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Added by: Zoé Grange-MarczakAbstract:
Judith Butler (b. 1956) is an American philosopher and academic, especially known for their work on gender in the 1990s onward. The second part of their career elaborates on themes of ethics and politics, engaging as always in current questions by reading and re-reading contemporary thinkers and poets. Their 2012 book consists in readings of Levinas, Said, Benjamin, Arendt, Primo Levi and Darwish, starting with the goal "to debunk the claim that any and all criticism of the State of Israel is effectively anti-Semitic", ultimately showing "there are Jewish values of cohabitation with the non-Jew that are part of the very ethical substance of diasporic Jewishness" (p. 1). Because of the book's originality, Butler's controversial popularity and the urgent character of its topic, this work has given way to a wealth of interpretations and discussion. It does propose a wide array of divisive readings of "classical" contemporary authors, and serves as a great example of how exegetical processes can lead to re-interrogation of even the most studied of philosophers.
Comment: If this work is itself scholarly and rigorous, the controversy surrounding its contents and its author tends to be volatile and inflammable, and should be approached with caution. However, it can be used to finish a class on religion or continental philosophy, by embodying the most recent debates in the field.
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Added by: Rochelle DuFordAbstract: 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 confinement undermines prisoners' sense of identity and their ability to understand the world, Guenther demonstrates the real effects of forcibly isolating a person for weeks, months, or years. -/- Drawing on the testimony of prisoners and the work of philosophers and social activists from Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis, the author defines solitary confinement as a kind of social death. It argues that isolation exposes the relational structure of being by showing what happens when that structure is abused - when prisoners are deprived of the concrete relations with others on which our existence as sense-making creatures depends. Solitary confinement is beyond a form of racial or political violence; it is an assault on being.Comment: This text serves as both a clear introduction to the history of punishment and imprisonment in the United States, as well as a clear introduction to phenomenological method. Portions of the text on the experience of social death in solitary confinement would make excellent additions to introductory courses on prisons and punishment. Some chapters would also be fitting on classes concerning race and mass incarceration.