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

About the Author

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.

Reviews

"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 "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 Stony Brook University "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