Philosophy

In ‘L'Animal que donc je suis’, Derrida analyzes the paradoxical use of discourses on shame and original sin to justify the human domination of other animals. In the absence of any absolute criterion for distinguishing between humans and other animals, human faultiness becomes a sign of our exclusive capacity for self-consciousness, freedom and awareness of mortality. While Derrida's argument is compelling, he neglects to explore the connection between the human domination of animals and the male domination of women. Throughout ‘L'Animal’, Derrida equivocates between ‘man’ and ‘humanity,’ and between the biblical figures of Ish and Adam. In so doing, he repeats a gesture that he himself has insightfully criticized in other philosophers, such as Levinas. By articulating the distinctions that Derrida elides, I suggest a way of reading Genesis which avoids this difficulty, but also continues Derrida's project.

Marion has criticized Levinas for failing to account for the individuation of the Other, thus leaving the face of the Other abstract, neutral and anonymous. I defend Levinas against this critique by distinguishing between the individuation of the subject through hypostasis and the singularization of self and Other through ethical response. An analysis of the instant in Levinas's early and late work shows that it is possible to speak of a "nameless singularity" which does not collapse into neutrality or abstraction, but rather explains the sense in which anyone is responsible for ally Other who happens to come along.

Emmanuel Levinas compares ethical responsibility to a maternal body who bears the Other in the same without assimilation. In explicating this trope, he refers to a biblical passage in which Moses is like a "wet nurse" bearing Others whom he has "neither conceived nor given birth to" (Num. 11:12). A close reading of this passage raises questions about ethics, maternity, and sexual difference, for both the concept of ethical substitution and the material practice of mothering.

Drawing on Adriana Cavarero's account of natality, I argue that Martin Heidegger overlooks the distinct ontological and ethical significance of birth as a limit that orients one toward an other who resists appropriation, even while handing down a heritage of possibilities that one can—and must—make one's own. I call this structure of natality Being-from-others, modifying Heidegger's language of inheritance to suggest an ethical understanding of existence as the gift of the other.

In Otherwise than Being, Levinas writes that the alterity of the Other escapes “le flair animal,” or the animal’s sense of smell. This paper puts pressure on the strong human-animal distinction that Levinas makes by considering the possibility that, while non-human animals may not respond to the alterity of the Other in the way that Levinas describes as responsibility, animal sensibility plays a key role in a relation to Others that Levinas does not discuss at length: friendship. This approach to friendship addresses a gap in Levinas’ work between the absolute Other for whom I am responsible and the “brother” who is my political equal.

Irigaray's early work seeks to multiply possibilities for women's self-expression by recovering a sexual difference in which male and female are neither the same nor opposites, but irreducibly different modes of embodiment. In her more recent work, however, Irigaray has emphasized the duality of the sexes at the expense of multiplicity, enshrining the heterosexual couple as the model of sexual ethics. Alison Stone's recent revision of Irigaray supplements her account of sexual duality with a theory of bodily multiplicity derived from Butler, Nietzsche, and certain German Romantics; but to the extent that Stone maintains the primacy of sexual duality, her revision fails to address the claims of multiplicity on their own terms. In this paper, I interpret a passage from Marcel Proust's novel, Sodom and Gomorrah, in order to develop an alternative theory of sexual difference in which sexual duality is affirmed in relation to a third, unsexed but sexual force which multiplies the possibilities for sexual pleasure beyond heterosexual coupling. Proust's emphasis on sexed ``parts'' rather than sexed morphologies is generative of maximally diverse combinations, all of which are equally natural and equally enhanced through artifice.

Shame is notoriously ambivalent. On one hand, it operates as a mechanism of normalization and social exclusion, installing or reinforcing patterns of silence and invisibility; on the other hand, the capacity for shame may be indispensible for ethical life insofar as it attests to the subject’s constitutive relationality and its openness to the provocation of others. Sartre, Levinas and Beauvoir each offer phenomenological analyses of shame in which its basic structure emerges as a feeling of being exposed to others and bound to one’s own identity. For Sartre, shame is an ontological provocation, constitutive of subjectivity as a being-for-Others. For Levinas, ontological shame takes the form of an inability to escape one’s own relation to being; this predicament is altered by the ethical provocation of an Other who puts my freedom in question and commands me to justify myself. For Beauvoir, shame is an effect of oppression, both for the woman whose embodied existence is marked as shameful, and for the beneficiary of colonial domination who feels ashamed of her privilege. For each thinker, shame articulates the temporality of social life in both its promise and its danger.

