Killing Times begins with the deceptively simple observation--made by Jacques Derrida in his seminars on the topic--that the death penalty mechanically interrupts mortal time by preempting the typical mortal experience of not knowing at what precise moment we will die. Through a broader examination of what constitutes mortal temporality, David Wills proposes that the so-called machinery of death summoned by the death penalty works by exploiting, or perverting, the machinery of time that is already attached to human existence. Time, Wills argues, functions for us in general as a prosthetic technology, but the application of the death penalty represents a new level of prosthetic intervention into what constitutes the human.
Killing Times traces the logic of the death penalty across a range of sites. Starting with the legal cases whereby American courts have struggled to articulate what methods of execution constitute cruel and unusual punishment, Wills goes on to show the ways that technologies of death have themselves evolved in conjunction with ideas of cruelty and instantaneity, from the development of the guillotine and the trap door for hanging, through the firing squad and the electric chair, through today's controversies surrounding lethal injection. Responding to the legal system's repeated recourse to storytelling--prosecutors' and politicians' endless recounting of the horrors of crimes--Wills gives a careful eye to the narrative, even fictive spaces that surround crime and punishment. Many of the controversies surrounding capital punishment, Wills argues, revolve around the complex temporality of the death penalty: how its instant works in conjunction with forms of suspension, or extension of time; how its seeming correlation between egregious crime and painless execution is complicated by a number of different discourses. By pinpointing the temporal technology that marks the death penalty, Wills is able to show capital punishment's expansive reach, tracing the ways it has come to govern not only executions within the judicial system, but also the opposed but linked categories of the suicide bombing and drone warfare. In discussing the temporal technology of death, Wills elaborates the workings both of the terrorist who produces a simultaneity of crime and punishment that bypasses judicial process, and of the security state, in whose remote-control killings the time-space coordinates of justice are compressed and at the same time disappear into the black hole of secrecy. Grounded in a deep ethical and political commitment to death penalty abolition, Wills's engaging and powerfully argued book pushes the question of capital punishment beyond the confines of legal argument to show how the technology of capital punishment defines and appropriates the instant of death and reconfigures the whole of human mortality.Product Research 101: The Essential Guide on How to Find the Perfect Niche and Product That Sells, Discover How to Find Hot Niche Markets and Winning Products That Would Sell
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In this highly original book David Wills rethinks not only our nature before all technology but also what we understand to be technology. Rather than considering the human being as something natural that then develops technology, Wills argues, we should instead imagine an originary imbrication of nature and machine that begins with a dorsal turn-a turn that takes place behind our back, outside our field of vision.
With subtle and insightful readings, Wills pursues this sense of what lies behind our idea of the human by rescuing Heidegger's thinking from a reductionist dismissal of technology, examining different angles on Lévinas's face-to-face relation, and tracing a politics of friendship and sexuality in Derrida and Sade. He also analyzes versions of exile in Joyce's rewriting of Homer and Broch's rewriting of Virgil and discusses how Freud and Rimbaud exemplify the rhetoric of soil and blood that underlies every attempt to draw lines between nations and discriminate between peoples. In closing, Wills demonstrates the political force of rhetoric in a sophisticated analysis of Nietzsche's oft-quoted declaration that God is dead.
Forward motion, Wills ultimately reveals, is an ideology through which we have favored the front-what can be seen-over the aspects of the human and technology that lie behind the back and in the spine-what can be sensed otherwise-and shows that this preference has had profound environmental, political, sexual, and ethical consequences.
David Wills is professor of French and English at the University of Albany (SUNY). He is the author of Prosthesis and Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction as well as the translator of works by Jacques Derrida, including The Gift of Death.
Hollywood in Kodachrome is a stunning portfolio of the stars of Hollywood's Golden Age, captured in rich, deeply saturated color photographs reproduced from original Kodachrome negatives and curated by collector David Wills and designer Stephen Schmidt, the creative team behind Marilyn Monroe: Metamorphosis and Audrey: The 60s.
From Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner, and Rita Hayworth to Fred Astaire, Humphrey Bogart, and Gregory Peck--and many more--the silver screen's elite are all here, in the full blush of youth, captured as if they were taken yesterday. But the true star is the medium itself: late-1940s sheet Kodachrome, a film stock that remains legendary for its rich tonal range, precise color, and detail.
Including a foreword by Golden Age star Rhonda Fleming, and featuring more than 200 photos from classic films and publicity shoots, Hollywood in Kodachrome is a magnificent tribute to Hollywood's most beloved icons, captured at their glamorous best.
A glamorous and nostalgic celebration of the summer through stunning retro photographs of Hollywood beauties
The author of the acclaimed photo compilations Vegas Gold, Hollywood in Kodachrome, Marilyn Monroe: Metamorphosis, and Audrey: The 60s, now presents a glamorous and nostalgic celebration of summer at the beach, captured in 150 stunning vintage photographs featuring beloved female celebrities, models, and starlets from the 1930s through the 1970s.
