Dwelling in Carceral Space

My Place in the Sun

Levinas's account of the complex dynamics of dwelling-as a shelter for the constitutive vulnerability of living-from the element, as a fortress of exclusion and mastery, and as the ethical opening of hospitality-helps to articulate what is at stake in the desire for walls and gates, even or especially when they are exposed as a fallacy. In "Ethics as First Philosophy," Levinas poses a question:

My being-in-the-world or my 'place in the sun,' my being at home, have these not also been the usurpation of spaces belonging to the other man whom I have already oppressed or starved, or driven out into a third world; are they not acts of repulsing, excluding, exiling, stripping, killing? Pascal's 'my place in the sun' marks the beginning of the image of the usurpation of the whole earth. 28

This seems like a fair description of homeowner citizenship, but it does not exhaust the meaning of dwelling for Levinas insofar as the masterful domination of "my place in the sun" presupposes both the element that precedes it and the ethical encounter that interrupts it. For Levinas, dwelling marks a boundary between inside and outside, thereby establishing the conditions for inclusion and exclusion in the home and in the domain of representation. But the constitutive boundary of dwelling is not absolute; whether we like it or not, this boundary remains ambiguous. 29 Without 26 Jackie Wang, "Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety." 27 See Lisa Guenther, "Critical Phenomenology," for a more sustained discussion of this approach to phenomenology. 28 Levinas, The Levinas Reader, 81-82. 29 Levinas writes: "The dwelling remains in a way open to the element from which it separates. The ambiguity of distance, both removal and connection, is lifted by the window that makes possible a look that dominates, a look of him who escapes looks, the look that contemplates," Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, 156. a place to dwell and a limit to mark that place, one would not find shelter from the faceless insecurity of the element. But without a porous boundary-without doors and windows for coming and going-one would cease to "live from" the element that sustains one's dwelling. The very boundary that stabilizes or secures the enjoyment of living from the element also ignites the fear of invasion or encroachment. 30 There is no oikos without the economy of coming and going, giving and getting, and yet this economy also threatens the durability of dwelling.

