Kelly Oliver
Kelly Oliver (born 1958) is an American philosopher and novelist whose work contributes to the fields of feminism, film theory, media studies, political philosophy, and ethics. She is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Oliver received her PhD in Philosophy from Northwestern University in 1987, and taught in the Philosophy departments at the University of Texas at Austin and SUNY Stony Brook prior to coming to Vanderbilt in 2005. Her most recent theoretical projects include a book on the use of animal images and metaphors in the history of philosophy and another on images of pregnancy and the pregnant body in Hollywood films.[1]
Works
Oliver is a prolific author of dozens of scholarly articles, and several books, and six edited volumes. Her authored books include Animal Lessons: how they teach us to be human, Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex and the Media, The Colonization of Psychic Space: a Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression, Noir Anxiety: Race, Sex and Maternity in Film Noir, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, Subjectivity without Subjects, Family Values: Subjects between Nature and Culture, Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy's Relation to the 'Feminine', and Reading Kristeva.[1]
Kelly Oliver is also a novelist and the author of The Jessica James Mysteries, Wolf, Coyote, and Fox.
Earth and World: Philosophy After the Apollo Missions (2015)
In Earth and World (Columbia University Press, 2015), Oliver explores some philosophical reflections on Earth and World, particularly insofar as they relate to the Globe, and thereby to Globalization. She frames the project by analyzing the reactions to the first pictures of Earth from space taken during the Apollo missions of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Examining the rhetoric surrounding these photographs, Oliver identifies a tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism that sets the tone for this book. In the following chapters, starting with Immanuel Kant, Oliver follows a path of thinking our relations to each other through our relation to the Earth, from Kant's politics based on the fact that we share the limited surface of the earth, through Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger's warnings that by leaving the surface of the earth, we endanger not only politics but also our very being as human beings, to Jacques Derrida's last meditations on the singular world of each human being. This trajectory leads us from Kant's universal laws that apply to every human being equally because we share the surface of the earth, through Arendt's insistence on a plurality of worlds constituted through relationships between people, and Heidegger's thoroughly relational account of world, to Derrida's radical claim that each singular human being—perhaps each singular living being—constitutes is not only a world, but also the world. In all of these thinkers, Oliver argues that we find a resistance to world citizenship and globalism. And yet, there, she claims that we also find the resources to think the Earth against the Globe in the hopes of grounding a global ethics on the Earth. The very meaning of Earth and World hang in the balance. So too does our relationship to Earth, World, and to each other. The guiding question that motivates Oliver's book is: How can we share the Earth with those with whom we do not even share a world? The answer to this question, she claims, is crucial in terms of figuring out whether there is any chance for global peace through, rather than against, both cultural diversity and the biodiversity of the planet. She asks: Can we imagine an ethics and politics of the Earth that is not totalizing and homogenizing? Can we develop global ethics and politics that embrace otherness and difference rather than coopting them to take advantage of a global market? How can we avoid the dangers of globalization while continuing to value cosmopolitanism? Her answer is that in various ways, Kant, Arendt, Heidegger and Derrida warn of the dangers of globalism even as they endorse cosmopolitanism. Oliver's book is guided by their discussions of Earth and World and our relations to both, not only to clarify these often ambiguous terms in their work, but also to develop ways of reconceiving both ethics and politics in relation to Earth and World. In the conclusion, Oliver returns to the images of Earth and the contradictory rhetorics of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in order to address the tension head-on, and to further elaborate her Response Ethics.
Technologies of Life and Death: From Cloning to Capital Punishment (2013)
In Technologies of Life and Death: From Cloning to Capital Punishment (Fordham 2013), Oliver analyzes the extremes of birth and death and insofar as they are mediated by technologies of life and death. First, with an eye to reproductive technologies, Oliver considers how the terms of debates over genetic engineering and cloning change if we challenge the assumption of liberal individualism at their heart. In this book, she shows how the very terms of contemporary debates over technologies of life and death, from cloning to capital punishment change if we unseat the notion of an autonomus liberal individual. She argues that the central aim of this book is to approach contemporary problems raised by technologies of life and death as ethical issues that call for a more nuanced approach than mainstream philosophy can provide. She maintains that the ethical stakes in these debates are never far from political concerns such as enfranchisement, citizenship, oppression, racism, sexism, and the public policies that normalize them. Oliver disarticulates a tension between ethics and politics that runs through these issues in order to suggest a more ethical politics by turning the force of sovereign violence back against itself. In the end, Oliver proposes a corrective for moral codes and political clichés that turn us into mere answering machines, namely, following Derrida, what she comes to call Response Ethics.
