ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault once remarked that, ‘the practice of the public execution haunted our penal system for a long time and still haunts it today’ (Foucault 1975/1991: 15). This spectre returns, of course, only at the margins of his text. Nevertheless, the powers of horror retained a distinctive place within penal modernity. This chapter rejects contemporary liberal narratives that frame western penal change in terms of civilized sensibilities, increasing humanity and penal leniency. The analysis presented explores how, for more than a century, British penality has been haunted by the shadow of the death penalty. The spectral presence of deadly punishment within Britain, and the emergence from the 1960s of a new aesthetics of ‘life means life’, are traced. Through a reading of Myra Hindley’s case, one sees how death is written into the law in new ways. From modern times the spectacle of the state’s power of life and death has been accompanied by legal logics that no longer respect the limitless fury of sovereign power. However, in Hindley’s case, the gothic of ‘life means life’ is revealed as one in which the ultimate penalty knows no bounds. This breaching of the limits of law reconfigures the very meaning of legality itself. Under the shadow of the death penalty, it seems, the aesthetics of punishment is an aesthetics of abjection.
