- Vanderbilt University, Philosophy, Faculty Memberadd
- My research is situated at the intersection of phenomenology, political philosophy, and critical prison studies. I f... moreMy research is situated at the intersection of phenomenology, political philosophy, and critical prison studies. I find phenomenological accounts of relational personhood and situated knowledge helpful for grounding political theory in lived experience and making theory accountable to the complexity of political praxis. In recent years, my research has focused on three main issues:
1) Prisoner Resistance
How have people in solitary confinement managed to resist and survive carceral power, and what can we learn from prisoner resistance movements about broader possibilities for contesting, transforming, and even abolishing carceral logics? My main points of reference for this project have been the California prison hunger strikes, organized by people in extreme isolation at Pelican Bay State Prison in 2011-13, and the Groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP), an activist group in which Foucault, Deleuze, and other French intellectuals collaborated with prisoners and their families in the early 1970s to amplify the voices of people inside.
2) Punishment,, Reproduction, and Settler Colonialism
What is the political relation between support for the death penalty and opposition to abortion? How do medicalized approaches to state execution in the US work in tandem with criminalized approaches to pregnancy, abortion, and substance use, to intensify the gap between lives that must be protected at all cost and lives that are marked as inherently dangerous or disposable? What is the relationship between genocidal policies to "kill the Indian in the child" and the current crisis of Indigenous hyperincarceration and deaths in custody? In this book project, I map the structural and historical connections between reproductive politics, carceral power, and settler colonialism in Canada, Australia, and the United States.
3) Carceral Space
How do carceral logics shape spaces beyond prisons, jails, and detention centers, such as suburbs, gated communities, and college campuses? In this series of articles, I explore the structure of carceral space from a critical phenomenological perspective, drawing on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Frantz Fanon, as well as social and political theories of space in disciplines such as architecture and design (Eyal Weizman, Leopold Lambert, Oscar Newman), urban studies (Mike Davis, Neil Smith), geography (Ruth Gilmore, Rashad Shabazz), gender studies and critical race studies (Katherine McKittrick, Simone Browne), and sociology (Henri Lefebvre, Bruno Latour). By “carceral space,” I mean the spatial organization of relationships among bodies and things through practices of criminalization, surveillance, confinement, segregation, and other forms of punitive control.edit
There are many ways to destroy a person, but the simplest and most devastating way must be solitary confinement. Deprived of meaningful human contact, otherwise healthy prisoners literally come unhinged. Many experience symptoms such as... more
There are many ways to destroy a person, but the simplest and most devastating way must be solitary confinement. Deprived of meaningful human contact, otherwise healthy prisoners literally come unhinged. Many experience symptoms such as intense anxiety and paranoia, uncontrollable trembling, confusion, hallucinations and other perceptual distortions. Some prisoners describe their experience in solitary confinement as a form of living death. Harry Hawser, a poet and inmate at Eastern State Penitentiary in the 1840s, called his cell “a living tomb.” Angela Tucker, an African-American woman held in supermax confinement in the 1980s, said: “It’s like living in a black hole.” Jeremy Pinson, a prisoner at Florence ADX (Administrative Maximum Facility), said, “You feel as if the world has ended but you somehow survived.” What does it mean to recognize, as the effect of a standard and increasingly widespread method of incarceration, the possibility of a suffering that blurs the distinction between life and death? What must subjectivity be like in order for this to be possible? Who are we, such that we can be unhinged from ourselves by being separated from others?
Research Interests: Criminal Law, Criminal Justice, Segregation, Race and Racism, Critical Animal Studies, and 17 morePhenomenology, Slavery, Continental Philosophy, Émmanuel Lévinas, Women, Philosophy of Punishment, Phenomenology of Space and Place, Prisons, Punishment, Solitary Confinement, Supermax Prisons, Convict Lease System, Solitary Confinement, Prisoners' Rights, Civil Rights Litigation, Health Effects, Supermaxes, Prisoners Families, and Prison Psychology
The Gift of the Other brings together a philosophical analysis of time, embodiment, and ethical responsibility with a feminist critique of the way women’s reproductive capacity has been theorized and represented in Western culture. Author... more
The Gift of the Other brings together a philosophical analysis of time, embodiment, and ethical responsibility with a feminist critique of the way women’s reproductive capacity has been theorized and represented in Western culture. Author Lisa Guenther develops the ethical and temporal implications of understanding birth as the gift of the Other, a gift which makes existence possible, and already orients this existence toward a radical responsibility for Others. Through an engagement with the work of Levinas, Beauvoir, Arendt, Irigaray, and Kristeva, the author outlines an ethics of maternity based on the givenness of existence and a feminist politics of motherhood which critiques the exploitation of maternal generosity.