Knock me up, Knock me down : Images of Pregnancy in Hollywood Film (2010)
In Knock me up, Knock me down: images of pregnancy in Hollywood Film and Popular Culture (Columbia UP 2010), Oliver analyses recent films produced in the U.S. dealing with pregnancy, including Junebug, Quinceañera, Children of Men, Bella, Saved!, The Waitress, Knocked-Up, Juno, Baby Mama, and Away We Go, among others. She examines the tensions between progressive and conservative elements in these films. Specifically, Oliver examines the ways in which these films redeploy the rhetofic of choice in the service of family values. In addition, she discusses apparent anxieties in some of these films about new reproductive technologies that uncouple sex and reproduction. Oliver analyzes representations of gender, race, sex, sexuality in relation to pregnancy. She argues that what she calls "momcom" is a new subgenre of romcom. And she examines images of pregnancy in horror and science fiction films, particularly in terms of fears of miscegenation. Overall, Oliver argues that the pregnant belly has become a screen for fears and desires associated with sex, race, gender and sexuality.
Animal Lessons (2009)
In Animal Lessons, Oliver analyzes the use of animal examples throughout the history of philosophy, arguing that in the work of thinkers as diverse as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Agamben, Freud, Lacan and Kristeva, animals play a key theoretical role in defining what it means to be human. While philosophers have historically been interested in maintaining a strong distinction between the animal and the human (often on the basis of reason), Oliver's analyses of these major thinkers suggests that much of philosophical discourse about humanity and ethics depends upon lessons learned from animal behavior.[2] Her point, however, is not that animals and humans are exactly the same, but instead that being human is dependent upon a particular relation to animals, and thus that the great chasm that Western philosophy posits between the two is untenable.[3] While Oliver questions the viability of a strict animal/human dichotomy, however, Animal Lessons does not follow the typical trajectory of ethical work on animal rights. In fact, Oliver is critical of rights-based ethical discourse that would simply expand its scope to include animals, since such a strategy would leave un-questioned assumptions about the nature of humanity on which rights depend. In many cases, Oliver suggests, such assumptions, which form the foundation of much ethical theory through concepts such as property or desert (philosophy), are themselves inextricably connected with our thinking about animals.[3]
Thus, while Animal Lessons does not approach animal ethics in the traditional mode, Oliver argues that many of our most pressing contemporary ethical questions are connected with claims about animals. Atrocities of torture and genocide, for example, are frequently justified by comparing their victims to animals. As Oliver puts it in an interview about the book,
"The man-animal binary is not just any opposition; it is the one used most often to justify violence, not only man's violence to animals, but also man's violence to other people deemed like animals. Until we interrogate the history of this opposition with its exclusionary values, considering animals (or particular animals) like us or recognizing that we are also a species of animal does very little to change "how we eat the other," as Jacques Derrida might say."[3]
In the end, Oliver calls for an approach to both ethics (both animal and human) that is mindful of our constitutive relationship to animals, which she playfully calls "a 'free range' ethics that breaks out of the self-centered, exclusionary, and domineering notions of individuality, identity, and sovereignty." Such an ethics would recognize humans' mutual dependency on animals, the environment, and other humans, and thus would be less concerned with traditional problems as individual rights and obligations than with living responsibly within that relationship of dependence. She writes:
In this era of species extinction and shrinking biodiversity, military occupation and expanded torture, record wealth for the few and poverty for the rest, gated-communities and record incarceration, we need a sustainable ethics more than ever. A sustainable ethics is an ethics of limits, an ethics of conservation. Rather than assert our dominion over the earth and its creatures, this ethics obliges us to acknowledge our dependence upon them. It requires us to attend to our response-ability by virtue of that dependence. It is an ethics of the responsibility to enable responses from others, not as it has been defined—as the exclusive property of man (man responds, animals react)—but rather as it exits all around us. All living creatures are responsive.All of us belong to the earth, not in the sense of property, but rather as inhabitants of a shared planet.[4]
Women as Weapons of War (2007)
In Women as Weapons of War (Columbia University 2007), Oliver analyzes media images of women involved in violence in the Middle East and the Iraq war. Here, she examines rhetoric surrounding women's violence. From the women involved in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay prisons, to rescued Pfc. Jessica Lynch, to Palestinian women suicide bombers, recent media coverage has turned them into "weapons" of war. Women warriors are not referred to as women with weapons or women carrying bombs, but their very bodies are imagined as dangerous. Oliver links these images of what some reporters have called "equal opportunity killers more dangerous than the males" with older images of dangerous women from Hollywood films, literature, and religious traditions. She argues that these latest examples of women figured as weapons are in an important sense a continuation of stereotypes of dangerous women who use their sexuality as a deadly weapon to deceive and trap men. In one sense, it should come as no surprise that women continue to occupy the position that we have built for them discursively. At the extreme, she argues that women become weapons, literally blowing up, the "bombshell" become the bomb. Oliver places events at Abu Ghraib and in Cuba, along with their media coverage, within the historical context of Western colonial violence in order to see how they are a continuation of military practices that normalize violence, particularly in relation to women and sex. Oliver examines media representations of women involved in violence, women's liberation here and elsewhere, the role of visual recording technologies in the enterprise of war, and the ways in which we justify our own (high-tech) violence and condemn the (low-tech) violence of others. Oliver discusses new technologies of war, including photojournalism and embedded war reporting within the history of uses of technology, particularly visual technologies, within imperialist occupations. On the one hand, she shows how internet and night-camera recordings continue a long history of using visual technologies in war. And on the other hand, she discusses the ways in which new technologies give us new ways of waging war and of thinking about war.
