an interview with lisa guenther

8/13/2019 An Interview with Lisa Guenther

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An Interview with Lisa Guenther

Michael Giesbrecht

Michael Giesbrecht: In a society and culture that in-creasingly subjects post-secondary education to cal-culative economic reasoning, thereby emphasizing theexchange value of a degree in the labour market while

downplaying the potential benefit of academia andpedagogy, what do you believe is the value of studyingphilosophy at the undergraduate level?

Lisa Guenther: Audre Lorde says that poetry is not a lux-ury, and I think this is also true o philosophy. But what isphilosophy? Is it the same thing as a degree in philosophy

at the postsecondary level? Does it coincide with the ca-nonical texts o Western philosophy? Lorde contrasts thephilosophical claim o white athers I think thereoreI am with the poetic whisper o black mothers: I eelthereore I can be ree.1She calls poetry the revelationor distillation o experienceit orms the quality o the

light within which we predicate our hopes and dreamstoward survival and change, first made into language,then into idea, then into more tangible action.2Philoso-

1 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches(New York: enSpeed Press, 2007), 38.

2 Ibid., 37.


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phy can do this too, I think, but sometimes we philoso-phers rush too quickly through language to the idea andorget the more tangible action. An education in philoso-phy, or in the humanities more generally, ought to createa time and a space or exploring the poetic dimensions in Audre Lordes sense o the word poetry o existence,experience, and praxis.

Some people find this space in university, and othersfind it elsewhere. I stumbled into a space like this in a

Plato reading group during my undergraduate educationat Bishops University. We would meet every Friday afer-noon to read the dialogues aloud and discuss them page-by-page, line-by-line, or word-by-word whatever it tookto make sense o the text. Now, Plato is most definitelya white ather, and he had some rather uncharitablethings to say about poetry, narrowly conceived. But the

shared practice o engaging with ancient texts and lettingthem resonate in our own time and place, was a orm oliberation rom the utilitarian logic o the market, andeven rom the credit system o the university. Te Platogroup is still my ideal model o philosophical education.

MG: In your recent work on the California prison hun-ger strikes, you employed Hannah Arendts notion of aworld-destroying violence, which threatens not onlyindividual life, but also the interpersonal bounds thatconstitute public, social life, or what Arendt namesthe common world, to describe the social and psy-chological situation of prisoners living under solitary

confinement in Californias prison system. In an era ofworld-destroying violence such as this, what hope canpedagogical practices offer, and how can education beredeployed as an avenue for liberation or resistance?


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LG: Tis is a great question! o respond to it, we first needto reflect on the meaning o the world or Arendt. Teworld is more than the totality o things on planet earth;it is the shared space o mutual appearance and, as such,it is the site o political action. Its not clear that we stilllive in a world when a significant number o our ellowhuman beings spend years, even decades, locked up inconcrete boxes. Its not just that theyhave been excludedrom our world, but the sense of the world as a place

where people encounter one another, tell their stories,and even argue over the meaning o things, has beenoreclosed. What hope can pedagogical practices offer ina situation o mass incarceration and normalized solitaryconfinement?

We can learn a lot rom incarcerated intellectuals andrevolutionaries in response to this question. Russell Ma-

roon Shoatz has spent over 20 years in solitary confine-ment and a total o over 30 years in prison in Pennsyl-

vania. But he has never given up on the possibility o acommon world and on the power o conversation to holdopen this possibility. Even in extreme isolation, Maroonhas ound ways to share words with other people and, in

so doing, to (re)create the space o mutual appearancethat is necessary or political action. As long as their cellshad open bars at the ront, Maroon and his ellow prison-ers would hold regular seminars along the tier, teachingeach other Arican history, economics, and other sub-

jects. When the open cell ronts were replaced by solidsteel doors, Maroon kept in touch with a community o

people on the outside by writing essays and letters aboutissues that were meaningul to him, such as revolution-ary politics, eminism, and the history o slave rebellions.You can read his collected writings inMaroon the Impla-cable(2013).


