Levinas, Guenther, Solitary Confinement, and the Ethical Encounter with the Other

What is it about?

This chapter explores Emmanuel Levinas’s and Lisa Guenther’s correlated accounts of the interruptive encounter with the other. According to both Levinas and Guenther, the other overflows the individual’s consciousness, challenges the latter to question the conditions of their own spontaneity, and ultimately reveals that consciousness alone is not sufficient to produce an intelligible experience of the world. Drawing on these thinkers, I suggest that the other not only contests one’s spontaneity but also provides one with any sense of spontaneity in the first place. This implies that, in order for Descartes to perform his solitary meditations, he first had to withdraw from the intricate web of social relations in which he was always-already embedded. While the radically deceived cogito remains a mere thought experiment for him, Guenther shows how this living nightmare becomes a reality for many prisoners in solitary confinement. Deprived of meaningful human interaction for prolonged periods of time, many of these prisoners experience an unraveling of their very sense of self. My task in this chapter is fourfold. First, I explore the implications of Levinas’s claim that an ethical encounter with the face of the other calls the former’s spontaneity into question and ultimately teaches them the idea of infinity. Second, I show how the deeply unsettling human experiment of solitary confinement is unique and illuminating in that it forces prisoners into the otherwise-fictive “ideal” role of the solipsistic individual. Third, I argue that Guenther’s claims about the significance of caregiving can help heal both prisoners and non-prisoners by encouraging us to pass the gift of birth on to others, even total strangers, by extending our generosity to them. Fourth, and finally, I explore how other activists have argued against solitary confinement and prisons altogether, specifically because of their dehumanizing effects. As I attempt to show, Levinas’s emphasis on gentleness and Guenther’s account of generosity accord with the broader aim of pursuing of peace, nonviolence, and justice in the face of power in crisis.

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Photo by Spencer Tamichi on Unsplash

Photo by Spencer Tamichi on Unsplash

Why is it important?

My chapter challenges ego-centric and individualistic conceptions of the self by encouraging readers to think about the ways in which we always already depend on others for a cohesive sense of self. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the suffering caused by prolonged solitary confinement by combining perspectives from philosophy, sociology, and psychiatry. Finally, it explores some of the recent literature in the prison abolitionist movement, including authors such as Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Albert Woodfox.