The Colonization of Psychic Space (2004)
In The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression (University of Minnesota, 2004), engaging with work by Fanon, Kristeva and others, Oliver develops a psychoanalytic social theory of oppression, particularly racist and sexist oppression. She analyzes the effects of oppression on those affected by it, particularly within the realm of affects. Oliver argues that depression, shame, anger and alienation can be the result of social institutions rather than individual pathology. Continuing her analysis in Witnessing, she argues that we are ethically responsible for our affects and their effects on others. Oliver argues that existentialist and psychoanalytic notions of alienation cover up specific forms of racists and sexist alienation that serve as the underside of subjectivity and the human condition. Many contemporary theorists maintain that alienation and violence are constitutive of subjectivity and humanity. Here, Oliver rejects this thesis. Rather, she argues that these leveling notions of alienation and violence are symptomatic of the subject's anxiety and guilt over the oppression upon which his privileged position as subject rests and that rather than constitute subjectivity and humanity the alienation unique to oppression undermines them. Oliver maintains that sublimation and forgiveness constitute subjectivity, not alienation. Oliver explores the complex ways in which the alienation unique to oppression leads to depression, shame, anger or violence, which are misread and misdiagnosed as individual or group pathologies and then used as rationale for more violent forms of oppression. She concludes that the affects of oppression—depression, shame, anger and alienation—can be transformed into agency, individuality, solidarity, and community through sublimation and forgiveness. In the course of her analysis, Oliver develops a theory of social melancholy as a counterbalance to medical and psychological discourses of women's depression. She also develops a theory of social sublimation to explain the dynamics of the colonization of psychic space. Oliver concludes by suggesting that a model of subjectivity based on a notion of social forgiveness enables ethics in a way that models of subjectivity based on alienation cannot.
Noir Anxiety (2002)
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Witnessing (2001)
In her most influential work, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (University of Minnesota, 2001), Oliver develops a critique of recognition models of identity and proposes witnessing as an alternative. She argues that recognition models of identity and subjectivity promote false oppositions and hostilities, including the split between subjectivity and agency evoked in antifoundationalist theories. Oliver critically engages various theories of recognition (and misrecognition) from Charles Taylor's version of multiculturalism and Axel Honneth's analysis of struggles for recognition, to Jacques Lacan's notion of misrecognition and Judith Butler's theory of the performative. She argues that the demand for recognition is a symptom of the pathology of oppression that perpetuates subject-object/other and same-different hierarchies. While theories of misrecognition challenge us to be vigilant in exposing the illusion of familiarity or sameness, most of them still propose an antagonistic subject-object/other relationship. Even contemporary theories of recognition concerned with difference and the other do not move us beyond subject-centered notions of relationships. Oliver argues that rather than talk about the other—a discursive move that perpetuates the subject-other hierarchy—we should diagnose othered subjectivity. Oliver develops a theory of subjectivity taking othered subjectivity as a starting point. As an alternative to theories of recognition, she develops a theory of witnessing subjectivity. She argues that the notion of witnessing, with its double meaning as either eye-witness or bearing witness to the unseen, is more promising for describing the onset and sustenance of subjectivity. Subjectivity is born out of and sustained by the process of witnessing—the possibility of addressability and response-ability—that puts ethical obligations at its heart. This work most clearly brings together Oliver's interest in subjectivity, political agency, and ethics. Throughout this project, Oliver applies the notion of witnessing to various contemporary ethical and social problems including affirmative action, hate speech, English-only policies, and reproductive technologies, among others. This book is the beginning of the Response Ethics approach that is further developed in all of Oliver's subsequent work.