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MG: Finally, it is evident that our common understand-ing of pedagogy is oriented towards an open future anda horizon of opportunity; however, in light of your ex-perience working with inmates on Tennessees deathrow, and your above-mentioned analysis of the world-destroying violence of the penitentiary system what,in your mind, is the telos of pedagogical practice inthe shadow of social and physical death when such ho-rizons are radically foreclosed? In particular, how do

you view your own pedagogical practices in light of thiswork?

LG: My conversations with people on death row in en-nessee have been a turning point in my lie as a teacher,a philosopher, and a person. I first got involved at Riv-erbend Maximum Security Prison afer volunteering to

acilitate a reading group in a minimum security prison.From one day to the next, the ennessee Department oCorrections decided to shut down the prison where I wasgoing to volunteer, and so I was offered a choice: continuewith the group on death row, or wait or another oppor-tunity to arise. I plunged in, knowing that I was out o

my depth but hoping that we would find some way to stayafloat. What would someone on death row want to reador talk about? How should one even greet them? Hey,hows it going? See you later? In the abstract, it seemedunthinkable that we could share anything in common,or that we could orient ourselves collectively towards anopen uture. But in one o our first meetings, someone

said to me: You know, we still have to liveon death row.In spite o being condemned to death and locked away or,in some cases, more than 25 years, these men still get upin the morning, ace the daily routine o prison lie, ormriendships and get drawn into petty squabbles. Some be-come jailhouse lawyers, working on their cases and help-


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ing other people to navigate the tangle o post-convictionlitigation. Others become artists or writers, creating workthat gives others a sense o how prison shapes their livesbut does not ully determine them. None o the men Ihave met on death row has accepted their structural posi-tion o social death or state execution. Tey all work veryhard every day to hold open the possibility o a commonworld, even i that means just a simple, unnecessary act okindness to their ellow prisoner.

What does pedagogy mean in such a space? Tis isthe statement we came up with to describe what we do:REACH Coalition is an organization or reciprocal edu-cation led by insiders on ennessees death row. Recip-rocal education is based on the idea that everyone hassomething to teach and to learn; by sharing our experi-ence and ideas with others, we grow as individuals and as

a community. I think it took us three hours to come upwith those two sentences. But it was a good way to spendthree hours! We try to organize our meetings in a way thatlets everyones voice be heard and that calls on everyoneto respond to others in a thoughtul, respectul way. Webegin with a quick question to which everyone responds;

this could be anything rom Whats your avourite mov-ie? to Whats a moment in your lie that you would liketo repeat, exactly as it happened? Ten we come up with3 or 4 discussion questions about the readings and breakinto small groups to discuss these questions. Each groupnominates a reporter to explain one interesting idea thatcame up in their small group discussion to the class as a

whole. Ten we spend the last hal hour o class hearingreports rom each group and seeing where the conversa-tion leads us.

I have ound that this way o engaging with a text, andwith each other, has affected the way I teach my univer-sity classes. Rather than eeling like I should be the expert


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who guides students in the acquisition o (what I take tobe the appropriate) knowledge o a text, I aspire to createa space in which we can encounter the text and give shapeto our singular and collective experience. o me, this ispoetry, and it is politics, and it is a collective act o mak-ing and re-making the world.

Bibliography

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. New York: enSpeed Press, 2007.

Dr. Lisa Guenther is an Associate Professor of Philoso-phy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Dr.Guenther specializes in phenomenology, feminism, and

prison issues. Her recent publications include Beyond

Dehumanization: A Post-Humanist Critique of IntensiveConnement (Journal for Critical Animal Studies), Re-sisting Agamben: The Biopolitics of Shame and Humili-

ation (Philosophy and Social Criticism), and The Most

Dangerous Place: Pro-Life Politics and the Rhetoric of

Slavery (Postmodern Culture).

Michael Giesbrecht is an undergraduate student of phi-losophy and religion attending Concordia University in

Montreal, Quebec. Michaels primary area of interest isin continental philosophy broadly construed, particularly

focusing on the wake of phenomenology and the philoso-phies of Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Lvinas, Friedrich

Nietzsche and Gilles Deleuze. Outside the world of aca-demia, Michael is a music enthusiast with an accentuatedaffection for experimental electronic and dance music inits multifarious forms.

an interview with lisa guenther

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