Kelly Oliver

In my brief remarks, I consider what it means to return and rebind—that is to say, the significance of the re for Kristeva’s thought. Kristeva does not just talk about binding or birth, or unbinding or death, but rather rebinding and rebirth, suggesting that it is a retrospective return rather than an original moment that is crucial. The most significant moment, then, is not the moment of imaginary plenitude, nor the moment of originary loss, but rather the moment of rebirth that comes through rebinding after the loss of plenitude. Indeed, Kristeva’s insistence on re-turning suggests that there is no originary moment of plenitude nor of castration or loss, but rather a constant movement of compensation for a recurrent loss. By emphasizing rebinding and rebirth, she underscores not the loss as cutting wound but rather the healing power of signification, always already inherent within loss. The flip-side of separation is reattachment. And rather than just focus on the separation or cut, Kristeva looks to that which allows us to rebind and reattach in order to create relations that sustain us. Both unbinding and binding are necessary for rebinding. Thus, by focusing on rebinding, Kristeva insists on the process of unbinding and binding, and the oscillation between them.

In The Poetic Axis of Ethics, Kelly Oliver argues that in Derrida's The Beast and the Sovereign Volume II, a line of poetry from Celan becomes the axis around which Derrida's analysis of world, death, and ethics revolves: ‘Die Welt ist fort, ich muß dich tragen’ [The world is far away, I must carry you]. Oliver maintains that the Celan fragment, which is repeated in nearly every session, is not only the axis around which Derrida binds the unlikely duo Robinson-Heidegger, but also it is a performance of a certain poetic world making that Derrida proposes as a counterbalance to sovereign world building.

“The bandages signify death,” says Derrida, “the condemnation to death; when they fall away, out of use, undone, untied, untying, they signify, like a detached signifier, that the dead one is resuscitated." Like a detached signifier, indicating a metaphorical relationship between signification and the bandages. But, when we follow the metonymy of bandages in Derrida’s Death Penalty seminar volume one, the bandages appear as the figure for figuration itself. More specifically, they are a sign that needs interpretation; a sign that the bandages are detached from the body; a sign that the word, or sign, is detached from the thing

In Subjectivity without Subjects, well-known philosopher and feminist theorist Kelly Oliver looks at aspects of popular culture, film, science, and law to examine contemporary notions of paternity and maternity. Oliver studies the roles of paternal responsibility, virility, and race in such events as the Million Man March and the Promise Keeper's movement and suggests alternative ways to conceive of self-other relations and the subjective identity at stake in them. In addition she offers a detailed analysis of particular works by such well-known filmmakers as Polanski, Bergman, and Varda in developing a theory of identity that opens the subject to otherness and difference

My essay is framed by Hypatia's first special issue on Motherhood and Sexuality at one end, and by the most recent special issue (as of this writing) on the work of Iris Young, whose work on pregnant embodiment has become canonical, at the other. The questions driving this essay are: When we look back over the last twenty-five years, what has changed in our conceptions of pregnancy and maternity, both in feminist theory and in popular culture? What aspects of feminist debates from the 1970s and 1980s are still relevant today? And, how might what appear to be radical shifts in popular perceptions of pregnancy actually continue traditional values that objectify and “abjectify” the maternal body?Here, I will focus on three central elements of the revaluation of pregnancy and maternity as they show up in feminist philosophy and in popular culture: 1. The relationship between pregnancy and sexuality, both in terms of pregnant sexuality and in terms of the pregnant body as sexual object; 2. The “choice” to become a mother as a “feminist choice”; 3. The temporality of pregnancy and birth as marking something like “women's time.”

: Our stereotypes of maternity and paternity as manifest in the history of philosophy and psychoanalysis interfere with the ability to imagine loving relationships. The associations of maternity with antisocial nature and paternity with disembodied cul-ture are inadequate to set up primary love relationships. Analyzing the conflicts in these associations, I reformulate the maternal body as social and lawful, and I re-formulate the paternal function as embodied, which enables imagining our primary relationships as loving

The concepts of animal, human, and rights are all part of a philosophical tradition that trades on foreclosing the animal, animality, and animals. Rather than looking to qualities or capacities that make animals the same as or different from humans, I investigate the relationship between the human and the animal. To insist, as animal rights and welfare advocates do, that our ethical obligations to animals are based on their similarities to us reinforces the type of humanism that leads to treating animals—and other people—as subordinates. But, if recent philosophies of difference are any indication, we can acknowledge difference without acknowledging our dependence on animals, or without including animals in ethical considerations. Animal ethics requires rethinking both identity and difference by focusing on relationships and responsivity. My aim is not only to suggest an animal ethics but also to show how ethics itself is transformed by considering animals

