An Abolitionism Worthy of the Name: From Death Penalty Reform to Prison Abolition

In Derrida’s lectures on the death penalty, the United States figures as “both exemplary and exceptional.”  Derrida acknowledges the racist structure of state violence in the United States, and he cites data and specific cases to support this point, but he does not develop a critical analysis of race or racism in the lecture series.  Drawing on the work of incarcerated intellectual Mumia Abu-Jamal, critical race theorists Cheryl Harris and Angela Davis, and contemporary prison abolitionists, I argue that racism is an issue, not only in the particular context of the United States, but also for the logic of the death penalty that Derrida proposes to deconstruct.  Derrida’s own account of indemnity, interest, and condemnation in the Tenth Session is incomplete without a supplementary analysis of black civil death and the construction of whiteness as property.  In conclusion, I argue that an abolitionism worthy of the name would have to move beyond the death penalty, towards the (im)possible project of prison abolition and the abolition of white supremacy.

Bio

Lisa Guenther is Queen’s National Scholar in critical prison studies at Queen’s University, Canada.  Her most recent book, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives, develops a phenomenological critique of solitary confinement by drawing on the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, as well as legal and historical documents in the history of the U.S. penitentiary system. Currently she is working on a book that is tentatively entitled, Life Against Social Death: From Reproductive Injustice to Natal Resistance. The book explores the structural and historical connections between reproductive politics and the politics of mass incarceration and capital punishment in the United States. Guenther facilitates a discussion group with men on Tennessee's death row called REACH Coalition.