Research Interests:
What is the meaning of critique for critical phenomenology? Building on Gayle Salamon’s engagement with this question in the inaugural issue of Puncta: A Journal for Critical Phenomenology (2018), I will propose a six-fold account of... more
What is the meaning of critique for critical phenomenology? Building on Gayle Salamon’s engagement with this question in the inaugural issue of Puncta: A Journal for Critical Phenomenology (2018), I will propose a six-fold account of critique as: 1) the art of asking questions, moved by crisis; 2) a transcendental inquiry into the conditions of possibility for meaningful experience; 3) a quasi-transcendental, historically-grounded study of particular lifeworlds; 4) a (situated and interested) analysis of power; 5) the problematization of basic concepts and methods; and 6) a praxis of freedom that seeks not only to interpret the meaning of lived experience, but also to change the conditions under which horizons of possibility for meaning, action, and relationship are wrongfully limited or foreclosed. While the first two dimensions of critique are alive and well in classical phenomenology, the others help to articulate what is distinctive about critical phenomenology.
Research Interests:
A group of women who were incarcerated at Canada's first federal Prison for Women (P4W) have been fighting to create a memorial garden since the prison closed in 2000. In 2017, the prison was sold to a private developer who plans to... more
A group of women who were incarcerated at Canada's first federal Prison for Women (P4W) have been fighting to create a memorial garden since the prison closed in 2000. In 2017, the prison was sold to a private developer who plans to convert the historic building and grounds into condos, retail, and office space. What does it mean to remember the dead, and to fight for the living, at a time when neoliberal common sense demands the efficient conversion of a place of suffering and death into a "heritage building" on "prime real estate"? How might a collective practice of radical imagination help to resist the commodification of memory into a tourist attraction or an aesthetic improvement of private property? And what is the relation between memory, healing, and accountability in a place where state violence, gender domination, and settler colonialism intersect?
Research Interests:
Policing is, among other things, a perceptual practice. In the 1960s, patrolling officers walked the beat, looking for signs of danger and disorder. Today, in the era of militarized policing, many police departments use unarmed drones... more
Policing is, among other things, a perceptual practice. In the 1960s, patrolling officers walked the beat, looking for signs of danger and disorder. Today, in the era of militarized policing, many police departments use unarmed drones to assist in surveillance. Police drones both compound the logic of what Grégoire Chamayou calls “cynegetic power,” or the power to hunt human beings, and also expand this power through the use of algorithmic models for mapping, predicting and pre-empting crime. A critical engagement with recent work by Jackie Wang, Mark Neocleous, Brian Massumi, and Fred Moten helps to clarify the current relation between police and the military, suggesting that the “drone assemblage” extends deep into the everyday life of racialized state violence.
Research Interests:
In her landmark essay, “Whiteness as Property,” Cheryl Harris shows how whiteness functions as a kind of property that protects those who pass as white from occupying the very bottom of a social hierarchy. This chapter explores the... more
In her landmark essay, “Whiteness as Property,” Cheryl Harris shows how whiteness functions as a kind of property that protects those who pass as white from occupying the very bottom of a social hierarchy. This chapter explores the perceptual practices and sociogenic structure of whiteness as property through an engagement with Fanon’s account of the lived experience of blackness in a white world, which is structured by the corporeal schema, the historico-racial schema, and the racial epidermal schema. Drawing on Darren Wilson’s grand jury testimony, as well as critical literature on race and policing, I argue that a possessive investment in whiteness produces and intensifies security apparatuses that serve and protect some people while exposing others to both mundane and spectacular forms of state violence. This double investment in property and security drives the perceptual practice of suspicious surveillance, or “seeing like a cop,” as well as the spatial politics of gentrification.
Research Interests:
What is the relationship between prisons designed to lock people in and suburban fortresses designed to lock people out? Building on Jonathan Simon's account of "homeowner citizenship," I argue that the gated community is the structural... more
What is the relationship between prisons designed to lock people in and suburban fortresses designed to lock people out? Building on Jonathan Simon's account of "homeowner citizenship," I argue that the gated community is the structural counterpart to the prison in a neoliberal carceral state. Levinas's account of the ambiguity of dwelling-as shelter for our constitutive relationality, as a site of mastery or possessive isolation, and as the opening of hospitality helps to articulate what is at stake in homeowner citizenship, beyond the spectre of stranger danger: namely, my own capacity for murderous violence, and my investment in this violence through the occupation of territory and the accumulation of private property. Given the systemic nature of such investments, the meaning of hospitality in the carceral state is best expressed in abolitionist social movements like the Movement for Black Lives, which holds space for a radical restructuring of the world.
Research Interests:
Critical phenomenology goes beyond classical phenomenology by reflecting on the quasi-transcendental social structures that make our experience of the world possible and meaningful, and also by engaging in a material practice of... more
Critical phenomenology goes beyond classical phenomenology by reflecting on the quasi-transcendental social structures that make our experience of the world possible and meaningful, and also by engaging in a material practice of “restructuring the world” in order to generate new and liberatory possibilities for meaningful experience and existence. In this sense, critical phenomenology is both a way of doing philosophy and a way of approaching political activism. The ultimate goal of critical phenomenology is not just to interpret the world, but also to change it.
