Lisa Guenther

Queen's University at Kingston, Philosophy and Cultural Studies, Faculty Member

Vanderbilt University, Philosophy, Faculty Member

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My research is situated at the intersection of phenomenology, political philosophy, and critical prison studies. I find phenomenological accounts of relational personhood and situated knowledge helpful for grounding political theory in lived experience and making theory accountable to the complexity of political praxis. In recent years, my research has focused on three main issues:

1) Prisoner Resistance

How have people in solitary confinement managed to resist and survive carceral power, and what can we learn from prisoner resistance movements about broader possibilities for contesting, transforming, and even abolishing carceral logics? My main points of reference for this project have been the California prison hunger strikes, organized by people in extreme isolation at Pelican Bay State Prison in 2011-13, and the Groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP), an activist group in which Foucault, Deleuze, and other French intellectuals collaborated with prisoners and their families in the early 1970s to amplify the voices of people inside.

2) Punishment,, Reproduction, and Settler Colonialism

What is the political relation between support for the death penalty and opposition to abortion? How do medicalized approaches to state execution in the US work in tandem with criminalized approaches to pregnancy, abortion, and substance use, to intensify the gap between lives that must be protected at all cost and lives that are marked as inherently dangerous or disposable? What is the relationship between genocidal policies to "kill the Indian in the child" and the current crisis of Indigenous hyperincarceration and deaths in custody? In this book project, I map the structural and historical connections between reproductive politics, carceral power, and settler colonialism in Canada, Australia, and the United States.

3) Carceral Space

How do carceral logics shape spaces beyond prisons, jails, and detention centers, such as suburbs, gated communities, and college campuses? In this series of articles, I explore the structure of carceral space from a critical phenomenological perspective, drawing on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Frantz Fanon, as well as social and political theories of space in disciplines such as architecture and design (Eyal Weizman, Leopold Lambert, Oscar Newman), urban studies (Mike Davis, Neil Smith), geography (Ruth Gilmore, Rashad Shabazz), gender studies and critical race studies (Katherine McKittrick, Simone Browne), and sociology (Henri Lefebvre, Bruno Latour). By “carceral space,” I mean the spatial organization of relationships among bodies and things through practices of criminalization, surveillance, confinement, segregation, and other forms of punitive control.

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Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration

by Lisa Guenther and Geoffrey Adelsberg

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

Social Death and its Afterlives: A Critical Phenomenology of Solitary Confinement

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?

Lisa Guenther

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