The Time of the (Trap)door

This discussion forms part of an analysis of the “temporal technology” of the death penalty, that is to say, what happens to human time once the temporality of mortality is interrupted “artificially” by a machine in the service of a state. In U.S. Supreme Court decisions have been reached that come down to a question of how to manage the instant of death so as not to have it constitute “cruel and unusual punishment”. On that basis I analyze images of cruelty as represented by Justice Clarence Thomas in the case of Glossip v. Gross (2015), by Puritan preachers in execution sermons, and by the Islamic State in contemporaneous examples, and interpret them through the lens of the trapdoor as technological innovation that, like the guillotine, tries to refine the instant of death, and introduces at the same time a type of“photographic” instant. Woven into that analysis is a reading of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”, and in particular of the door that separates his roomfrom the space of his family and the outside world.