In Remnants of Auschwitz, Giorgio Agamben argues that the hidden structure of subjectivity is shame.  In shame, I am consigned to something that cannot be assumed, such that the very thing that makes me a subject also forces me to witness my own desubjectification.  Agamben’s ontological account of shame is inadequate insofar as it forecloses collective responsibility and collapses the distinction between shame and humiliation.  By recontextualizing three of Agamben’s sources – Primo Levi, Robert Antelme and Maurice Blanchot – I develop an alternative account of shame as the structure of intersubjectivity, and of a collective responsibility that is more fundamental than the subject itself.  On this basis, I sketch the preliminary outline of a biopolitics of resistance rooted in the ethics of alterity.  The intuition driving this approach is that life is never bare, that even in situations of extreme affliction there remains a relation to alterity which provides a starting-point for resistance.

Psychiatrist Stuart Grassian has proposed the term “SHU syndrome” to name the cluster of cognitive, perceptual and affective symptoms that commonly arise for inmates held in the Special Housing Units (SHU) of supermax prisons. In this paper, I analyze the harm of solitary confinement from a phenomenological perspective by drawing on Husserl’s account of the essential relation between consciousness, the experience of an alter ego and the sense of a real, Objective world. While Husserl’s prioritization of transcendental subjectivity over transcendental intersubjectivity underestimates the degree to which first-person consciousness is constitutively intertwined with the embodied consciousness of others, Husserl’s phenomenology nevertheless provides a fruitful starting-point for a philosophical engagement with the psychiatric research on solitary confinement.

While Merleau-Ponty does not theorize sexual difference at any great length, his concepts of the flesh and the institution of a sense suggest hitherto undeveloped possibilities for articulating sexual difference beyond the male–female binary. For Merleau-Ponty, flesh is a “pregnancy of possibilities” which gives rise to masculine and feminine forms through a process of mutual divergence and encroachment. Both sexes bear “the possible of the other,” and neither represents the first or generic form of the human; each sex bears the possibility of the other. By approaching sexual difference in terms of intersubjectively distributed possibilities rather than interlocking forms or types, we may grasp sexual difference in terms of both a developmental process in which bodies become sexed (and sometimes re-sexed) over time, and in terms of a social-historical process in which patterns of relation and exchange between sexed bodies shift over time, altering the very sense of sexual difference.

Prisoners involved in the Attica rebellion and in the recent Georgia prison strike have protested their dehumanizing treatment as animals and as slaves.  Their critique is crucial for tracing the connections between slavery, abolition, the racialization of crime, and the reinscription of racialized slavery within the US prison system.  I argue that, in addition to the dehumanization of prisoners, inmates are further de-animalized when they are held in conditions of intensive confinement such as prolonged solitude or chronic overcrowding.  To be de-animalized is to be treated not as a living being who is sustained by its mutual relations with other living and nonliving beings, but rather as a thing to be warehoused and/or exchanged for a profit.  The violence of de-animalization affects both human and nonhuman animals held in control prisons, factory farms, laboratories and other sites of intensive confinement.  In order to make the connections between these sites, and to develop forms of solidarity appropriate to our shared animality, we need a post-humanist critique of intensive confinement that breaks with the logic of opposition between human and animal, and articulates our constitutive relationality as (inter)corporeal beings.

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?

Solitary confinement is often justified through an appeal to accountability. But what can accountability mean in isolation from others who demand an account of oneself? Levinas offers an account of critique as the provocation of the other to justify oneself and invest one’s arbitrary freedom as ethical responsibility and political solidarity.  Rhetoric, as the use of language to overpower the other, is the opposite of critique. For Levinas, the task of philosophy is to perform an ethical reduction of rhetoric: in other words, to trace anti-language back to the ethical responsibility that it both presupposes and denies.

