断头机与死亡剧场简史

A Brief History of Guillotine and Performance of Death

在人类的观看史上,对死亡的观赏是一个持久的话题.欧洲的政权将死刑作为一种警示民众的公开表演.刑具的发展史———尤其是断头机的历史,充分说明了死刑作为一种公开表演不断被“理性化”和“道德化”的过程.法律规范、道德标准和哲学隐喻在两千年间不断趋于“理性”,使得断头机由一种死刑不断人道化的努力变成死刑残忍的象征,最终退出了刑罚的历史.然而被断头的恐惧却不曾泯灭,在互联网时代,电子化手段将人的思维与身体分离,将生命的消亡转化为无需肉体的精神之永存.

Watching death is a persistent topic in human history of looking.The European countries showed the death penalty as public performance to prevent crime.The development history of the instruments of death especially the Guillotine suggests that the death penalty has been rationalized and moralized as a public performance.Because of the development of legal morality and philosophy,Guillotine became the symbol of death instead of the effort for humanism and vanished everlastingly.However,the terror of being decapitated never die.In the network age,human's mind and body are separated by the internetwork,the end of one's physical life may be the beginning of one's spiritual life,which is the modern decapitation.