A home is not just a building, it is a place, a niche or fold within the world that shelters and supports one's capacity to endure over time, rather than consuming oneself in enjoyment or exhausting oneself in anxiety over the impermanence of enjoyment. Not everyone has a home, even if they do occupy a building or a house. Domestic violence and sexual abuse violate the intimacy of shelter from within, exposing inhabitants to insidious forms of control and incapacitation. A prison is arguably the opposite of a home; it is, to borrow a term from Jill Stauffer, a site of ethical loneliness, designed to undermine rather than support the constitutive relationality of its inhabitants. 31 The fast and slow violence of the prison-executions and life without parole, cell extractions and solitary confinement, random beatings and the systemic extraction of criminal justice debt-underline the importance of having a place where you can curl up and sleep, a homeplace to retreat from the world and let down your guard. 32 It's entirely possible to feel at home in a gated community, or in some other site of homeowner citizenship such as a gentrified urban neighborhood, a secure condominium, or a campus residence. But wherever one lives, the feeling of home does not solve the problem of slow violence; if anything, this feeling may foreclose a reckoning with one's own capacity for murderous violence, 30 On one hand, "The future of the element as insecurity is lived concretely as the mythical divinity of the element. . . . The element I inhabit is at the frontier of a night" populated by "[f]aceless gods, impersonal gods." On the other hand, "Enjoyment seems to be in touch with an 'other' inasmuch as a future is announced within the element and menaces it with insecurity." Levinas,Totality and Infinity,142,137. The more stable boundaries of the dwelling both remain exposed to the insecurity of a faceless element and also establish the conditions under which the subject who dwells encounters an Other who both commands hospitality and provokes the temptation to murder. In the context of this paper, one might understand this as a structural ambiguity in the securitized dwelling between a quasi-mythical anxiety about the threat of indeterminate harm from indeterminate sources and a more concrete fear of particular others whose representation as a threat is shaped by the dweller's own anxiety. See my summary, later in this article, of Sara Ahmed's analysis of fear and anxiety in The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 31 Jill Stauffer, "How Much Does That Weigh?: Levinas, Rawls, and the Possibility of Human Rights." 32 See Stauffer, "How Much Does That Weigh?," for a nuanced reading of Levinas on the importance of having a place to curl up and find relief from the weight of existence. The word "homeplace" is from bell hooks's essay, "Homeplace: A Site of Resistance," 41-50. and one's investment in this violence through the occupation of territory and the accumulation of private property. The counterpoint to the gated community is the city, understood as an elemental source of undefined danger and potential enjoyment that must be carefully managed and excluded in order to stabilize the mastery of homeowner citizenship, which lives from the city while disavowing its parasitic dependence. 33 For Levinas, the place of dwelling is not just spatial; it also has a temporal dimension whereby the "uncertain future of the element is suspended" and "calmed in possession." 34 The ceaseless flux of living from the element and depending on its sufficiency to support one's existence becomes manageable through labor and the acquisition of property. This is the hinge between shelter and mastery, the switchpoint between the home as a form of shelter for one's constitutive vulnerability, and the house or real estate as a site of possession, exclusion, isolation, and domination. We could understand the difference between house and home in terms of a distinction between privacy and intimacy, where privacy is rooted in the conception of personhood as a kind of property, and intimacy is the shape of relational personhood supported by what Levinas calls the feminine Other, but which I will critically engage in the final section of my paper as a (Black) feminist Other. 