. The is/ought model tends to be activated either by conservative administrations suspicious of centralized regulation or in response to perceived abuses of power by scientists. But neither model ever goes away entirely, and the latent competition between them creates an ethical catch-22 for science advisers in the following way: in policy crises, the old progressive model triggers calls to scientists for advice.

This chapter examines the argument that the lethal injection is not humane at all, with particular emphasis on its speed and reliability. It first considers the latest criticisms against the lethal injection and relates it to two landmarks in the history of modern executions: the guillotine and the electric chair. It then provides an overview of the lethal injection and its introduction as a method of execution and goes on to discuss how notions of speed and timing have been incorporated into attempts to make executions “appear tolerable” by providing a “reliable, precise, and painless death” for the convicted. It argues that today's criticism of he lethal injection has not diverged much from that of the capital punishment discourse in the late 1970s and early 1980s.