The Time of Liberation: Angela Davis's Prison Abolition and Giorgio Agamben's Coming Community

<p>The project explores the ethical, social, and political subject of incarceration. I investigate Angela Davis’s multifaceted critique of the prison industrial complex – focusing primarily on the tenets of racism, classism, and capitalism – and take an interdisciplinary approach to advancing her call for prison abolition by way of Giorgio Agamben’s radical adjustments to traditional discourses about ontology in his work <em>The Coming Community. </em>Agamben’s rendering of ontology in terms of impotentiality and indifference, when put in dialogue with Davis, exposes latent and unexplored philosophic suggestions Davis is making – specifically regarding a non-normative interpretation of temporality and an operation of liberation best understood as indefinite rather than finite and attainable. Ultimately, the poetic re-thinking Agamben applies to ontology and its political consequences serve as one blueprint for the kind of cognitive re-orientation vital for the prison abolitionist project: abolishing the conditions which allow for the prison industrial complex to be an unquestioned, inevitable part of social reality. Experimenting with thinkers that have seemingly disparate concerns and styles creates a space for more imaginative approaches to potentially mitigating limited, oppressive modes of thought, practices, and institutions.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Philosophy

Year

2016

Author dc:creator

• Pommerening, Amy M.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Leonard Harris
• Sandor Goodhart
• Nancy Heitzeg
• Lee A. McBride
• Daniel Smith

• Philosophy
• religion and theology
• Angela davis
• Giorgio agamben
• Liberation
• Prison abolition
• Temporality

Repository record dc:identifier

https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/open_access_dissertations/832

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:docs.lib.purdue.edu:open_access_dissertations-2024