35 Homeowner citizenship conflates the distinction between house and home, privacy and intimacy, mastery and shelter. In so doing, it identifies the ontological safety of having a place to curl up and sleep with the security apparatus of the carceral state, investing in the latter as an insurance policy on the former, and justifying its own investment in structural violence as a legitimate form of self-defense. We could distinguish these concepts spatially in term of porous and rigid boundaries, or temporally in terms of a safety that ebbs and flows, remaining open to the disruption of an unpredictable future and an unruly past, versus a security apparatus that seeks to eliminate danger through the production of timeless zone, protected from the risk of loss and death. For Levinas, the temporality of dwelling tends towards an investment in security: "Possession masters, suspends, postpones the unforeseeable future of the element-its independence, 33 Blakely and Snyder, Fortress America, 112-21; see also Katherine McKittrick on "urbicide," in "On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place." 34 The full passage reads: "The access to the world is produced in a movement that starts from the utopia of the dwelling and traverses a space to effect a primordial grasp, to seize and to take away. The uncertain future of the element is suspended. The element is fixed between the four walls of the home, is calmed in possession. It appears there as a thing, which can, perhaps, be defined by tranquility-as in 'still life,' " Levinas Totality and Infinity,158. 35 See Cheryl Harris, "Whiteness as Property," and Guenther, "Seeing Like a Cop: A Critical Phenomenology of Whiteness as Property," where I build on Harris's pathbreaking account to analyze the racial dynamics of policing. its being." 36 In the context of homeowner citizenship, the temporal logic of possession structures the desire to lock in property values by locking out strangers and securing the value of one's investment from the unforeseeable future of fluctuating markets, unpredictable neighbours, and fickle consumers. Marketing campaigns for gated communities play on this desire, promising a return to safer, simpler times, free from the anxiety of danger and loss. But the desire for timeless security is also rooted in a deeper constitutive dynamic at the heart of Levinas's phenomenology of dwelling, in which enjoyment is sacrificed for the sake of guarding and prolonging the very possibility of enjoyment. Ultimately, this dynamic is rooted in a disavowal of mortality and finitude; for Levinas, "The dwelling, overcoming the insecurity of life, is a perpetual postponement of the expiration in which life risks foundering." 37 This postponement of death sustains the life of consciousness as an eddy in the inexorable and irreversible flow of time, but it also motivates the slow violence of displacing the anxiety of Being-towards-death into a more manageable and determinate fear of others. This is the hallmark of the homeowner citizen, in Levinas's words: "a determination of the other by the same, without the same being determined by the other," a Gygean fantasy of seeing without being seen, or acting without being acted upon. The desire to be Gyges is murderous in structure: "the same cannot lay hold of this other without suppressing him." 38 It both presupposes and disavows the tension between the wall, understood as an enclosure that must remain solid and unbreachable in order to perform its security function, and the gate, understood as the constitutive limit of the wall, an opening to the element from which ones lives and draws the value of one's possession (if only by receiving deliveries, letting in housekeepers or day laborers, facilitating the commute to work, and so forth). 39 But even if one were to solve the spatial problem of walls and gates, the value of one's property would still be exposed to elemental insecurity through the liquidation of things into money. Levinas writes: "Property alone institutes permanence in the pure quality of enjoyment, but this permanence disappears forthwith in the phenomenality reflected in money. As property, merchandise, bought and sold, a thing is revealed in the market as convertible into money, susceptible of dispersing in the anonymity of money." 40 In this sense, property itself is both wall and gate, both solid/impermeable and instable/permeable. Precisely the future that one tried to secure through possession is jeopardized by the currency that measures the value of one's possessions, and by the unpredictability 36 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 158. 37 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 165. 38 Levinas,Totality and Infinity,170,171. 39 See Guenther, "A Critical Phenomenology of Dwelling in Carceral Space" for a more detailed account of walls and gates. Parts of the current article borrow from and elaborate on passages in this previously published essay. 40 Levinas,Totality and Infinity,162. of economic exchange more generally. Levinas analyzes this dynamic in terms of affect and temporality:

All the freedom of inhabitation depends on the time that, for the inhabitant, still always remains. The incommensurable, that is, the incomprehensible format of the surrounding medium leaves time. The distance with regard to the element to which the I is given over menaces it in its dwelling only in the future. For the moment the present is only consciousness of danger, fear, which is feeling par excellence. 41

For Levinas, the subject who dwells forestalls this danger and manages its fear through the labor of "a being that is threatened, but has time at its disposal to ward off the threat." 42 Or, as Peter Sloterdijk puts it: "houses are initially machines to kill time." 43 In the gated community, at least part of this labor is performed by the gate itself, which acts as a "lieutenant" that vigilantly takes my place (lieu), keeping danger at a distance 24 / 7, so that I can let down my guard and have a bit of time for myself and my family. 44 And yet, the constitutive ambivalence of the gate as a hinged structure that both opens and closes makes the gate an unreliable worker, incapable of solving the problem of dwelling in a pocket of security that is constantly menaced by the threat of death and the anonymity of the il y a. 45 In her critical phenomenology of fear in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed analyzes the relationship between "the time that, for the inhabitant, still always remains" and the potentially overwhelming feeling of fear in the present moment. For Ahmed, the "affective politics" of fear "'preserves' only through announcing a threat to life itself." 46 The perception of a threat that passes me by does not, for that reason, give me a feeling of continued safety; it may even intensify the feeling of imminent danger. And so, we shouldn't be 41 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 166. 42 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 166. 43 Peter Sloterdijk, "Spheres Theory: Talking to Myself about the Poetics of Space," 133. 44 Bruno Latour uses the term "lieutenant" ("from the French "lieu" "tenant," i.e., "holding the place of, for, someone else") to describe the agency of objects to which tasks such as holding the door have been delegated; see "Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer," 308. The gates and walls of securitized spaces perform a similar function, which is often, but not always, supplemented by human agency. 45 Not to mention the hired security guards, whom Felicia, a homeowner in a San Antonio gated community, blames for her own feelings of vulnerability: "[I]t's a false sense of safety if you think about it, because our security people are not 'Johnny-on-the-spot,' so to speak, and anybody who wants to jump the gate could jump the gate. . . . There's a perception of safety that may not be real, that could potentially leave one more vulnerable if there was ever an attack," Low, Behind the Gates, 53. 46 Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 64. surprised to find that "those least in danger are the most afraid." 47 For Ahmed (reading Heidegger), "Fear projects us from the present into a future. But the feeling of fear presses us into that future as an intense bodily experience in the present. One sweats, one's heart races, one's whole body becomes a space of unpleasant intensity." 48 Even when fear does the work of displacing the anxiety of Being-towards-death onto a determinate fearful object, the very threat of this object coming close or passing by destabilizes the affective structure of fear, troubling the distinction between fear and anxiety. Certain objects, such as gates and walls, can "become sticky, or saturated with affect, as sites of personal and social tension." Hence the desire for the gate, even or especially when it is exposed as a "fallacy" that not only fails to protect us but may even make us more vulnerable. The anxious fear of privileged and protected subjects "works to contain the bodies of others, a containment whose 'success' relies on its failure, as it must keep open the very grounds of fear." 49 The containment of racialized and criminalized "populations" in prisons, jails, and detention centers performs this function of both promising to keep privileged and protected "communities" safe and also intensifying the affective politics of fear. Thus, as Foucault argued in 1975, the failure of prison is also its success; the system isn't broken, this is precisely how the system "works." 50 Locking in and locking out are not separate, but rather literally interlocking gestures by which power is spatialized, subjects constituted, and affects circulated. For Ahmed, "the turning away from the object of fear also involves turning towards the object of love, who becomes a defense against the death that is apparently threatened by the object of fear. In this way, we can see that fear is that which keeps alive the fantasy of love as the preservation of life, but paradoxically only by announcing the possibility of death." 51 This is how "family values" emerge both as a defense against the threat of criminality and also as a justification or alibi for fast and slow violence against criminalized others. The hypervaluation of vulnerable (white) women and children both sutures the intimacy of shelter to the mastery of possessive dwelling, and also forecloses 47 Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 68 quoting Jason Ditton and Stephen Farrall, The Fear of Crime. 48 Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 65. 49 Ahmed,Cultural Politics of Emotion,11,67. 50 Foucault writes: "For a century and a half the prison had always been offered as its own remedy." . . . "But perhaps one should reverse the problem and ask oneself what is served by the failure of the prison; what is the use of these different phenomena that are continually being criticized," Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison, 268, 272. See also Perry Zurn, "Work and Failure: Assessing the Prisons Information Group," for a nuanced discussion of Foucault, the GIP, and failure. 51 Ahmed,Cultural Politics of Emotion,68. hospitality for those who are abandoned to poverty, racism, and carceral state violence. 52 To summarize: Levinas's account of dwelling suggests the following sketch of homeowner citizenship as an existential and ethical dilemma: a desire for the safety and intimacy of shelter from the element; a conflation of safety with security; an investment in real estate property as the concretization of shelter, safety, and intimacy; a concurrent investment in the security apparatus of the carceral state as a kind of homeowner's insurance; a disavowal of one's own mortality, and of the violence of the carceral state; a displacement of this violence onto others as a legitimate self-defense against the threat posed by strangers, and as a sign of intimacy and care for one's own family; an inevitable exposure of property values to the volatility of the market, which is both necessary to measure and increase the value of one's property, and also a constitutive risk to the value of property, personhood, and intimacy with others. The very conditions for securing one's dwelling against the elemental insecurity of the city both compound the feeling of vulnerability to harm and also displace it though an investment in state and structural violence. The fact that most of this violence is passive and slow does not make it any less murderous. Nor does the affective structure of fear and love provide an alibi for the containment of criminalized others in carceral enclosures.