Research Interests:
In Derrida’s lectures on the death penalty, the United States figures as “both exemplary and exceptional” (79). Derrida acknowledges the racist structure of state violence in the United States, and he cites data and specific cases to... more
In Derrida’s lectures on the death penalty, the United States figures as “both exemplary and exceptional” (79). Derrida acknowledges the racist structure of state violence in the United States, and he cites data and specific cases to support this point, but he does not develop a critical analysis of race or racism in the lecture series. Drawing on the work of incarcerated intellectual Mumia Abu-Jamal, critical race theorists Cheryl Harris and Angela Davis, and contemporary prison abolitionists, I argue that racism is an issue, not only in the particular context of the United States, but also for the logic of the death penalty that Derrida proposes to deconstruct. Derrida’s own account of indemnity, interest, and condemnation in the Tenth Session is incomplete without a supplementary analysis of black civil death and the construction of whiteness as property. In conclusion, I argue that an abolitionism worthy of the name would have to move beyond the death penalty, towards the (im)possible project of prison abolition and the abolition of white supremacy.
Research Interests:
In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress [CRC] presented a petition to the United Nations entitled “We Charge Genocide.” While the petition was never formally considered by the UN, the project of naming, analyzing, and contesting systematic... more
In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress [CRC] presented a petition to the United Nations entitled “We Charge Genocide.” While the petition was never formally considered by the UN, the project of naming, analyzing, and contesting systematic anti-black violence in the United States has inspired activist groups such as We Charge Genocide [WCG], a grassroots organization challenging police violence against youth of color in Chicago. Both organizations engage strategically with formal institutions such as the UN in a way that exceeds the restricted agenda of those institutions and struggles for revolutionary social change. But the UN’s narrow definition of genocide, and the analogy with homicide upon which it relies, pose challenges for this project. I propose a concept of structural genocide, based on a model of social justice rather than criminal justice, as a tool for articulating the harm of policies and practices that undermine a group’s life chances, whether or not they directly kill people.
Research Interests:
The Trousdale Turner Correctional Center is a 2,600-bed private prison owned and operated by CoreCivic, formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America. It is located in Hartsville, Tennessee, on the former site of the Hartsville... more
The Trousdale Turner Correctional Center is a 2,600-bed private prison owned and operated by CoreCivic, formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America. It is located in Hartsville, Tennessee, on the former site of the Hartsville Nuclear Plant and PowerCom Industrial Center. In this paper, I develop a critical genealogy of nuclear, industrial, and carceral power in the Hartsville site, focusing in particular on the production of the “prison bed” and the “compensated man-day” as monetizable units of carceral space-time. The prison bed is both a material object and also a technical term in private prison contracts which allows corporations like CoreCivic to secure a guaranteed income, regardless of the actual prison population in a given facility. For example, the contracts for the Trousdale Turner Correctional Center grant CoreCivic a minimum bed guarantee of 90%; the state (via the county) must pay CoreCivic $58.75 per day for 90% of the prison beds in the facility, whether or not these beds are occupied. The technical term for this per diem is the “compensated man-day”: a term that both inscribes the prison bed into a temporal and financial order, and also dissolves the man [sic] who may or may not occupy a prison bed into the logic of carceral neoliberalism. This logic does not primarily exploit the labor power of the prisoner, nor does it seek to discipline the subject or redeem their soul; rather, carceral neoliberalism targets criminalized populations for their potential to be warehoused. The recent rebranding of CCA as CoreCivic, a company whose mission is to provide “innovative solutions to meet some of governments’ most challenging real estate demands,” only compounds this financialization of human life and its inscription into the spatio-temporal order of carceral neoliberalism.
Research Interests:
In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry analyzes the structure of torture as an unmaking of the world in which the tools that ought to support a person’s embodied capacities are used as weapons to break them down. The Security Housing Unit... more
In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry analyzes the structure of torture as an unmaking of the world in which the tools that ought to support a person’s embodied capacities are used as weapons to break them down. The Security Housing Unit (SHU) of California’s Pelican Bay State Prison functions as a weaponized architecture of torture in precisely this sense; but in recent years, prisoners in the Pelican Bay Short Corridor have re-purposed this weaponized architecture as a tool for remaking the world through collective resistance. This resistance took the form of a hunger strike in which prisoners exposed themselves to the possibility of biological death in order to contest the social and civil death of solitary confinement. By collectively refusing food, and by articulating the meaning and motivation of this refusal in articles, interviews, artwork, and legal documents, prisoners reclaimed and expanded their perceptual, cognitive, and expressive capacities for world-making, even in a space of systematic torture.
Research Interests:
Published in The Routledge Handbook to Epistemic Injustice, ed. Ian Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus. New York: Routledge, 2017.
Research Interests:
The United States is the only Western democratic nation to practice capital punishment in the 21st century. Lethal injection was introduced in the late 1970s as a more palatable alternative to evidently brutal methods of execution such as... more
The United States is the only Western democratic nation to practice capital punishment in the 21st century. Lethal injection was introduced in the late 1970s as a more palatable alternative to evidently brutal methods of execution such as electrocution, hanging, and firing squads. Today, executions are staged as a quasi-medical procedure in which the inmate/patient is put to sleep – and put to death – on a gurney, hooked up to an IV machine, sometimes with the direct participation of medical professionals such as anesthesiologists. Medical knowledge and authority is both invoked to justify the practice of lethal injection and also strictly limited in its capacity to critique, or even to optimize, this practice. In the Supreme Court case, Baze v Rees (2008), prisoners on Kentucky’s death row called for the use of medical technology and expertise to minimize pain during execution. The court denied their request, but in response to a dissenting opinion, many states introduced manual “consciousness checks” which function as both a both biopolitical ritual of care and a necropolitical ritual of social death. Following Foucault, this chapter analyses the current practice of lethal injection in the US as a form of ‘grotesque sovereignty’ or Ubu-esque power.