In his 1934 essay, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” Levinas raises important questions about the subject’s relation to nature and to history.  His account of the ethical significance of paternity, maternity, and fraternity in texts such as Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being suggest powerful new ways to understand the meaning of kinship, beyond the abstractions of Western liberalism.  How does this analysis of race and kinship translate into the context of the Transatlantic slave trade, which not only stole Africans from their families and communities, but also imposed upon them a single “fictive” kinship relation to the master?  What if the problem of racialization is not only a matter of being “chained” to one’s identity through (presumed) blood ties, but also being violently separated from one’s kin?  What does it mean for the concepts of ethical and political fraternity if the only father recognized by law and society as legitimate is the slave master?  Or if the bodies of slave women are exploited, not only for productive labor, but also for the reproductive labor that makes more slaves for the master?  If kinship is a way of making sense of the relation between past, present and future generations, then what does a radical disruption of existing kinship relations, and the imposition of one fictive, absolute and unilateral kinship relation, do to the social meaning of time and of history in a particular community?  In this paper, I reflect on the significance of fecundity and kinship in the context of US slavery, both in order in order to situate my analysis in the particular history of my own present community, and as a way of demonstrating the significance of a more determinate social analysis for Levinas’ ethics of singularity and politics of universal justice.

In recent years, comparisons between abortion and slavery have become increasingly common in American pro-life politics. Some have compared the struggle to extinguish abortion rights to the struggle to end slavery. Others have claimed that Roe v Wade is the Dred Scott of our time. Still others have argued that abortion is worse than slavery; it is a form of genocide. This paper tracks the abortion = slavery meme from Ronald Reagan to the current personhood movement, drawing on work by Orlando Patterson, Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman to develop a discourse of reproductive justice that grapples with the wounded kinship of slavery and racism.

On July 8, 2013, over 30,000 prisoners in California joined together across racial and regional lines to launch the largest hunger strike in state history. This article analyzes the prison conditions that led to the hunger strike as a form of world-destroying violence, drawing on Heidegger’s account of Being- in-the-world and Arendt’s account of being cast out of the common world and deprived of the “right to have rights”. The paper then examines the process by which prisoners in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay State Prison reached across the social barriers of race and gang affiliation to organize a nonviolent resistance movement and, in so doing, to rebuild a meaningful sense of the world and of political action. Ultimately, the California prison hunger strikes are more than a struggle for human rights; they are also a struggle for meaning, and for the possibility of a common world.

On July 8, 2013, over 30,000 prisoners in California joined together across racial and regional lines to launch the largest hunger strike in state history.  The strike action was organized by a group of supermax prisoners called the Pelican Bay SHU Short Corridor Collective, which defines itself as a multi-racial, multi-regional human rights movement.  This paper analyzes the emergence of collective agency and organizational power within the extreme isolation of a supermax prison, among people who might otherwise be divided by social, material, and institutional barriers.  Drawing on Fanon’s decolonial phenomenology of race, Sartre’s social ontology of collectives and groups in Critique of Dialectical Reason, and the first-person testimony of hunger strike organizers, the paper offers a theoretical and practical account of the movement from isolation to collective solidarity and resistance in a carceral state.

Published in Body/Self/Other: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters, ed. Luna Dolezal and Danielle Petherbridge. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2017.

Prisoner-led resistance movements are complicated by both the brutality of state violence and the inadequacy of moralistic discourses of prison reform.  A comparative study of the GIP and the Pelican Bay SHU Short Corridor Collective, which launched a series of mass hunger strikes across the California prison system in 2011-13, suggests that effective resistance to carceral power demands a movement beyond good and evil, and beyond the moral-legal categories of guilt and innocence.  This calls for an affirmation of the creaturely needs, desires, and capacities that motivate and sustain political life as such: a creaturely politics of active intolerance and intercorporeal solidarity.

Published in Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition, ed. Andrew Dilts and Perry Zurn. Palgrave 2015.

Between 2006 and 2010, nearly 150 women were unlawfully sterilized in California prisons.  Prison medical staff have defended the procedures as a service to taxpayers, and even to the women themselves, as a way of preventing the birth of “unwanted children.”  This chapter situates the recent sterilization of women in California prisons in relation to the history of eugenics in the United States as well as broader patterns of racism, class oppression, reproductive injustice, and mass incarceration.  The central claim is that the current U.S. prison system is not just implicated in eugenics at particular moments, but in its very structure, insofar as it systematically prevents certain groups of people – primarily poor people and people of color, who are targeted for disproportionate police surveillance, arrest, and incarceration – from making basic decisions concerning their own reproductive capacity.  The reproductive justice movement led by women of color activists and scholars provides a framework for dismantling the eugenic structure of mass incarceration, beyond the alternatives of pro-choice and pro-life.

Published in Feminist Philosophies of Life, ed. Hasana Sharp and Chloe Taylor. Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016.