How do we work our way through this impasse? Can we imagine a form of hospitality that would abolish the structure of homeowner citizenship and the carceral state that incentivizes and rewards it?

Hospitality as Economic Justice

At this point in the analysis, one might be tempted to call for an ethical gesture of hospitality in which people in gated communities across America open their McMansions to people of different races and classes to encounter each other face-to-face. This would be a version of the liberal argument that the way to defeat Trumpism is for everyone to "get outside their bubble" and talk to each other as "human beings." Such an approach would-among other things-misconstrue the problem of homeowner citizenship as an individual moral drama rather than as the demand for an ethical orientation of political praxis towards social justice.

But if we read Levinas carefully and critically, we find that hospitality is not a sentimental gesture of expanding the privacy of one's own home to include the stranger. Rather, the command to give hospitality both raises and changes the stakes of dwelling by exposing the slow violence of exclusive possession as one 52 My analysis of these issues is indebted to Inderpal Grewal, "'Security Moms' in the Early Twentieth-Century United States: The Gender of Security in Neoliberalism"; McKittrick, "On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place"; Wang, "Against Innocence"; and, on the carceral politics of innocence, Willse, The Value of Homelessness. among many expressions of the temptation to murder, and by commanding the subject who dwells not merely to make room for the Other within the existing framework of habitation and representation, but to undergo a radical alteration at the level of subjectivity, materiality, and meaning. For Levinas, "No human or interhuman relationship can be enacted outside of economy; no face can be approached with empty hands and closed home." 53 This does not mean that the ownership of private property is a condition for ethical life; if this were the case, then the poor and the homeless would be excluded in advance from the possibility of ethical subjectivity. While it is possible to read Levinas in a way that aligns with liberal political thought and capitalist economics, it is also possible-and far less problematic for his ethical project as a whole-to read him as a thinker of the relation between ethical responsibility and economic justice. 54 From this perspective, the ethical command to hospitality is not just a command to open one's home to the other, but to transform the structure of dwelling from a site of possession, mastery, and representation, into an opening for the creation of a world in common. 55 What does it mean, ethically and politically, to put the world in common? First, it means acknowledging the constitutive possibility of murder at the heart of private property. 56 Second, it means learning to fear one's own capacity for violence more than one fears violence from others. Third, it means taking Levinas seriously when he writes, in "The I and the Totality," that "the moral conditions of thought . . . are realized in the work of economic justice." 57 For Levinas, the demand for justice comes from a third party who opens a political dimension in the midst of ethical responsibility. 58 Because there is more than one other in the world, the meaning of my actions cannot be determined by my own will, nor even by my ethical response to the Other; it is also shaped by what I owe to the third party who might otherwise be excluded from both the intimacy of the dwelling and the infinity of the face-to-face. Levinas writes: "For me to realize my injustice-for me to glimpse the possibility of justice-a new situation is required: someone must ask me for an accounting." 59 This accounting 53 Levinas,Totality and Infinity,172. 54 The debate over Levinas's alleged liberalism goes beyond the scope of this article. For helpful contributions to this debate, see Victoria Tahmasebi, "Does Levinas Justify or Transcend Liberalism?: Levinas on Human Liberation"; Annabel Herzog, "Is Liberalism All We Need'?: Levinas's Politics of Surplus"; and Stauffer, "How Much Does That Weigh?" 55 This includes an alteration at the level of language and representation: "To speak is to make the world common, to create commonplaces. Language does not refer to the generality of concepts, but lays the foundations for a possession in common, " Levinas Totality and Infinity,76. 56 See Dilts, "To Kill a Thief." 57 Levinas, The Levinas Reader, 17. 58 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 212-15. 59 Levinas,The Levinas Reader,30. is indispensable for social and political critique; it requires not only language or discourse, but also calculation, analysis, perhaps even pie charts and graphs. Consider, for example, the Movement for Black Lives, which demands accountability for homicidal police violence, but also reparations for slavery and other forms of injustice against black people, such as housing redlining and mass incarceration. The Movement demands "economic justice for all," including a "progressive restructuring of tax codes," "federal and state job programs," the "right to restored land, clean air, clean water and housing," and the right for workers to organize." 60 It further demands "investments in the education, health and safety of Black people," and "divestment from exploitative forces including prisons, fossil fuels, police, surveillance and exploitative corporations." 61 In short, the Movement for Black Lives demands the abolition of the racist, colonial, sexist, heterosexist, and ableist structure of the carceral state. The Movement for Black Lives initially emerged in response to the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin in a Florida gated community. Three black women-Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi-began circulating the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, which grew from a moment into a movement as people across the country protested the murder of Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Renisha McBride, Rekia Boyd, Aiyana Jones, and many others, some of whose names we say and repeat more than others. Protesters occupied highways, city streets, and shopping malls, shouting "I Can't Breathe" and "Say Her Name," and laying their bodies on the ground for 4 ½ minutes to mark the 4 ½ hours that Mike Brown's dead body lay in the street. 62 If we focus for a moment on the murder of Mike Brown and the non-indictment of police officer Darren Wilson-without forgetting the many other black lives lost to police violence and extrajudicial killing-then the connection between homeowner citizenship and the extraction of wealth from racialized and criminalized communities becomes evident, as does the ethical and political meaning of hospitality, not as the philanthropic gesture of a privileged subject, but as a collective remaking of the world through the embodied agency of (Black) feminist others.