Published in The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities. Ed. Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods. Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
Published in The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities. Ed. Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods. Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
Research Interests:
Between 2006 and 2010, nearly 150 women were unlawfully sterilized in California prisons. Prison medical staff have defended the procedures as a service to taxpayers, and even to the women themselves, as a way of preventing the birth of... more
Between 2006 and 2010, nearly 150 women were unlawfully sterilized in California prisons. Prison medical staff have defended the procedures as a service to taxpayers, and even to the women themselves, as a way of preventing the birth of “unwanted children.” This chapter situates the recent sterilization of women in California prisons in relation to the history of eugenics in the United States as well as broader patterns of racism, class oppression, reproductive injustice, and mass incarceration. The central claim is that the current U.S. prison system is not just implicated in eugenics at particular moments, but in its very structure, insofar as it systematically prevents certain groups of people – primarily poor people and people of color, who are targeted for disproportionate police surveillance, arrest, and incarceration – from making basic decisions concerning their own reproductive capacity. The reproductive justice movement led by women of color activists and scholars provides a framework for dismantling the eugenic structure of mass incarceration, beyond the alternatives of pro-choice and pro-life.
Published in Feminist Philosophies of Life, ed. Hasana Sharp and Chloe Taylor. Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016.
Published in Feminist Philosophies of Life, ed. Hasana Sharp and Chloe Taylor. Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016.
Research Interests:
Prisoner-led resistance movements are complicated by both the brutality of state violence and the inadequacy of moralistic discourses of prison reform. A comparative study of the GIP and the Pelican Bay SHU Short Corridor Collective,... more
Prisoner-led resistance movements are complicated by both the brutality of state violence and the inadequacy of moralistic discourses of prison reform. A comparative study of the GIP and the Pelican Bay SHU Short Corridor Collective, which launched a series of mass hunger strikes across the California prison system in 2011-13, suggests that effective resistance to carceral power demands a movement beyond good and evil, and beyond the moral-legal categories of guilt and innocence. This calls for an affirmation of the creaturely needs, desires, and capacities that motivate and sustain political life as such: a creaturely politics of active intolerance and intercorporeal solidarity.
Published in Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition, ed. Andrew Dilts and Perry Zurn. Palgrave 2015.
Published in Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition, ed. Andrew Dilts and Perry Zurn. Palgrave 2015.
Research Interests:
On July 8, 2013, over 30,000 prisoners in California joined together across racial and regional lines to launch the largest hunger strike in state history. The strike action was organized by a group of supermax prisoners called the... more
On July 8, 2013, over 30,000 prisoners in California joined together across racial and regional lines to launch the largest hunger strike in state history. The strike action was organized by a group of supermax prisoners called the Pelican Bay SHU Short Corridor Collective, which defines itself as a multi-racial, multi-regional human rights movement. This paper analyzes the emergence of collective agency and organizational power within the extreme isolation of a supermax prison, among people who might otherwise be divided by social, material, and institutional barriers. Drawing on Fanon’s decolonial phenomenology of race, Sartre’s social ontology of collectives and groups in Critique of Dialectical Reason, and the first-person testimony of hunger strike organizers, the paper offers a theoretical and practical account of the movement from isolation to collective solidarity and resistance in a carceral state.
Published in Body/Self/Other: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters, ed. Luna Dolezal and Danielle Petherbridge. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2017.
Published in Body/Self/Other: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters, ed. Luna Dolezal and Danielle Petherbridge. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2017.
Research Interests:
On July 8, 2013, over 30,000 prisoners in California joined together across racial and regional lines to launch the largest hunger strike in state history. This article analyzes the prison conditions that led to the hunger strike as a... more
On July 8, 2013, over 30,000 prisoners in California joined together across racial and regional lines to launch the largest hunger strike in state history. This article analyzes the prison conditions that led to the hunger strike as a form of world-destroying violence, drawing on Heidegger’s account of Being- in-the-world and Arendt’s account of being cast out of the common world and deprived of the “right to have rights”. The paper then examines the process by which prisoners in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay State Prison reached across the social barriers of race and gang affiliation to organize a nonviolent resistance movement and, in so doing, to rebuild a meaningful sense of the world and of political action. Ultimately, the California prison hunger strikes are more than a struggle for human rights; they are also a struggle for meaning, and for the possibility of a common world.
Research Interests:
In recent years, comparisons between abortion and slavery have become increasingly common in American pro-life politics. Some have compared the struggle to extinguish abortion rights to the struggle to end slavery. Others have claimed... more
In recent years, comparisons between abortion and slavery have become increasingly common in American pro-life politics. Some have compared the struggle to extinguish abortion rights to the struggle to end slavery. Others have claimed that Roe v Wade is the Dred Scott of our time. Still others have argued that abortion is worse than slavery; it is a form of genocide. This paper tracks the abortion = slavery meme from Ronald Reagan to the current personhood movement, drawing on work by Orlando Patterson, Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman to develop a discourse of reproductive justice that grapples with the wounded kinship of slavery and racism.
