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IndexIn Lisa Guenther, Geoffrey Adelsberg & Scott Zeman (eds.), Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration, Fordham Up. pp. 407-411. 2015.
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FrontmatterIn Lisa Guenther, Geoffrey Adelsberg & Scott Zeman (eds.), Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration, Fordham Up. 2015.
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ContentsIn Lisa Guenther, Geoffrey Adelsberg & Scott Zeman (eds.), Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration, Fordham Up. 2015.
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11Abolish the World as We Know It: Notes for a Praxis of Phenomenology Beyond CritiquePuncta 5 (2): 28-44. 2022.The world as we know it is structured by intersecting forms of systemic violence. It might seem obvious that this violence calls for critique. But this essay experiments with another, more radical possibility inspired by Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Black feminist poethics and by abolitionist refusals of critique as an end in itself and a substitute for collective action. To what extent might phenomenology, even in its most critical form, be so deeply invested in the Kantian tradition of transcend…Read more
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19Six Senses of Critique for Critical PhenomenologyPuncta 4 (2): 5-23. 2021.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, 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 analysis of power; 5) the problemat…Read more
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14 The Birth of Sexual Difference: A Feminist Response to Merleau- PontyIn Sarah LaChance Adams & Caroline R. Lundquist (eds.), Coming to Life: Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering, Fordham University Press. pp. 88-106. 2013.
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6Unmaking and Remaking the World in Long-Term Solitary ConfinementJournal of Critical Phenomenology 1 (1): 74. 2018.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 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 throu…Read more
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1Le flair animal: Levinas and the Possibility of Animal FriendshipPhaenex: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture 2 (2). 2007.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 t…Read more
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2Introduction: Death and Other PenaltiesFordham University Press. 2015.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…Read more
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1Maroon Philosophy: An Interview with Russell “Maroon” ShoatzIn Lisa Guenther, Geoffrey Adelsberg & Scott Zeman (eds.), Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration, Fordham Up. pp. 60-74. 2015.
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7Chapter 13. An Abolitionism Worthy of the NameIn Kelly Oliver & Stephanie Straub (eds.), Deconstructing the Death Penalty: Derrida's Seminars and the New Abolitionism, Fordham University Press. pp. 239-258. 2020.
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5Dwelling in Carceral SpaceLevinas Studies 12 61-82. 2018.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 …Read more
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2The Psychopathology of Space: A Phenomenological Critique of Solitary ConfinementIn Darian Meacham (ed.), Medicine and Society, New Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, Springer Verlag. 2015.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 solit…Read more
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111Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration (edited book)Fordham UP. 2015.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…Read more
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32Unmaking and Remaking the World in Long-term Solitary ConfinementSocial Philosophy Today 34 7-25. 2018.This paper analyzes the Security Housing Unit in Pelican Bay State Prison as a form of weaponized architecture for the torture of prisoners and the unmaking of the world. I argue that through collective resistance, prisoners in the Pelican Bay Short Corridor have re-purposed this weaponized architecture as a tool for remaking the world by creating new, resistant and resurgent forms of social life. This collective practice of remaking of the world used the self-destructive tactic of a hunger stri…Read more
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Birth, Time, and EthicsDissertation, University of Toronto (Canada). 2002.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 …Read more
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21Review of Diane Perpich, The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (2). 2009.
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Cecile T. Tougas and Sara Ebenreck, eds., Presenting Women Philosophers (review)Philosophy in Review 21 222-224. 2001.
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2051Beyond Dehumanization: A Post-Humanist Critique of Intensive ConfinementJournal of Critical Animal Studies. Special Issue on Animals and Prisons 10 (2). 2012.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 …Read more
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Unborn mothers: The old rhetoric of new reproductive technologiesRadical Philosophy 130. 2005.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 …Read more
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71Merleau-Ponty and the Sense of Sexual DifferenceAngelaki 16 (2). 2011.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 for…Read more
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53The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of ReproductionSUNY Press. 2006.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 wo…Read more
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1798Shame and the temporality of social lifeContinental Philosophy Review 44 (1): 23-39. 2011.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 bei…Read more
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63Fecundity and Natal Alienation: Rethinking Kinship with Emmanuel Levinas and Orlando PattersonLevinas Studies 7 (1): 1-19. 2012.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 Transatlant…Read more
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1503Le Flair Animal: Levinas and the Possibility of Animal FriendshipPhaenEx 2 (2): 216-238. 2007.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 t…Read more
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1403“Nameless Singularity”: Levinas on Individuation and Ethical SingularityEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 14 (1): 167-187. 2009.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 neutra…Read more
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Vanderbilt UniversityRegular Faculty
Nashville, Tennessee, United States of America