Lisa Guenther

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.

This paper offers a close reading of Merleau-Ponty’s Institution Course Notes to reflect on the history of colonisation as both an event and a structure. On the one hand, colonial invasion is a singular cataclysmic event; on the other hand, it establishes legal, social, economic and psychic structures that seem increasingly inevitable the more they are repeated. Likewise, decolonisation may require a singular liberatory event, but it also calls for the (re)establishment of alternative traditions that issue a different “call to follow.” A critical interpretation of Merleau-Ponty in conversation with abolitionist and decolonial thinkers helps to clarify the temporal and political relation between event and structure, building bridges between phenomenology and radical politics.

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.

Many prisoners in solitary confinement experience adverse psychological and physical effects such as anxiety, paranoia, insomnia, headaches, hallucinations and other perceptual distortions. Psychiatrists call this SHU syndrome, named after the Security Housing Units [SHU] of supermax prisons. While psychiatric accounts of the effects of supermax confinement are important, especially in a legal context, they are insufficient to account for the phenomenological and even ontological harm of solitary confinement. This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of the lived experience of space in supermax confinement by drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s account of intercorporeal depth. I argue that the prolonged deprivation of concrete experiences of spatial depth in a shared world is a form of violence against the relational structure of embodied (inter)subjectivity, and that it threatens to undermine the prisoner’s capacity for a meaningful relation to the world, to others, and even to herself. Nevertheless, some prisoners have developed strategies for resisting this psychopathology of space.

What does it mean to be born, or to give birth? I explore the relation between ethics and time through a phenomenology of birth, understood as the gift of the Other. My birth is not my own; apart from death, it is that moment when I am least present as a self-determining subject. But unlike death, birth binds me to an Other without whom I could not exist. This difference opens the possibility of understanding time in its ethical dimensions, as time from an Other and for the Other. To be born is to be engendered for responsibility; it is to be given the imperative to give to Others. ;Part I, Given Birth, discusses the significance of being born for Heidegger, Arendt and Levinas. Heidegger interprets birth as an inheritance or "heritage" which Dasein hands down to itself by authentically "repeating" the past. I argue that this self-inheritance tends to obscure the sense in which one is born to an Other. Arendt understands birth as the initiation of someone new into a political world; thanks to natality, we are given the promise of a different, more hopeful future. Finally, Levinas suggests an interpretation of birth as being welcomed into a home by the feminine Other. This formulation begins to articulate the ethical dimensions of birth; and yet it also raises questions about the status of sexual difference in the work of Levinas. ;Part II, Giving Birth, explores the ethical and temporal dimensions of maternity and paternity in Beauvoir, Levinas, and selected biblical texts. In particular, I consider Levinas' articulation of responsibility as becoming "like a maternal body" for the stranger. To become like a maternal body is to give time to the Other, opening up a past of forgiveness and a future of promise. It is to remember the immemorial gift of birth, while metaphorically passing it on to a stranger. But the sexual specificity of maternity raises questions which can only be addressed through feminist analysis. How can we explore the richness of the maternal metaphor, and its implications for ethics, without making the embodied "reality" of motherhood disappear?

In 2003, The Guardian newspapers ran an article with the headline, “Prospect of babies from unborn mothers.” A team of Israeli researchers had been attempting to grow viable eggs from the ovarian tissue of aborted fetuses for use in fertility treatments such as IVF. The rhetoric of “unborn mothers” poses new challenges to the liberal feminist discourse of personhood. How do we articulate the ethical issues involved in harvesting eggs from an aborted fetus, without resurrecting the debate over whether this fetus is a full-fledged person with, for example, rights to non-interference or freedom from harm? Can we coherently defend a woman’s right to terminate pregnancy without relinquishing a feminist position from which to critique the use of aborted fetuses in certain experimental procedures? In short, what happens when the “new” discourse of reproductive technology intersects with the “old” discourse of abortion?