10 - Open Secrets, or The Postscript of Capital Punishment

Summary

The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.

– Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

Nobody bears witness for the witness.

– Paul Celan, “Ashglory”

In his 1957 essay “Reflections on the Guillotine,” Albert Camus recounts the story of how he came to know about executions. The incident involved his father, who was killed in World War I when Camus was only a year old and whom Camus knew mainly through his mother's recollections. Lucien Camus had gone to the center of Algiers to see the execution of a man convicted of killing his children in a particularly grisly, high-profile murder. Camus relates the incident half a century later:

One of the few things I know about him, in any case, is that he wanted to witness the execution, for the first time in his life. He got up in the dark to go to the place of execution at the other end of town amid a great crowd of people. What he saw that morning he never told anyone. My mother relates merely that he came rushing home, his face distorted, refused to talk, lay down for a moment on the bed, and suddenly began to vomit. He had just discovered the reality hidden under the noble phrases with which it was masked. Instead of thinking of the slaughtered children, he could think of nothing but that quivering body that had just been dropped onto a board to have its head cut off.