Research Interests:
In his 1934 essay, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” Levinas raises important questions about the subject’s relation to nature and to history. His account of the ethical significance of paternity, maternity, and fraternity in... more
In his 1934 essay, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” Levinas raises important questions about the subject’s relation to nature and to history. His account of the ethical significance of paternity, maternity, and fraternity in texts such as Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being suggest powerful new ways to understand the meaning of kinship, beyond the abstractions of Western liberalism. How does this analysis of race and kinship translate into the context of the Transatlantic slave trade, which not only stole Africans from their families and communities, but also imposed upon them a single “fictive” kinship relation to the master? What if the problem of racialization is not only a matter of being “chained” to one’s identity through (presumed) blood ties, but also being violently separated from one’s kin? What does it mean for the concepts of ethical and political fraternity if the only father recognized by law and society as legitimate is the slave master? Or if the bodies of slave women are exploited, not only for productive labor, but also for the reproductive labor that makes more slaves for the master? If kinship is a way of making sense of the relation between past, present and future generations, then what does a radical disruption of existing kinship relations, and the imposition of one fictive, absolute and unilateral kinship relation, do to the social meaning of time and of history in a particular community? In this paper, I reflect on the significance of fecundity and kinship in the context of US slavery, both in order in order to situate my analysis in the particular history of my own present community, and as a way of demonstrating the significance of a more determinate social analysis for Levinas’ ethics of singularity and politics of universal justice.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Black Studies Or African American Studies, Jurgen Habermas, Continental Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze, and 24 moreFriedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Lacan, Émmanuel Lévinas, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Postmodernism, Honneth, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Nietzsche, Levinas, Black feminism, Baudrillard, Adorno, Black Women's Studies, Black Feminist Theory/Thought, Kinship, French phenomenology: Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Yves Lacoste and Emmanuel Levinas. Husserl and Heidegger., McLuhan, Natality, Social Death, Hortense Spillers, Orlando Patterson, and Socio Political Philosophy
Solitary confinement is often justified through an appeal to accountability. But what can accountability mean in isolation from others who demand an account of oneself? Levinas offers an account of critique as the provocation of the other... more
Solitary confinement is often justified through an appeal to accountability. But what can accountability mean in isolation from others who demand an account of oneself? Levinas offers an account of critique as the provocation of the other to justify oneself and invest one’s arbitrary freedom as ethical responsibility and political solidarity. Rhetoric, as the use of language to overpower the other, is the opposite of critique. For Levinas, the task of philosophy is to perform an ethical reduction of rhetoric: in other words, to trace anti-language back to the ethical responsibility that it both presupposes and denies.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Segregation, Phenomenological Psychology, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and 39 moreJurgen Habermas, Continental Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Lacan, Émmanuel Lévinas, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Postmodernism, Honneth, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Nietzsche, Levinas, Phenomenology of the body, Prison Industrial Complex, Baudrillard, Ancient Philosophy, Adorno, Architecture and Phenomenology, Phenomenology of Space and Place, Critical Prison Studies, Leibniz, Prisons, Sartre, French phenomenology: Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Yves Lacoste and Emmanuel Levinas. Husserl and Heidegger., Contemporary Continental Philosophy, Philosophy of the Subject, Pascal, McLuhan, Punishment, Solitary Confinement, Supermax Prisons, Health Effects, Supermaxes, Socio Political Philosophy, Phenomenology: Heidegger, Levinas/Classical Modern Philosophers : Descartes, and Prison Psychology
Prisoners involved in the Attica rebellion and in the recent Georgia prison strike have protested their dehumanizing treatment as animals and as slaves. Their critique is crucial for tracing the connections between slavery, abolition,... more
Prisoners involved in the Attica rebellion and in the recent Georgia prison strike have protested their dehumanizing treatment as animals and as slaves. Their critique is crucial for tracing the connections between slavery, abolition, the racialization of crime, and the reinscription of racialized slavery within the US prison system. I argue that, in addition to the dehumanization of prisoners, inmates are further de-animalized when they are held in conditions of intensive confinement such as prolonged solitude or chronic overcrowding. To be de-animalized is to be treated not as a living being who is sustained by its mutual relations with other living and nonliving beings, but rather as a thing to be warehoused and/or exchanged for a profit. The violence of de-animalization affects both human and nonhuman animals held in control prisons, factory farms, laboratories and other sites of intensive confinement. In order to make the connections between these sites, and to develop forms of solidarity appropriate to our shared animality, we need a post-humanist critique of intensive confinement that breaks with the logic of opposition between human and animal, and articulates our constitutive relationality as (inter)corporeal beings.
