Lisa Guenther | Queen's University at Kingston (original) (raw)

Books by Lisa Guenther

Motivated by a conviction that mass incarceration and state execution are among the most importan... more Motivated by a conviction that mass incarceration and state execution are among the most important ethical and political problems of our time, the contributors to this volume come together from a diverse range of backgrounds to analyze, critique, and envision alternatives to the injustices of the U.S. prison system, with recourse to deconstruction, phenomenology, critical race theory, feminism, queer theory, and disability studies. They engage with the hyper-incarceration of people of color, the incomplete abolition of slavery, the exploitation of prisoners as workers and as "raw material" for the prison industrial complex, the intensive confinement of prisoners in supermax units, and the complexities of capital punishment in an age of abolition.

Contents

Introduction: Death and Other Penalties
Geoffrey Adelsberg, Lisa Guenther, and Scott Zeman

Part I. Legacies of Slavery

Excavating the Sedimentations of Slavery: The Unfinished Project of American Abolition
Brady Heiner

From Commodity Fetishism to Prison Fetishism: Slavery, Convict-leasing, and the Ideological Productions of Incarceration
James Manos

Maroon Philosophy: An Interview with Russell Maroon Shoatz
Russell Maroon Shoatz

Part II. Death Penalties

In Reality-from the Row
Derrick Quintero

Inheritances of the Death Penalty: American Racism and Derrida's Theologico-Political Sovereignty
Geoffrey Adelsberg

Making Death a Penalty: Or, Making "Good" Death a "Good" Penalty
Kelly Oliver

Death Penalty Abolition in Neoliberal Times: The SAFE California Act and the Nexus of Savings and Security
Andrew Dilts

On the Inviolability of Human Life
Julia Kristeva (translated by Lisa Walsh)

Part III. Rethinking Power and Responsibility

Punishment, Desert, and Equality: A Levinasian Analysis
Benjamin S. Yost

Prisons and Palliative Politics
Ami Harbin

Sovereignty, Community, and the Incarceration of Immigrants
Matt S. Whitt

Without the Right to Exist: Mass Incarceration and National Security
Andrea Smith

Prison Abolition and a Culture of Sexual Difference
Sarah Tyson

Part IV. Isolation and Resistance

Statement on Solitary Confinement
Abu Ali Abdur'Rahman

The Violence of the Supermax: Toward a Phenomenological Aesthetics of Prison Space
Adrian Switzer

Prison and the Subject of Resistance: A Levinasian Inquiry
Shokoufeh Sakhi

Critical Theory, Queer Resistance, and the Ends of Capture
Liat Ben-Moshe, Che Gossett, Nick Mitchell, and Eric A. Stanley

There are many ways to destroy a person, but the simplest and most devastating way must be solita... 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?

The Gift of the Other brings together a philosophical analysis of time, embodiment, and ethical r... 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.

Papers by Lisa Guenther

Critical Times, 2024

This essay proposes a critical phenomenology of the ontological, social, ethical, and and politic... more This essay proposes a critical phenomenology of the ontological, social, ethical, and and political dimensions of collective memory. At an ontological
level, the site of collective memory is not intentional consciousness
but rather the lifeworld itself, understood as a historically sedimented context for meaning and mattering. The social dimension of collective
memory is structured around an antagonism between hegemonic public memory and insurgent countermemory. The ethical dimension issues a command to anyone to listen and respond to the countermemory of the oppressed. And the political dimension of collective memory asks us to commit to building a world that refuses to repeat past oppression; it calls for the reclamation and (re)invention of a collective procedural memory of how to care for a common world. This analysis of collective memory unfolds in the context of a proposed memorial garden on the grounds of Canada’s first prison for women, which is in the process of being redeveloped into luxury condominiums.

Rethinking Responsibility, ed. Elisabeth Gräb-Schmidt, Ferdinando G. Menga, and Christian Schlenker. , 2023

The recent identification of over 1,500 unmarked graves of Indigenous children on the grounds of ... more The recent identification of over 1,500 unmarked graves of Indigenous children on the grounds of residential schools across so-called Canada has raised pressing questions about intergenerational responsibility for colonial violence. This paper sketches a critical phenomenology of settler responsibility, drawing on Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s call to “potentialize” colonial violence in a way that makes it impossible. Azoulay rejects the moral division between victims, perpetrators, and spectators, arguing that these “personae” are scripted to pursue opposing interests by claiming innocence for themselves and assigning guilt to others. She argues for an ethics of worldcarefulness that reclaims the right to refuse complicity with imperial violence and affirms nonimperial ways of organizing the “phenomenological field” of time, space, and the body politic. This paper explores the implications of Azoulay’s ethics for a critical practice of phenomenology and for addressing ongoing colonial violence in the wake of the Indian Residential School system.

