Mariah Partida

This chapter explores Emmanuel Levinas’s and Lisa Guenther’s correlated accounts of the interruptive encounter with the other. According to both Levinas and Guenther, the other overflows the individual’s consciousness, challenges the latter to question the conditions of their own spontaneity, and ultimately reveals that consciousness alone is not sufficient to produce an intelligible experience of the world. Drawing on these thinkers, I suggest that the other not only contests one’s spontaneity but also provides one with any sense of spontaneity in the first place. This implies that, in order for Descartes to perform his solitary meditations, he first had to withdraw from the intricate web of social relations in which he was always-already embedded. While the radically deceived cogito remains a mere thought experiment for him, Guenther shows how this living nightmare becomes a reality for many prisoners in solitary confinement. Deprived of meaningful human interaction for prolonged periods of time, many of these prisoners experience an unraveling of their very sense of self. My task in this chapter is fourfold. First, I explore the implications of Levinas’s claim that an ethical encounter with the face of the other calls the former’s spontaneity into question and ultimately teaches them the idea of infinity. Second, I show how the deeply unsettling human experiment of solitary confinement is unique and illuminating in that it forces prisoners into the otherwise-fictive “ideal” role of the solipsistic individual. Third, I argue that Guenther’s claims about the significance of caregiving can help heal both prisoners and non-prisoners by encouraging us to pass the gift of birth on to others, even total strangers, by extending our generosity to them. Fourth, and finally, I explore how other activists have argued against solitary confinement and prisons altogether, specifically because of their dehumanizing effects. As I attempt to show, Levinas’s emphasis on gentleness and Guenther’s account of generosity accord with the broader aim of pursuing of peace, nonviolence, and justice in the face of power in crisis.

In this chapter, I explore the relationship between Heidegger’s notion of uncanniness and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s critical concept of “misfitting.” According to Heidegger, uncanniness is an ineliminable aspect of our being-in-the-world. Furthermore, his notion of the “self” or “individual” is anti-Cartesian such that Dasein (“being-there”) is always-already immersed in a world of practical involvement. However, Heidegger’s account of skillful coping in Being and Time fails to make room for the everyday experiences of disabled individuals who encounter environmental barriers that disallow a sense of moving through the world with ease. Here is where the notion of “misfitting” is especially helpful. In “Misfitting,” Garland-Thomson proposes the term misfit as a keyword that aims to defamiliarize and reexamine conventional understandings of disability. While “fitting” refers to an encounter between two things in which they come together harmoniously, “misfitting” describes a discordant relationship between two things: a square peg in a round hole. Garland-Thomson contends that the problem with a misfit is not located in either of the two things, but rather in their juxtaposition. Likewise, Heidegger’s claim that Dasein is immersed in a world of practical involvement implies a relational understanding of selfhood. He discusses tool breakdown, and even existential death, in terms of a more general Dasein. Yet, Garland-Thomson addresses difference in a way that this more general account of Dasein does not. More specifically, her emphasis on the relationship between misfitting and disability shows how an environment that fails to account for difference can greatly exacerbate the sense of “misfitting” or “uncanniness” experienced by individuals with minority bodies. Drawing on Garland-Thomson, I argue that misfitting can, in fact, be used as a tool for social and political change. I then examine the relationship between misfitting, uncanniness, and Corrine Lajoie’s first-person account of “disorientations” in illness. Ultimately, I show how these three concepts can be collectively utilized by disability activists in order to achieve a more emancipatory political praxis.

This essay develops a renewed conception of autonomy through an explication of Judith Butler’s critique of liberal individualism in The Force of Nonviolence. I argue that while rejecting liberal individualism requires abandoning the fantasies of mastery and self-sufficiency, such a rejection need not imply a renunciation of autonomy. Instead, an ethics of nonviolence that is committed to equality demands a relational understanding of autonomy that affirms our radical interdependency. I contend, moreover, that for an account of the self to acknowledge this interdependency, the body must be conceived as a threshold rather than an end. Put differently, to be a relational self means to be give over to others from the start. My argument proceeds in three steps. First, I explore Butler’s critical analysis of liberal political thought, while emphasizing the key role that the state-of-nature fantasy plays in the Western social and political imaginary. Next, I show how dependency, interdependency, and vulnerability are closely related but also distinct. Specifically, I argue that a relational understanding of autonomy is consistent with Butler’s emphasis on our interdependency and the social obligations that bind us to one another. Finally, I show how the social model of disability lends further support to a relational understanding of autonomy. Drawing on Butler’s brief discussion of instruments for support in The Force of Nonviolence, I propose that we think more closely about the everyday ways in which we are sustained by various modes of support. The fact that we never stop relying on this support, even when we disavow it, suggests that autonomy is not a given but rather an achievement.