Research Interests:
While Merleau-Ponty does not theorize sexual difference at any great length, his concepts of the flesh and the institution of a sense suggest hitherto undeveloped possibilities for articulating sexual difference beyond the male–female... more
While Merleau-Ponty does not theorize sexual difference at any great length, his concepts of the flesh and the institution of a sense suggest hitherto undeveloped possibilities for articulating sexual difference beyond the male–female binary. For Merleau-Ponty, flesh is a “pregnancy of possibilities” which gives rise to masculine and feminine forms through a process of mutual divergence and encroachment. Both sexes bear “the possible of the other,” and neither represents the first or generic form of the human; each sex bears the possibility of the other. By approaching sexual difference in terms of intersubjectively distributed possibilities rather than interlocking forms or types, we may grasp sexual difference in terms of both a developmental process in which bodies become sexed (and sometimes re-sexed) over time, and in terms of a social-historical process in which patterns of relation and exchange between sexed bodies shift over time, altering the very sense of sexual difference.
Research Interests:
Psychiatrist Stuart Grassian has proposed the term “SHU syndrome” to name the cluster of cognitive, perceptual and affective symptoms that commonly arise for inmates held in the Special Housing Units (SHU) of supermax prisons. In this... more
Psychiatrist Stuart Grassian has proposed the term “SHU syndrome” to name the cluster of cognitive, perceptual and affective symptoms that commonly arise for inmates held in the Special Housing Units (SHU) of supermax prisons. In this paper, I analyze the harm of solitary confinement from a phenomenological perspective by drawing on Husserl’s account of the essential relation between consciousness, the experience of an alter ego and the sense of a real, Objective world. While Husserl’s prioritization of transcendental subjectivity over transcendental intersubjectivity underestimates the degree to which first-person consciousness is constitutively intertwined with the embodied consciousness of others, Husserl’s phenomenology nevertheless provides a fruitful starting-point for a philosophical engagement with the psychiatric research on solitary confinement.
Research Interests:
In Remnants of Auschwitz, Giorgio Agamben argues that the hidden structure of subjectivity is shame. In shame, I am consigned to something that cannot be assumed, such that the very thing that makes me a subject also forces me to witness... more
In Remnants of Auschwitz, Giorgio Agamben argues that the hidden structure of subjectivity is shame. In shame, I am consigned to something that cannot be assumed, such that the very thing that makes me a subject also forces me to witness my own desubjectification. Agamben’s ontological account of shame is inadequate insofar as it forecloses collective responsibility and collapses the distinction between shame and humiliation. By recontextualizing three of Agamben’s sources – Primo Levi, Robert Antelme and Maurice Blanchot – I develop an alternative account of shame as the structure of intersubjectivity, and of a collective responsibility that is more fundamental than the subject itself. On this basis, I sketch the preliminary outline of a biopolitics of resistance rooted in the ethics of alterity. The intuition driving this approach is that life is never bare, that even in situations of extreme affliction there remains a relation to alterity which provides a starting-point for resistance.
Research Interests:
Shame is notoriously ambivalent. On one hand, it operates as a mechanism of normalization and social exclusion, installing or reinforcing patterns of silence and invisibility; on the other hand, the capacity for shame may be indispensible... more
Shame is notoriously ambivalent. On one hand, it operates as a mechanism of normalization and social exclusion, installing or reinforcing patterns of silence and invisibility; on the other hand, the capacity for shame may be indispensible for ethical life insofar as it attests to the subject’s constitutive relationality and its openness to the provocation of others. Sartre, Levinas and Beauvoir each offer phenomenological analyses of shame in which its basic structure emerges as a feeling of being exposed to others and bound to one’s own identity. For Sartre, shame is an ontological provocation, constitutive of subjectivity as a being-for-Others. For Levinas, ontological shame takes the form of an inability to escape one’s own relation to being; this predicament is altered by the ethical provocation of an Other who puts my freedom in question and commands me to justify myself. For Beauvoir, shame is an effect of oppression, both for the woman whose embodied existence is marked as shameful, and for the beneficiary of colonial domination who feels ashamed of her privilege. For each thinker, shame articulates the temporality of social life in both its promise and its danger.
Research Interests:
In her essay "Choosing the Margin," bell hooks draws attention to the way uncritical celebrations of difference and otherness often act as an alibi for progressive politics. hooks writes: I am waiting for them to stop talking about... more
In her essay "Choosing the Margin," bell hooks draws attention to the way uncritical celebrations of difference and otherness often act as an alibi for progressive politics. hooks writes:
I am waiting for them to stop talking about the "Other," to stop even describing how important it is to be able to speak about difference. It is not just important what we speak about, but how and why we speak. Often this speech about the "other" is also a mask, an oppressive talk hiding gaps, absences, that space where our words would be if we were speaking, if there were silence, if we were there. This "we" is that "us" in the margins, that "we" who inhabit marginal space that is not a site of domination but a place of resistance. Enter that space.
(hooks 1990, 151)
The recent proliferation of discourses on alterity, particularly with the growth of Levinas studies, makes hooks's critique all the more relevant for ethical and political theory today. To what extent has this emphasis on alterity affected the dynamics of philosophical and political life? Does it fall into the trap that hooks identifies here as a mask with which privileged subjects present themselves as critical thinkers, while failing to listen to the diverse voices of concrete others gathered under the rubric of "the Other"? It is one thing to affirm one's infinite responsibility for the Other, and quite another thing to make good on that responsibility in specific contexts, especially in a political landscape where some faces are more visible than others, and some voices more likely to be heard. Unless we can flesh out Levinas's ethical project with a political project of resisting oppression, his ethics risks a level of abstraction that covers over its own blind spots. And unless we can distinguish rigorously between otherness as a sign of political exclusion and otherness as a source of ethical command, we risk repeating the conflation of certain others with a position of weakness and victimhood, where "we" can feel responsible for "them" without having to listen to anyone but ourselves.
