I.
The condemned is laid down and strapped onto a gurney. His arms are swabbed with alcohol before two sterilized intravenous cannulaes are inserted—one primary line in one arm, one backup line in the other. With the necessary connections made, saline drips are started to ascertain that the connections are clear. The condemned is allowed a final statement and the execution commences.
A heart monitor is attached and a sequence of poisons are injected, strategically ordered to minimize physical distress and maximize lethality. Sodium thiopental, an ultra-short action barbiturate, is injected first to render the condemned unconscious for a few seconds before an injection of pancuronium causes complete, fast and sustained paralysis of the skeletal striated muscles, including the diaphragm and the rest of the respiratory muscles. Potassium cholride is finally injected to stop the heart. Death is to follow seven to eighteen minutes later.
Under the watchful gaze of the makeshift voyeurs surrounding him—the meticulous executioners, public witnesses and friends and family hidden behind curtains and one-way mirrors—the condemned lies paralyzed, paradoxically blind in the same focal position of power that the panopticon condemned him from.
Isolated (however in company), the prisoner dies center-stage, the object of a cruel panoptic reversal.
II.
As Foucault says of our biopolitical age: "Power [today] is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of the population."[1]
With power at the level of life, the rational eradication of those deemed threatening to life, to the population, is carried out without question and with impunity. The criminal, the terrorist, the mad, the insane and the ill, then, are the objects of an ironic campaign that kills in the service of the population and therefore life and justice abstractly.
But this killing, this executing, is differentiated from that of the condemned or that of the King; it is killing without murder or torture, and murder without injustice. This process seems more and more like a process Zizek describes in Homo Sacer: "On today's market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol... And the list goes on: what about virtual sex as sex without sex, the Colin Powell doctrine of warfare with no casualties (on our side, of course) as warfare without warfare..."
Modern capital punishment is killing without murder, without injustice.
III.
Biopower, as deployed by the state, kills without murdering by killing humanely, by taking the inhumanity out of murder, by targeting not the body, but the soul. The condemned is permitted a final meal and a final statement; his arms are swabbed with alcohol, the equipment deployed to kill him is sterilized, and the sequence of the drugs administered ensures maximized lethality and minimized distress. Killing becomes a humane process, a science carried out by a diffuse body of psychologists, doctors, judges, lawyers, and politicians. The condemned's body is not tortured, though his ill soul is extinguished, cured of its maladies.
Justice, perhaps, is a self-perpetuating thing[3] colonized by instrumental rationality. It conquers the condemned's 'ill' soul to ground itself in pure truth; to establish itself as a curative power that is legitimate. As the Judge says, 'we punish, but this is a way of saying that we wish to obtain a cure.'[4]
In the end, however, perhaps it is justice itself, given its coercive resentful nature, that is ill and in need of curing.◊
