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

Author:   Geoffrey Adelsberg ,  Lisa Guenther ,  Scott Zeman
Publisher:   Fordham University Press
ISBN:  

9780823265305


Pages:   424
Publication Date:   01 April 2015
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
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Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration


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Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Geoffrey Adelsberg ,  Lisa Guenther ,  Scott Zeman
Publisher:   Fordham University Press
Imprint:   Fordham University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.80cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.567kg
ISBN:  

9780823265305


ISBN 10:   0823265307
Pages:   424
Publication Date:   01 April 2015
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.

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"

Reviews

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 Ciciarello-Maher, Drexel University


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 What does it mean to live in what Wacquant has called `the first genuine prison society in history' and to be caught in the grip of a carceral state, economy, and public imaginary? What does philosophy, or rather philosophers, have to say about what this cancer growing in the very viscera of democracy: racialized, systematic, and capillary massive imprisonment? Perhaps philosophy itself has been imprisoned by its silence about this societal crisis. This anthology brings together philosophers, prison activists, former and present prisoners, to offer what are unquestionably the most thorough, insightful and incisive analyses of the origins and nefarious effects that the prison industrial complex has on our imprisoned democracy. Ranging across the philosophical corpus, from Nietzsche through Davis to Derrida, the contributors put philosophy to work on behalf of abolitionism, decarceration and reconstruction. The editors, however, have more than saved the honor of philosophy by having it address one of our most pressing yet invisible problems we face; they have given us a work that established a new benchmark. Henceforth, we must begin with this text if we are to think about racial justice and the democracy to come that the abolition of slavery promised but that at the very moment of its birth was compromised. There will be no racial democracy without abolition democracy. This is the new imperative that W.E.B. DuBois enunciated nearly a century ago, but which has become more urgent in our time. -- -Eduardo Mendieta 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


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


Author Information

Geoff Adelsberg is a graduate student in philosophy at Vanderbilt University writing his dissertation on the intersections of philosophy of race, nonretributive 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 (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 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.

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