I am waiting for them to stop talking about the "Other," to stop even describing how important it is to be able to speak about difference. It is not just important what we speak about, but how and why we speak. Often this speech about the "other" is also a mask, an oppressive talk hiding gaps, absences, that space where our words would be if we were speaking, if there were silence, if we were there. This "we" is that "us" in the margins, that "we" who inhabit marginal space that is not a site of domination but a place of resistance. Enter that space.
(hooks 1990, 151)
The recent proliferation of discourses on alterity, particularly with the growth of Levinas studies, makes hooks's critique all the more relevant for ethical and political theory today. To what extent has this emphasis on alterity affected the dynamics of philosophical and political life? Does it fall into the trap that hooks identifies here as a mask with which privileged subjects present themselves as critical thinkers, while failing to listen to the diverse voices of concrete others gathered under the rubric of "the Other"? It is one thing to affirm one's infinite responsibility for the Other, and quite another thing to make good on that responsibility in specific contexts, especially in a political landscape where some faces are more visible than others, and some voices more likely to be heard. Unless we can flesh out Levinas's ethical project with a political project of resisting oppression, his ethics risks a level of abstraction that covers over its own blind spots. And unless we can distinguish rigorously between otherness as a sign of political exclusion and otherness as a source of ethical command, we risk repeating the conflation of certain others with a position of weakness and victimhood, where "we" can feel responsible for "them" without having to listen to anyone but ourselves.
Research Interests:
Irigaray's early work seeks to multiply possibilities for women's self-expression by recovering a sexual difference in which male and female are neither the same nor opposites, but irreducibly different modes of embodiment. In her more... more
Irigaray's early work seeks to multiply possibilities for women's self-expression by recovering a sexual difference in which male and female are neither the same nor opposites, but irreducibly different modes of embodiment. In her more recent work, however, Irigaray has emphasized the duality of the sexes at the expense of multiplicity, enshrining the heterosexual couple as the model of sexual ethics. Alison Stone's recent revision of Irigaray supplements her account of sexual duality with a theory of bodily multiplicity derived from Butler, Nietzsche, and certain German Romantics; but to the extent that Stone maintains the primacy of sexual duality, her revision fails to address the claims of multiplicity on their own terms. In this paper, I interpret a passage from Marcel Proust's novel, Sodom and Gomorrah, in order to develop an alternative theory of sexual difference in which sexual duality is affirmed in relation to a third, unsexed but sexual force which multiplies the possibilities for sexual pleasure beyond heterosexual coupling. Proust's emphasis on sexed ``parts'' rather than sexed morphologies is generative of maximally diverse combinations, all of which are equally natural and equally enhanced through artifice.
Research Interests:
Marion has criticized Levinas for failing to account for the individuation of the Other, thus leaving the face of the Other abstract, neutral and anonymous. I defend Levinas against this critique by distinguishing between the... more
Marion has criticized Levinas for failing to account for the individuation of the Other, thus leaving the face of the Other abstract, neutral and anonymous. I defend Levinas against this critique by distinguishing between the individuation of the subject through hypostasis and the singularization of self and Other through ethical response. An analysis of the instant in Levinas's early and late work shows that it is possible to speak of a "nameless singularity" which does not collapse into neutrality or abstraction, but rather explains the sense in which anyone is responsible for ally Other who happens to come along.
Research Interests:
In ‘L'Animal que donc je suis’, Derrida analyzes the paradoxical use of discourses on shame and original sin to justify the human domination of other animals. In the absence of any absolute criterion for distinguishing between humans and... more
In ‘L'Animal que donc je suis’, Derrida analyzes the paradoxical use of discourses on shame and original sin to justify the human domination of other animals. In the absence of any absolute criterion for distinguishing between humans and other animals, human faultiness becomes a sign of our exclusive capacity for self-consciousness, freedom and awareness of mortality. While Derrida's argument is compelling, he neglects to explore the connection between the human domination of animals and the male domination of women. Throughout ‘L'Animal’, Derrida equivocates between ‘man’ and ‘humanity,’ and between the biblical figures of Ish and Adam. In so doing, he repeats a gesture that he himself has insightfully criticized in other philosophers, such as Levinas. By articulating the distinctions that Derrida elides, I suggest a way of reading Genesis which avoids this difficulty, but also continues Derrida's project.
Research Interests:
Drawing on Adriana Cavarero's account of natality, I argue that Martin Heidegger overlooks the distinct ontological and ethical significance of birth as a limit that orients one toward an other who resists appropriation, even while... more
Drawing on Adriana Cavarero's account of natality, I argue that Martin Heidegger overlooks the distinct ontological and ethical significance of birth as a limit that orients one toward an other who resists appropriation, even while handing down a heritage of possibilities that one can—and must—make one's own. I call this structure of natality Being-from-others, modifying Heidegger's language of inheritance to suggest an ethical understanding of existence as the gift of the other.