Subjectivity without Subjects (1998
In Subjectivity Without Subjects: From Abject Fathers to Desiring Mothers (Rowman & Littlefield 1998), Oliver continues to explore the relationship between images of maternity, paternity, rhetoric, subjectivity and ethics. Here, one of her central questions is: If there is no unified subject, then who is the agent of political action or change? This question has forced theorists to choose sides, for or against identity politics. Rather than choose sides, Oliver argues that we need to explore the dynamics of identity. She argues that it is premature to accept or reject identity politics until we understand how identity works and what is at stake in the politics of identity. Oliver analyzes the repressed others of contemporary notions of paternity and maternity, especially the othered body, and suggest alternative ways to conceive of self-other relations and the subjective identity at stake in them in order to begin to develop a theory of subjectivity as openness to others. By thinking of subjectivity as fluid, she navigates between two extremes that plague contemporary attempts to theorize difference: at the one pole, the position that I can understand anyone by just taking up her perspective, which makes communication unencumbered; and at the other, the position that I can understand no one because of radical alterity that prevents me from taking up her perspective, which makes communication impossible. Oliver argues that the first assumes that we are absolutely identical, which erases our differences, and the second assumes that we are absolutely different, which erases our communion. Both presume a certain solidity of the subject; both work with an oppositional notion of identity and difference; and, both seem to presume that communication requires recognition. Here, Oliver begins to explore the usefulness and limitations of the notion of recognition, and its flip side, abjection, in developing a theory of identity that opens the subject to otherness or difference. She does so in the context of analyzing popular culture (specifically religious forms of masculinity evident in the Promise Keepers Movement and the Million Man March), an analysis of adoption laws, and a critical engagement with films by Fassbinder, Polanski, Bergman and Varda. Later, she will further develop her critique of recognition in her most influential book, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition.
Family Values (1997)
In Family Values: Subjects Between Nature and Culture (Routledge 1997), Oliver continues where she left off in Womanizing Nietzsche. In this book she explores the ways that primary family relations affect subjectivity in my continued attempt to articulate a theory of subjectivity and intersubjectivity that can ground the ethical relation. Here, Oliver argues that there are contradictions at the heart of Western conceptions of maternity and paternity and the rhetoric surrounding those concepts that make our notions of relationships with ourselves and with others problematic. Using examples from philosophical texts, psychoanalytic theory, studies in biology and medicine, examples from legal cases, and popular culture, Oliver challenges notions of maternity that are associated with nature and notions of paternity that are associated with culture. By addressing familial relations as formative relationships in the development of our conceptions of ourselves as individuals in relationships, she develops novel notions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity that refigure our notions of ourselves and our notions of our relations to others. By articulating alternative ways to conceive of ourselves as subjects, Oliver develops an alternative intersubjective approach to ethics or questions of values, family values.
Womanizing Nietzsche (1995)
In Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy's Relation to the "Feminine" (Routledge 1995), Oliver continues to develop the themes of language, subjectivity, sexual difference, and ethics through an engagement with texts by Nietzsche, Derrida, Irigaray, and others. She argues that while Nietzsche and Derrida attempt to open up the notion of subjectivity so that is not autonomous and self-enclosed, they do so by excluding or appropriating femininity. In other words, while they open subjectivity onto otherness, they do so by foreclosing or appropriating specifically feminine otherness. Oliver maintains that the model of intersubjective relations operating in extreme versions of these texts is an Hegelian model stuck at the level of the master-slave fight to the death where the only options are murder or suicide. In the last chapter, "Save the Mother," turning to new developments in biology, Oliver suggests a new model for conceiving of intersubjective relationships that moves us beyond the violent master-slave dialectic.
Reading Kristeva (1993)
In Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-bind (Indiana University 1993), Oliver takes up the question of the relation between language, ethics, subjectivity and sexual difference in the context of Kristeva's large body of work. She indicates how Kristeva's notion of a subject-in-process can be useful in formulating a notion of subjectivity that allows for an explanation of women's oppression and some possibilities of overcoming that oppression. In addition, she goes beyond Kristeva's few gestures towards ethics, to suggest how the notion of a subject-in-process might ground a reformulated ethical subject. Engaging with Kristeva's distinction between the semiotic and symbolic dimensions of language, Oliver explores the liberatory potential for the revolution in poetic language for political revolution.