Synopses & Reviews
Mass incarceration is one of the most pressing ethical and political issues of our time. In this volume, philosophers join activists and those incarcerated on death row to grapple with contemporary U.S. punishment practices and draw out critiques around questions of power, identity, justice, and ethical responsibility.
This work takes shape against a backdrop of disturbing trends: The United States incarcerates more of its own citizens than any other country in the world. A disproportionate number of these prisoners are people of color, and, today, a black man has a greater chance of going to prison than to college. The United States is the only Western democracy to retain the death penalty, even after decades of scholarship, statistics, and even legal decisions have depicted a deeply flawed system structured by racism and class oppression.
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.
The resulting collection contributes to a growing intellectual and political resistance to the apparent inevitability of incarceration and state execution as responses to crime and to social inequalities. It addresses both philosophers and activists who seek intellectual resources to contest the injustices of punishment in the United States.
Review
"Death and Other Penalties: Philosophical Interventions in a Time of Mass Incarceration is a brilliant collection of articles that draw on continental philosophers in order to consider the prison industrial complex, the death penalty in the United States, and the intersecting oppressions of racism, ableism, classism, sexism and heterosexism that are at work in these institutions and practices. The articles are innovative and accessible."-Chloe Taylor, University of Alberta
"This is a crucially important work, one that while centering on philosophy far exceeds the bounds of the discipline, reaching out toward the concrete to grapple not just with a, but the question of our moment in ways that are both practical and rigorous."-George Ciccariello-Maher, Drexel University
About the Author
Geoff Adelsberg is a graduate student in philosophy at Vanderbilt University writing his dissertation on the intersections of philosophy of race, non-retributive conceptions of justice, and arguments for the abolition of the death penalty. Since 2012, he has been a participant in the REACH Coalition philosophy reading group on death row at Riverbend Prison in Nashville, Tennessee.
Lisa Guenther is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University and a member of REACH Coalition, an organization for reciprocal education based on Tennessee's death row. She is the author of Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives (2013) and The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction (2006).
Scott Zeman works in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His research interests include psychoanalysis, trauma theory, philosophy of science, and the influence of unconscious structural power on modern forms of social justice and injustice.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction: Death and Other Penalties
Geoffrey Adelsberg, Lisa Guenther, and Scott Zeman 1
Part I. Legacies of Slavery
Excavating the Sedimentations of Slavery: The Unfinished Project of American Abolition
Brady Heiner 000
From Commodity Fetishism to Prison Fetishism: Slavery, Convict-leasing, and the Ideological Productions of Incarceration
James Manos 000
Maroon Philosophy: An Interview with Russell Maroon Shoatz
Russell Maroon Shoatz 000
Part II. Death Penalties
In Reality-from the Row
Derrick Quintero 000
Inheritances of the Death Penalty: American Racism and Derrida's Theologico-Political Sovereignty
Geoffrey Adelsberg 000
Making Death a Penalty: Or, Making "Good" Death a "Good" Penalty
Kelly Oliver 000
Death Penalty Abolition in Neoliberal Times: The SAFE California Act and the Nexus of Savings and Security
Andrew Dilts 000
On the Inviolability of Human Life
Julia Kristeva (translated by Lisa Walsh) 000
Part III. Rethinking Power and Responsibility
Punishment, Desert, and Equality: A Levinasian Analysis
Benjamin S. Yost 000
Prisons and Palliative Politics
Ami Harbin 000
Sovereignty, Community, and the Incarceration of Immigrants
Matt S. Whitt 000
Without the Right to Exist: Mass Incarceration and National Security
Andrea Smith 000
Prison Abolition and a Culture of Sexual Difference
Sarah Tyson 000
Part IV. Isolation and Resistance
Statement on Solitary Confinement
Abu Ali Abdur'Rahman 000
The Violence of the Supermax: Toward a Phenomenological Aesthetics of Prison Space
Adrian Switzer 000
Prison and the Subject of Resistance: A Levinasian Inquiry
Shokoufeh Sakhi 000
Critical Theory, Queer Resistance, and the Ends of Capture
Liat Ben-Moshe, Che Gossett, Nick Mitchell, and Eric A. Stanley 000
Notes 000
List of Contributors 000
Index 000