South Atlantic Quarterly, 2023

In early 2022, hundreds of right-wing activists got in their trucks and drove to Ottawa, the capi... more In early 2022, hundreds of right-wing activists got in their trucks and drove to Ottawa, the capital of so-called Canada, and occupied the city for almost four weeks straight. They called themselves the Freedom Convoy. They were fed up with Covid mandates and angry about government mismanagement of the pandemic. They were also fired up about "political Islam," the "Great Replacement," carbon taxes, and Western Canadian separatism (or Wexit). Between January 22 and February 21, 2022, thousands more people would join the convoy, some in spite of the right-wing agenda, others because of it. Freedom looked like different things to different people in different moments of the convoy. It looked like bouncy castles and hot tubs and bonfires in the street. It looked like Confederate flags and swastikas. It looked like honking horns and fake Indigenous drum circles and singing "O Canada" in the face of an arresting officer. It looked like the righteous indignation of white people who were sick and tired of being told what to do, standing up to fight for their human right to eat in restaurants and play indoor sports. Not everyone felt so free, though. BIPOC residents reported being harassed and assaulted by convoy protesters. The incessant honking and fumes from idling trucks made everyday life a nightmare for people and pets. Some Ottawa residents demanded that police "do their job" and forcibly clear the occupation; some filed a class action lawsuit against convoy organizers because of the noise; and some organized counter demos to reclaim their neighborhoods and block weekend convoy enthusiasts from joining the party.

Philosophy Today, 2023

In "Criminal Empire, " Ojibwe scholar Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark argues that the criminalizati... more In "Criminal Empire, " Ojibwe scholar Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark argues that the criminalization of Indigenous resistance to colonization "averts attention" from the criminality of democratic settler states, which fail or refuse to honor their own legal agreements with Indigenous peoples. This chapter reflects on the implications of Stark's analysis for the relation between property, dispossession, and liberal democratic state violence. From this perspective, the prison appears not as a correctional institution for individual lawbreakers, but as a spatial strategy for the imposition and enforcement of a colonial legal order and a capitalist property regime. The challenge of decolonization, then, is not just to return stolen land to Indigenous peoples, but also to dismantle the structures of propertied personhood and dispossession that the settler democracy (re)produces through the prison system.

Chiasmi International, 2022

In this essay, I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s Institution Course Notes to revise Patrick Wolfe’s claim... more In this essay, I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s Institution Course Notes to revise Patrick Wolfe’s claim that, for settler colonialism, “invasion is a structure, not an event,” arguing that it is both a structure and an event. I also engage critically with colonial assumptions in Merleau-Ponty’s own work, including his Eurocentric response to questions such as: “[I]s there a field of world history or universal history?... A true society?” In this essay, I ask different questions – with Merleau-Ponty, against him, and beyond him – to reflect on the relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s account of institution for both understanding and transforming settler colonial violence.

Puncta, 2021

What is the meaning of critique for critical phenomenology? Building on Gayle Salamon’s engagemen... 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.

Space and Culture , 2021

A group of women who were incarcerated at Canada's first federal Prison for Women (P4W) have been... 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?

The Ethics of Policing, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Benjamin Jones (NYU Press), 2021

Policing is, among other things, a perceptual practice. In the 1960s, patrolling officers walked... 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.

Race as Phenomena, ed. Emily Lee, 2019

In her landmark essay, “Whiteness as Property,” Cheryl Harris shows how whiteness functions as a ... 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.

Levinas Studies , 2018

What is the relationship between prisons designed to lock people in and suburban fortresses desig... 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.

50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, ed. Gail Weiss, Gayle Salamon, and Ann Murphy, 2019

Critical phenomenology goes beyond classical phenomenology by reflecting on the quasi-transcenden... 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.

