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Lisa Guenther
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Contact Information
Email: lisa.guenther@vanderbilt.edu
Office: 104 Furman Hall
Phone: 615-936-7236
Fax: (615) 343-7259
Degrees
PhD, Philosophy, University of Toronto, 2002
BA Honours, Philosophy, Bishop’s University, 1994
BA, English, Bishop’s University, 1994
Research Area
Phenomenology and Feminism, especially in the French tradition. Main figures: Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and contemporary feminists such as Butler, Cavarero, and Irigaray. Main topics: natality, embodiment, temporality, intersubjectivity, literary theory, ethics, social and political thought.
Current Research
My recent book, The Gift of the Other, explores the ethical, political and ontological significance of birth as a gift of time. The gift of birth is remarkable in that it is not merely exchanged between existents, but rather generates the one who receives it. In this sense, birth is not only given to me; it also gives me, bringing forth a self who already responds to Others before gaining awareness of itself as an autonomous subject. Birth marks the beginning of my own existence in time; but the givenness of birth suggests that my existence is not quite my own, that my time is already bound up with the time of at least one Other: my mother. By reading Levinas’ account of ethical temporality alongside feminist analyses of birth from Beauvoir, Arendt, Irigaray, Kristeva and Cornell, I develop both a feminist critique of Levinas’ account of paternity and maternity, and also a Levinasian contribution to feminist reproductive politics.
I am currently working on a second book, provisionally called Alterity, Difference, Indifference, on the ethics of transcendence in Levinas and the feminist ethics of immanence suggested by Clarice Lispector’s novel, The Passion According to G.H. While Levinas’ “humanism of the other man” arguably relies on hierarchies between man and woman, human and animal, to support the ethics of radical responsibility, Lispector’s fictional encounter between a woman and an insect suggests a post-humanist ethics which affirms the singularity of every living (and even non-living) thing. In this book, I seek to develop Lispector’s ethics by reading her work alongside thinkers such as Cixous, Deleuze, Agamben and Blanchot, but also to use this perspective to open up new ways of reading Levinas.
Selected Recent Publications
- The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006.
- ‘Being-from-Others: Reading Heidegger after Cavarero.’ Forthcoming in Hypatia 23:1, Winter 2008.
- ‘‘Like a Maternal Body’: Levinas and the Motherhood of Moses,’ Hyaptia 21:1, Special Issue on Maternal Bodies, 119-136, Winter 2006.
- ‘The 'Facts' of Life: Beauvoir and the Ethics of Maternal Embodiment’, Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, 9, (2), 177-194, 2005.
- 'Unborn Mothers: The old rhetoric of New Reproductive Technologies', Radical Philosophy, 130, 2-6, March/April 2005.
- ‘Towards a Phenomenology of Dwelling’ Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, Vol. 7(2), 38-46, 2002.
Recent Courses
Recent graduate courses: Phenomenology and the Question of the Other (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas), Theories of the Gift (Mauss, Derrida, Bataille, etc), and Levinas (Totality and Infinity).
Recent undergraduate courses: Twentieth Century French Philosophy, Philosophy and Gender, and Theories of Human Nature.
