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138José Medina, The epistemology of protest: silencing, epistemic activism, and the communicative life of resistance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023)Contemporary Political Theory 23 (2): 284-310. 2024.
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6NotesIn Lisa Guenther, Geoffrey Adelsberg & Scott Zeman (eds.), Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration, Fordham Up. pp. 297-370. 2015.
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List of ContributorsIn Lisa Guenther, Geoffrey Adelsberg & Scott Zeman (eds.), Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration, Fordham Up. pp. 401-406. 2015.
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68Asking Different Questions: a Decolonial Reading of Merleau-Ponty’s Institution Course NotesChiasmi International 24 311-332. 2022.In this essay, I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s Institution Course Notes to clarify Patrick Wolfe’s claim that, for settler colonialism, “invasion is a structure, not 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? Is there an intended accomplishment? A closure on itself? A true society?” In this essay, I ask different questions – with Merleau-Po…Read more
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13BibliographyIn Lisa Guenther, Geoffrey Adelsberg & Scott Zeman (eds.), Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration, Fordham Up. pp. 371-400. 2015.
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7AcknowledgmentsIn 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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6IndexIn 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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1FrontmatterIn 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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1ContentsIn 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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214 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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20Introduction: 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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80Dwelling 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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7The 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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165Death 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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85Unmaking 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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116Merleau-Ponty and the Sense of Sexual DifferenceAngelaki 16 (2): 19-33. 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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3650Other Fecundities: Proust and Irigaray on Sexual DifferenceDifferences 21 (2). 2010.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 the…Read more
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2974Shame 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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1399Being-from-others: Reading Heidegger after CavareroHypatia 23 (1): 99-118. 2008.: Drawing on Adriana Cavarero's account of natality, Guenther argues 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. Guenther calls 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 othe…Read more
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2552“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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134The Ethics and Politics of Otherness: Negotiating Alterity and Racial DifferencephiloSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 1 (2): 195-214. 2011."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. 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 hoo…Read more
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416Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its AfterlivesMinnesota University Press. 2013.Prolonged solitary confinement has become a widespread and standard practice in U.S. prisons—even though it consistently drives healthy prisoners insane, makes the mentally ill sicker, and, according to the testimony of prisoners, threatens to reduce life to a living death. In this profoundly important and original book, Lisa Guenther examines the death-in-life experience of solitary confinement in America from the early nineteenth century to today’s supermax prisons. Documenting how solitary co…Read more
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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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3013Beyond 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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110Who Follows Whom? Derrida, Animals and WomenDerrida Today 2 (2): 151-165. 2009.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 mal…Read more
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3948Resisting Agamben: The biopolitics of shame and humiliationPhilosophy and Social Criticism 38 (1): 59-79. 2012.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 problematic insofar as it forecloses collective responsibility and collapses the distinction between shame and humiliation. By recontextualizing three of Agamben’s sources – Primo Levi, Robert…Read more
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Vanderbilt UniversityRegular Faculty
Nashville, Tennessee, United States of America