Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewIn an unusually vigorous interrogation of philosophy and the social sciences, Lisa Guenther addresses one of humanity’s greatest inhumanities and its perversely long, extensive history in America. Guenther offers a compelling critique of solitary confinement, in the course of which she pushes phenomenology beyond its classical limits, revealing our inherent inter-subjectivity, our need for both interaction and anonymity, and the moral imperative that America end this cruel and barbaric form of punishment. An urgently needed, powerfully argued study of one of the nation’s gravest moral and socio-political failings.—Orlando Patterson, Harvard University
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Critical Phenomenology of Solitary Confinement
I. The Early U.S. Penitentiary System1. An Experiment in Living Death2. Person, World, and Other: A Husserlian Critique of Solitary Confinement3. The Racialization of Criminality and the Criminalization of Race: From the Plantation to the Prison Farm
II. The Modern Penitentiary4. From Thought Reform to Behavior Modification5. Living Relationality: Merleau-Ponty’s Critical Phenomenological Account of Behavior6. Beyond Dehumanization: A Posthumanist Critique of Intensive Confinement
III. Supermax Prisons7. Supermax Confinement and the Exhaustion of Space8. Dead Time: Heidegger, Levinas, and the Temporality of Supermax Confinement9. From Accountability to Responsibility: A Levinasian Critique of Supermax Rhetoric
Conclusion: Afterlives
NotesBibliographyIndex