St. Louis is the location of the first ever gated streets, beginning with Lucas Place in 1851, and expanding to include 47 private developments designed by the same city planner over the next 50 years. 63 By 1982, there were 427 so-called "private places" in St. Louis, each with its own "covenant" to spell out the terms 60 Movement for Black Lives, "Economic Justice." 61 Movement for Black Lives, "Invest-Divest." 62 For a more expansive account of the Black Lives Matter movement, see Alicia Garza, "A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement"; Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation; and Cathy J. Cohen and Sarah J. Jackson, "Ask a Feminist: A Conversation with Cathy J. Cohen on Black Lives Matter, Feminism, and Contemporary Activism." 63 Low,Behind the Gates,14,248. of collective private ownership of streets, sewage systems, and so forth. One of the reasons why large-scale public housing projects like Pruitt-Igoe failed to provide decent housing for low-income people is that the tax base in St. Louis was so limited, and state and federal governments did not provide funding for basic maintenance. 64 Pruitt-Igoe was destroyed in stages between 1972 and 1976, just twenty years after it was built. Architectural historian Charles Jencks calls this "the day Modern architecture died." 65 but we could just as well call it the day neoliberal architecture was born, giving rise to Oscar Newman's concept of defensible space, the design ethos of CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design), Broken Windows policing, and other experiments in the neoliberal aesthetics of security. 66 As "private places" flourished in St. Louis, municipalities like Ferguson had to rely on a much smaller tax base to pay for basic services and amenities such as sanitation and roads. These municipalities turned to fees and fines as a revenue source, criminalizing activities such as one's "manner of walking along roadway." According to the Justice Department's 2015 report on Ferguson, 95% of "manner of walking" charges from 2011 to 2013 were issued to black people. One of these people was Michael Brown. The penalty for an inappropriate "manner of walking" in Ferguson could be up to three months in jail, a fine of up to $1,000, or both. 67 For those unable to pay their fines on time, new fines and fees compounded the debt; for example, one Black woman who was initially charged $151 in parking fines ended up paying $550 over a span of seven years, and she still owed another $541. 68 The Department of Justice report on Ferguson found unequivocally that the city's policing practices were driven by the demand for revenue rather than by public safety. Indeed, as Mike Brown's death painfully demonstrates, the safety of black residents was directly undermined by law enforcement. As Kevin Seltzer, a black resident of Ferguson, told the L.A. Times: "Certain things make you a target. . . . If you walk with a book bag you're suspicious, if you're walking slow-it's stupid stuff." Seltzer explained: "We called it walking black. . . . You would leave out of your house to go to the store and might not make it back." 69 Let's return to the passage I quoted from Levinas a moment ago, reading it this time in the context of Ferguson:

All the freedom of inhabitation depends on the time that, for the inhabitant, still always remains. The incommensurable, that is the incomprehensible format of the surrounding medium leaves time. The distance with regard to the element to which the I is given over menaces it in its dwelling only in the future. For the moment the present is only consciousness of danger, fear, which is feeling par excellence. 70

When you can't leave your house without the fear-not to mention the well-documented risk-of not making it back without police harassment, arrest, or even death, your house may no longer function as a home that shelters and supports your dwelling. Rather, "the time that, for the inhabitant, still always remains," may feel like it's collapsing into a suffocating present that threatens to dissolve your incommensurability with the menacing anonymity of the il y a. From the social location of those who are targeted for caging rather than protected by gating, it is not the city that threatens with elemental indeterminacy, but rather the security forces that continually police the boundary between those who must live and those who may die, extracting wealth from the latter to pay for their own surveillance and punishment.

The possibility of a future beyond the expectation of imminent danger rests not with the assertion of masterful possession, nor with the acquisition of the middle-class values built into "defensible space" 71 but rather with collective grassroots movements like Black Lives Matter, where people who may or may not own real estate offer each other hospitality in the streets, laying their bodies on the ground to honor the dead, and protecting each other's vulnerable bodies from cars, police, and impatient shoppers. African American anthropologist Donna Auston writes movingly of her own experience participating in a die-in at the 2014 annual meeting of the AAA: I have never died before . . .

We gathered a few minutes before the scheduled time, as instructions for how to begin arranging our standing bodies around the rotunda were whispered from ear to ear. "If you are planning to die, please make your way into the center of the circle, those who prefer to watch on the outside." At exactly 12:28 P.M. we lay down on the immaculate marble floor in unison. Immediately, I felt my throat close and the rush of tears that I fought to hold back. "Dead women don't cry," I thought to myself, as I immediately became aware of my breath. Almost against my will, it felt-for dead women don't breathe either-my lungs insisted on continuing to fill with air. As my lungs expanded so forcefully, I shed more tears as I thought of the violence and brutality with which Daniel Pantaleo literally squeezed the life out of Eric Garner. Garner, an asthmatic, was placed in an illegal chokehold and gradually robbed of air while he screamed repeatedly-over and over and over again-"I can't breathe."