Deconstructing the Death Penalty: Derrida's Seminars and the New Abolitionism, ed. Kelly Oliver and Stephanie Straub, 2018

In Derrida’s lectures on the death penalty, the United States figures as “both exemplary and exce... 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.

Logics of Genocide, ed. Anne O'Byrne and Martin Shuster, 2020

In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress [CRC] presented a petition to the United Nations entitled “We ... 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.

Social Justice, 2018

The Trousdale Turner Correctional Center is a 2,600-bed private prison owned and operated by Core... 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.

Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology, 2018

In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry analyzes the structure of torture as an unmaking of the world ... 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.

Published in The Routledge Handbook to Epistemic Injustice, ed. Ian Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile ... more Published in The Routledge Handbook to Epistemic Injustice, ed. Ian Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus. New York: Routledge, 2017.

The United States is the only Western democratic nation to practice capital punishment in the 21s... 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.

Contents

Introduction: Death and Other Penalties
Geoffrey Adelsberg, Lisa Guenther, and Scott Zeman

Part I. Legacies of Slavery

Excavating the Sedimentations of Slavery: The Unfinished Project of American Abolition
Brady Heiner

From Commodity Fetishism to Prison Fetishism: Slavery, Convict-leasing, and the Ideological Productions of Incarceration
James Manos

Maroon Philosophy: An Interview with Russell Maroon Shoatz
Russell Maroon Shoatz

Part II. Death Penalties

In Reality-from the Row
Derrick Quintero

Inheritances of the Death Penalty: American Racism and Derrida's Theologico-Political Sovereignty
Geoffrey Adelsberg

Making Death a Penalty: Or, Making "Good" Death a "Good" Penalty
Kelly Oliver

Death Penalty Abolition in Neoliberal Times: The SAFE California Act and the Nexus of Savings and Security
Andrew Dilts

On the Inviolability of Human Life
Julia Kristeva (translated by Lisa Walsh)

Part III. Rethinking Power and Responsibility

Punishment, Desert, and Equality: A Levinasian Analysis
Benjamin S. Yost

Prisons and Palliative Politics
Ami Harbin

Sovereignty, Community, and the Incarceration of Immigrants
Matt S. Whitt

Without the Right to Exist: Mass Incarceration and National Security
Andrea Smith

Prison Abolition and a Culture of Sexual Difference
Sarah Tyson

Part IV. Isolation and Resistance

Statement on Solitary Confinement
Abu Ali Abdur'Rahman

The Violence of the Supermax: Toward a Phenomenological Aesthetics of Prison Space
Adrian Switzer

Prison and the Subject of Resistance: A Levinasian Inquiry
Shokoufeh Sakhi

Critical Theory, Queer Resistance, and the Ends of Capture
Liat Ben-Moshe, Che Gossett, Nick Mitchell, and Eric A. Stanley

Critical Times, 2024

Rethinking Responsibility, ed. Elisabeth Gräb-Schmidt, Ferdinando G. Menga, and Christian Schlenker. , 2023

South Atlantic Quarterly, 2023

Philosophy Today, 2023

Chiasmi International, 2022

Puncta, 2021

Space and Culture , 2021

The Ethics of Policing, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Benjamin Jones (NYU Press), 2021

Race as Phenomena, ed. Emily Lee, 2019

Levinas Studies , 2018

50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, ed. Gail Weiss, Gayle Salamon, and Ann Murphy, 2019

Deconstructing the Death Penalty: Derrida's Seminars and the New Abolitionism, ed. Kelly Oliver and Stephanie Straub, 2018

Logics of Genocide, ed. Anne O'Byrne and Martin Shuster, 2020

Social Justice, 2018

Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology, 2018

Published in The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities. Ed. Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods. Edinburgh University Press, 2016.

Between 2006 and 2010, nearly 150 women were unlawfully sterilized in California prisons. Prison... 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.

Prisoner-led resistance movements are complicated by both the brutality of state violence and the... 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.

On July 8, 2013, over 30,000 prisoners in California joined together across racial and regional l... 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.

When Lisa Guenther took the stand at the first-ever US Congressional hearing into solitary confin... 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

"When the concept of solitary confinement was first implemented in the early 19th century, the id... 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/

In this second interview in a series of three on issues of criminal justice, incarceration, and s... 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

The United States incarcerates more of its own citizens than any other country in the world. We a... 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.