Nobody kills: Constance Debré
Constance Debré's "Protocoles" (Flammarion, 2026) replaces a "literature of the death penalty" with the literary reproduction of its administration: The book traces the countdown of a condemned man's final 35 days and reconstructs, with cold, prosaic precision, the technical, bureaucratic, and logistical processes of execution in the United States. The individual no longer appears as a moral subject, but as a "corps du sujet," a body whose weight, skin, veins, resistance, and decomposition are regulated by protocols. The division of labor among the execution teams points to a system that anonymizes, fragments, and depersonalizes violence until "no one kills." In parallel, Debré sketches a topography of the United States as a landscape of regularity, surveillance, and moral erosion—from "We buy souls" signs to school monitoring software to an omnipresent sense of impending doom. The review interprets "Protocoles" as a break with the tradition of Hugo and Camus: instead of pathos, moral appeal, or existential reflection, Debré relies on the formal mimicry of legal protocols, thus depriving literature of its hermeneutic function. Debré's poetics of desubjectification, "purity," and the self-referentiality of the rule are examined. "Protocoles" exposes the modern logic of law, technology, and the administration of the death penalty as a totalizing order in which literature can only exist as a copy of power.
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