Research Interests:
Emmanuel Levinas compares ethical responsibility to a maternal body who bears the Other in the same without assimilation. In explicating this trope, he refers to a biblical passage in which Moses is like a "wet nurse" bearing Others whom... more
Emmanuel Levinas compares ethical responsibility to a maternal body who bears the Other in the same without assimilation. In explicating this trope, he refers to a biblical passage in which Moses is like a "wet nurse" bearing Others whom he has "neither conceived nor given birth to" (Num. 11:12). A close reading of this passage raises questions about ethics, maternity, and sexual difference, for both the concept of ethical substitution and the material practice of mothering.
Research Interests:
In Otherwise than Being, Levinas writes that the alterity of the Other escapes “le flair animal,” or the animal’s sense of smell. This paper puts pressure on the strong human-animal distinction that Levinas makes by considering the... more
In Otherwise than Being, Levinas writes that the alterity of the Other escapes “le flair animal,” or the animal’s sense of smell. This paper puts pressure on the strong human-animal distinction that Levinas makes by considering the possibility that, while non-human animals may not respond to the alterity of the Other in the way that Levinas describes as responsibility, animal sensibility plays a key role in a relation to Others that Levinas does not discuss at length: friendship. This approach to friendship addresses a gap in Levinas’ work between the absolute Other for whom I am responsible and the “brother” who is my political equal.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
When Lisa Guenther took the stand at the first-ever US Congressional hearing into solitary confinement she took her phenomenology textbooks with her. Her testimony took its cues from the classic work of Edmund Husserl and Maurice... more
When Lisa Guenther took the stand at the first-ever US Congressional hearing into solitary confinement she took her phenomenology textbooks with her. Her testimony took its cues from the classic work of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who both attempted to show how meaningful experiences arise through being in the world. So, what happens when that world shrinks to a small cell with no-one in sight?
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/alone-and-apart/5002594
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/alone-and-apart/5002594
"When the concept of solitary confinement was first implemented in the early 19th century, the idea was not to punish the prisoner, but to give him space to reflect and reform. Two centuries later, despite the growing use of segregation... more
"When the concept of solitary confinement was first implemented in the early 19th century, the idea was not to punish the prisoner, but to give him space to reflect and reform. Two centuries later, despite the growing use of segregation in Canada and the United States, the practice continues to produce very different results. Prisoners who have lived through solitary confinement say the experience is torturous. Freelance journalist Brett Story explores the roots of this practice in North America, and the profound and often devastating impact it has on people who are severed from social contact.
Guests in order of appearance: Susan Rosenberg, Gregory McMaster, Lisa Guenther, Caleb Smith, and Michael Jackson.
Link: http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2013/09/03/alone-inside/
Guests in order of appearance: Susan Rosenberg, Gregory McMaster, Lisa Guenther, Caleb Smith, and Michael Jackson.
Link: http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2013/09/03/alone-inside/
Research Interests:
In this second interview in a series of three on issues of criminal justice, incarceration, and solitary confinement in the United States, I speak with philosopher Lisa Guenther about what solitary confinement does to bodies and minds.... more
In this second interview in a series of three on issues of criminal justice, incarceration, and solitary confinement in the United States, I speak with philosopher Lisa Guenther about what solitary confinement does to bodies and minds. Her forthcoming book, Social Death and Its Afterlives: A Critical Phenomenology of Solitary Confinement, shows simultaneously why solitary confinement should be considered cruel and unusual punishment (even though, as we learned from Colin Dayan in the first interview in this series, the Supreme Court keeps refusing to make that ruling) and how what happens to prisoners subjected to isolation reveals to us something about what it means to be a person. In other words, what is wrong about solitary confinement matters in an institution of justice, of course, but it also speaks, on a more existential level, to our understanding of ourselves as creatures who must live together with others. Isolation is not punishment; it is destruction of personhood. As such, it does not belong in a correctional system.
http://www.believermag.com/issues/201306/?read=interview_guenther
http://www.believermag.com/issues/201306/?read=interview_guenther
The United States incarcerates more of its own citizens than any other country in the world. We are the only Western democracy to retain the death penalty. The racism endemic to our criminal justice system has led Michelle Alexander to... more
The United States incarcerates more of its own citizens than any other country in the world. We are the only Western democracy to retain the death penalty. The racism endemic to our criminal justice system has led Michelle Alexander to call it “The New Jim Crow.” And even from a purely economic standpoint, mass incarceration has become a burden that many states are finding difficult to bear. The time has come to rethink prisons and the multiple systems of power that intersect behind bars. A Year of Rethinking Prisons is a series of events to stimulate a public discussion of issues raised by prisons and the death penalty. We have invited scholars, activists, artists, and community members – both in prison and in the outside world – to reflect on how the criminal justice system shapes our lives, and how we can work together to find better responses to crime. The series culminates in a national conference at Vanderbilt University on May 2-4, 2012, with invited speakers Joy James, Susan Rosenberg, and Mark L. Taylor.