I challenge the age-old binary opposition between human and animal, not as philosophers sometimes do by claiming that humans are also animals, or that animals are capable of suffering or intelligence, but rather by questioning the very category of “the animal” itself. This category groups a nearly infinite variety of living beings into one concept measured in terms of humans—animals are those creatures that are not human. In addition, I argue that the binary opposition between human and animal is intimately linked to the binary opposition between man and woman. Furthermore, I suggest that thinking through animal differences or differences among various living creatures opens up the possibility of thinking beyond the dualist notion of sexual difference and enables thinking toward a multiplicity of sexual differences.

In The Right to Narcissism: A Case for Im-Possible Self-Love, Pleshette DeArmitt opens the space for an alternative to origin story so popular with political philosophers, namely, the social contract, which assumes a rational and self-identical subject. She does this obliquely by deconstructing narcissism as love of the self-same, or, love of what Kristeva might call “the clean and proper self.” Like Echo interrupting Narcissus’s soliloquy of deadly self-absorbed pleasure and his solitary auto-affection upon seeing his own reflection, Pleshette interrupts the seeming proximity of self-same, the closeness of near, and the propinquity of proper by deflecting the image of Narcissus onto the voice of Echo, who comes into her own by repeating his words. How, asks Pleshette, can Echo’s reiteration of the words of another be anything more than mere repetition or reduplication? Echoing Derrida, she answers that it is through a declaration of love. Echo’s repetition of the words of Narcissus take on new meaning, and allow her to express herself, and her love, through the words of the other. After all words are words of the other. Language comes to us from the other. Echo becomes a self, a “little narcissist,” through an address from and to the other, through the appropriation and ex-appropriation of the other’s words.

As a linguist, Julia Kristeva has pioneered a revolutionary theory of the sign in its relation to social and political emancipation; as a practicing psychoanalyst, she has produced work on the nature of the human subject and sexuality, and on the "new maladies" of today's neurotic. _The Portable Kristeva_ is the only fully comprehensive compilation of Kristeva's key writings. The second edition includes added material from Kristeva's most important works of the past five years, including _The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt_, _Intimate Revolt_, and _Hannah Arendt_. Editor Kelly Oliver has also added new material to the introduction, summarizing Kristeva's latest intellectual endeavors and updating the bibliography.

In this essay, I argue that the contemporary notion of law has been reduced to regulations and disciplinary codes that do not and cannot give meaning to our emotional lives and moral sensibilities. As a result, we have increasing numbers of what I call “abysmal individuals” who suffer from a split between law—broadly conceived as that which gives form and structure to social life—and personal embodied sensations of pain and pleasure. My attempt to understand the place of Abu Ghraib within American culture leads to an analysis of our valorization of innocence and ignorance that not only becomes the grounds on which we morally (if not legally) excuse abusive behavior as “fun,” but also becomes part of the justification for condoning some forms of violence while condemning others. In addition, I argue that the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence trades on underlying assumptions about the relationship between culture and nature, technology and bodies, wherein bodies are imagined as natural and outside of the realm of law.

"... both an excellent introduction and a thoroughgoing analysis of Kristeva’s writing." —Signs "The book is a brilliant combination of a recuperative and a critical reading of Kristeva’s work." —Changes: An International Journal of Psychology & Psychotherapy "... a thorough, detailed, and critical analysis of the writings of Julia Kristeva." —Elizabeth Grosz "... the most involved and engaging study of Julia Kristeva’s work to date..." —The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory This first full-scale feminist interpretation of Kristeva’s work situates her within the context of French feminism. Oliver guides her readers through Kristeva’s intellectual formation in linguistics, Freud, Lacan, and poetics. This comprehensive introduction to Kristeva makes accessible her important contributions to philosophy, linguistics, and psychoanalytic feminism

Our stereotypes of maternity and paternity as manifest in the history of philosophy and psychoanalysis interfere with the ability to imagine loving relationships. The associations of maternity with antisocial nature and paternity with disembodied culture are inadequate to set up primary love relationships. Analyzing the conflicts in these associations, I reformulate the maternal body as social and lawful, and I reformulate the paternal function as embodied, which enables imagining our primary relationships as loving.