Dying, it turns out, changed everything. I died in that hotel so that we might be able to live. As I lay on that polished floor feigning death I heard off in the distance the voice of a Dickens character recalling me to life. Dying in that lobby staunched the bleeding in my heart, patched it hastily and returned it to me. Dying put me back in touch with the sheer physicality of my body, and enabled me to reach both hands through the numbness and feel my emotions as they moved between my fingers. Empowered by my renewed sensuality, for the first time in I don't know how long, I just felt. Instead of attempting to stop the intake of air I inhaled slowly, deeply, and dedicated every single breath to Eric Garner. I relished in the heat of the tears that now welled up behind my still-closed eyelids and offered each of them to Mamie Till and Lesley McSpadden. In death, I rediscovered life-and emerged with a renewed sense of the urgency to resist. And upon my resurrection, still at a loss for words, I sought expression in physical contact. I found the eyes of my sister-friend in the still awakening crowd, and instinctively-compulsively even-sought the only release that seemed powerful enough to carry the sheer enormity of my emotional state in that moment. In silence, we picked our way toward one another and embraced. . . .

I died that day because I am determined to live. 72

This is what hospitality looks like in the carceral state. Not the masculine subject relying on the discretion of a feminine Other to open his home to the stranger, but rather Black feminists of all genders and sexualities, supported by allies and accomplices, creating and holding space for each other in solidarity against the logic and material infrastructure of the carceral state, collectively oriented towards the possibility of a world to be shared in common. The intimacy of this space is not produced by the discreet modesty of what Levinas calls the feminine Other, but rather the obstinate presence of bodies yelling, "Whose streets? OUR STREETS!"-reclaiming the city not as private property but as a shared place of unexpected encounters and mutual support. It is produced by the courageous vulnerability of people standing with their backs to honking cars so that others may die-in together, sharing breath in a space from which too many others have been eliminated. This is what it means to dwell and to offer hospitality in the carceral state, against the carceral state, and beyond the carceral state.

Such an interpretation of hospitality may be unorthodox in Levinas studies, but there are nevertheless good scholarly reasons for taking his thought in this direction. If we insist on separating out the moments of being welcomed and supported by a feminine Other, dwelling as an autonomous subject, and offering hospitality to a stranger or absolute Other who is implicitly masculine, if only by contrast with the feminine Other, then we risk tying ourselves in knots trying to explain how ethical responsibility presupposes a pre-ethical or non-ethical dependence on others who are mysteriously excluded from ethical alterity, or how hospitality presupposes property ownership, such that I have something to give to the Other, in which case it would seem that impoverished subjects are less capable of hospitality than wealthy subjects. Not only are such conclusions pernicious, but they are also based on a reductive reading of Totality and Infinity as an allegorical progression from infancy to (masculine) maturity. The collective practice of holding space for one another in the streets and in other sites of racialized privilege such as shopping centers and hotel lobbies challenges us as readers of Levinas to understand giving and receiving hospitality as an asymmetrical but shared and simultaneous practice in which one need not possess property to give in material ways-for example, by helping to shut down an intersection by placing one's body in the way of traffic, or by distracting an angry counter-protestor so that others can march in the streets more safely. If we read Levinas in this way, then the fraught distinction between ethics and politics in his work becomes less an opposition or even an alternation than an interweaving of ethical and political dimensions, which is suggested by Levinas's claim that the "third party looks at me in the eyes of the Other-language is justice. It is not that there first would be the face, and then the being it manifests or expresses would concern himself with justice; the epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity." 73 This reading of Levinas puts his work in conversation with bell hooks's reflections on homeplace as "a community of resistance" where "black women and men can renew their spirits and recover themselves." 74 And it challenges us to dismantle the structure of "whiteness as property" that sutures personhood to whiteness and property ownership as a way of justifying white impunity and foreclosing the ethical command of racialized Others. 75 Levinas's account of dwelling and hospitality is not sufficient to account for the complexity of racist spatial violence in the carceral state, nor for the collective transformation of meaning and materiality in radical social movements like Black Lives Matter, but his insight into the ambiguity of dwelling as a site of shelter, mastery, and ethical responsibility may help us as philosophers to understand what is at stake in such violence and to amplify transformative justice movements with our own words and deeds.