Book Review: Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives, by Lisa Guenther
| Published date | 01 August 2019 |
| Author | Nancy Luxon |
| DOI | 10.1177/0090591718817329 |
| Date | 01 August 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
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contemporary thought rather than explicitly endorsed, but it brought to
my mind a difficulty that the book sidesteps when it claims less often that
we talk about the future mistakenly and more often that we talk about it
not at all or not enough. I struggled to quell the voice inside me that said,
“Citizenries and their representatives make claims about political value in
terms of futurity all the time.” I wonder whether the critical question to
focus on is not whether the future is “invisible” today (4) but rather when
it is present and to what various effects it operates.
Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives, by Lisa Guenther. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2013, 368 pp.
Reviewed by: Nancy Luxon, Political Science, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities,
USA
DOI: 10.1177/0090591718817329
Solitary confinement has become one of the most visible carceral practices in
mainstream American media in recent years. It has come to serve as a fulcrum
for a variety of critiques of mass incarceration: from critiques of the effects of
prison on mental health, to those that highlight the racial imbalances that seep
into every step of the criminal justice system from police stops to sentencing,
to critiques of the living conditions within modern prisons. In writing Solitary
Confinement, Lisa Guenther plays a critical role not just in advancing these
critiques but also in probing why American society clings so insistently to pun-
ishment for its moral and political self-understanding. Her account is limpidly
written and brilliantly argued. For all that Solitary Confinement offers a searing
account of the dehumanization of solitary confinement, it also is a book of
philosophy that returns its readers to the question of what it means to be human
and to face the challenges of an “elementary living-together with others.”
Guenther’s book opens with a breathtakingly direct claim: “There are
many ways to destroy a person, but one of the simplest and most devastating
is through prolonged solitary confinement” (xi). In the hands of a less deft
thinker and writer, such an opening could easily become sentimental or
polemical. Instead, Guenther uses this flat observation to inquire into how,
exactly, human society hangs together and (more implicitly) how severing
those threads reverberates beyond the prison walls. The organizing figure for
these questions is that of the hinge: “In the context of this inquiry, ‘becoming
unhinged’ is not just a colloquial expression; rather, it is a precise phenome-
nological description of what happens when the articulated joints of our
586
Political Theory 47(4)
embodied, inter-relational subjectivity are broken apart. […] The very pos-
sibility of being broken in this way suggests that...
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