Renowned independent curator and photographic preservationist David Wills commemorates the allure and joy of the sun, the sand, the ocean, and the fashions of endless summer with this sizzling collection. Hollywood Beach Beauties includes more than one-hundred vibrant color images of some of Hollywood's most timeless stars lounging and playing at one of the most iconic settings: the beach.
Hollywood Beach Beauties highlights the sexy, carefree attitude of the summer, the elegant seaside couture, and the enchanting and alluring beauty of the female form. Included here are candid and stylish photographs featuring stars of yesterday such as Elizabeth Taylor, Rita Hayworth, Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, Sharon Tate, Raquel Welch, Sophia Loren, Dorothy Dandridge, and Nancy Sinatra.
A treasure trove for classic movie mavens, vintage photography enthusiasts, and pop culture aficionados, this stunning theme-driven compendium taps into nostalgia for the joys of summer and captures the dazzling beauty of the seaside and some of the most stylish stars of the big screen in a fresh, unique, and captivating way.
A stunning photographic compilation showcasing Audrey Hepburn's iconic career in the 1950s--the decade that solidified her place as one of the world's greatest stars in film and fashion.
Devoted to her most influential decade, Audrey: The 50s brings together in one volume the allure and elegance that made Audrey Hepburn the most iconic figure in modern fashion history. Photographed during the early days of her career, both on the sets of Roman Holiday, Sabrina, Funny Face, and other classic films, and in fashion photo shoots by top photographers who adored and immortalized her, these beautiful black-and-white and color images radiate with Audrey's waifish charm, ethereal beauty, and effortless style.
Renowned author, curator and photographic preservationist David Wills has carefully selected this collection of two hundred museum-quality photos that capture Audrey in her prime as never before. Audrey: The 50s displays this star at her brightest, and brings her legacy into perfect focus.
Among the highlights:
Matchbook consists of nine essays written around, or in response to, work published by Jacques Derrida since 1980. The focal point of the essays is the Envois, which forms part of Derrida's Post Card. Particular attention is paid to how that text articulates with the ethical and political emphases of Derrida's more recent work, but also to its autobiographical conceit.
The incendiary reference of the book's title underscores deconstruction's engagement with questions of reading: relations between (slow) reading and the speed of technology, and the political effects of an internationalized deconstruction in a globalized culture. It is in terms of what deconstruction can have us think about the speed of technology and technologies of reading that Derrida's work has made one of its most important contributions to philosophy and literary and cultural studies. The book concentrates on that as proof of the continued relevance of such work.
Inanimation is the third book by author David Wills to analyze the technology of the human. In Prosthesis, Wills traced our human attachment to external objects back to a necessity within the body itself. In Dorsality, he explored how technology is understood to function behind or before the human. Inanimation proceeds by taking literally the idea of inanimate or inorganic forms of life. Starting from a seemingly na ve question about what it means to say texts live on or have a life of their own, Inanimation develops a new theory of the inanimate.
Inanimation offers a fresh account of what life is and the ethical and political consequences that follow from this conception. Inspired by Walter Benjamin's observation that the idea of life and afterlife in works of art should be regarded with an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity, the book challenges the coherence and limitations of what lives, arguing that there is no clear opposition between a live animate and dead inanimate. Wills identifies three major forms of inorganic life: autobiography, translation, and resonance. Informed by Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, he explores these forms through wide-ranging case studies. He brings his panoptic vision to bear on thinkers (Descartes, Freud, Derrida, Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Jean-Luc Nancy, Roland Barthes), writers and poets (H l ne Cixous, Paul Celan, William Carlos Williams, Ernst J nger, James Joyce, Georges Bataille), and visual artists (Jean-Fran ois Millet, Jean-Luc Godard, Paul Klee). With panache and gusto, Wills discovers life-forms well beyond textual remainders and translations, in such disparate places as the act of thinking, the death drive, poetic blank space, recorded bird songs, the technology of warfare, and the heart stopped by love.
An examination of the presumed opposition between the natural human body and artificial inanimate objects
Prosthesis is a landmark work in posthuman thought that analyzes and explores the human body as a technology, seamlessly integrated (both physically and psychologically) with prosthetics. Here David Wills lays the groundwork for ideas he develops in two of his other books, Dorsality, exploring how technology functions behind or before the human, and Inanimation, giving perspective on what it means to be alive.
In Prosthesis, Wills promotes the idea that the human body is open to supplementation by artificial addenda that operate both internally or externally and engage it in an unceasing arbitration with the environment. Questioning the opposition between animate and inanimate along with the logic of the automatic prioritization of living flesh, Prosthesis undertakes these assumptions by studying thematics of artificiality through the writings of Freud, Derrida, William Gibson, Peter Greenaway, and others. In the twenty-five years since its first publication, Prosthesis has been a point of reference in the field of disability studies. It has also been recognized for its prosthetic writing, consisting of academic and autobiographical voices and styles that are artificially attached to one another.