Kelly Oliver

Working against both Hegelian recognition and ethics based on vulnerability, I argue for response ethics or an ethics of ambivalence. While the ideal of mutual recognition is admirable, in practice, recognition is experienced as conferred by the very groups and institutions responsible for withholding it in the first place. In other words, recognition is distributed according to an axis of power that is part and parcel of systems of dominance and oppression. I both challenge the concept of vulnerability as exclusive to, or constitutive of, humanity, on the one hand, and criticize the concept for leveling differences in levels of vulnerability, on the other.

Editor's introduction -- Author's introduction -- Interrelational subjects and social sublimation -- The gestation of the other in phenomenology -- The look of love and ecological subjectivity -- Social melancholy, shame and sublimation -- Responsible subjects and witnessing -- Witnessing subjectivity and testimony -- Witnessing, recognition, and response ethics -- Between ethics and politics -- Response ethics and the nonhumans -- Animal ethics: toward an ethics of responsiveness -- Service dogs: between animal studies and disability studies -- Earth ethics and creaturely cohabitation -- Witnessing in the age of spectacle -- Death as a penalty and instant death -- Rape as spectator sport and creepshot entertainment -- The spectacle of war -- Bibliography -- Index.

Julia Kristeva was born in 1941 in Bulgaria. She was educated by French nuns, studied literature and worked as a journalist before going to Paris in 1966 to do graduate work with Lucien Goldmann and Roland Barthes. While in Paris she finished her doctorate in French literature, became involved in the influential journal Tel Quel, and began psychoanalytic training. In 1979 she finished her training as a psychoanalyst. Currently, Kristeva is a professor of linguistics as the University of Paris VII and a regular visiting professor at Columbia University. In addition to her work as a practicing psychoanalyst and her theoretical writings, Kristeva is a novelist.

“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

With the upsurge in various forms of religion, especially dogmatic forms that kill in the name of good versus evil, there is an urgent need for intellectuals to acknowledge and analyze the role of religion in contemporary culture and politics. If there is to be any hope for peace, we need to understand how and why religion becomes the justification for violence. In a world where religious intolerance is growing, and the divide between the secular and the religious seems to be expanding, Julia Kristeva’s writings bridge the gap and once again provide a path where others have seen only an impasse. Her approach is unique in its insistent attempt to understand the violence both contained and unleashed by religion. Moreover, she rearticulates a notion of the sacred apart from religious dogmatism, a sense of the sacred that is precisely lacking in fundamentalism.

In this chapter the author tracks the ethics of deconstruction as it moves through The Beast and the Sovereign, to see where it leads us and where it leaves us; and examines the role of the machine in Derrida's deconstructive project, particularly as it operates in this seminar. He shows how machine is another nickname for the operation of difference in so far as it is an undecidable figure or concept that both works for and against the binary oppositions and dichotomies so popular in our culture, most especially Nature and Culture, Mind and Body, and Man and Animal. Derrida's invocation of the machine has powerful implications for thinking about ethics and what he calls the distinction between morality and ethics, a distinction that ultimately cannot be maintained but is nevertheless necessary to make, for the sake of thinking through ethics itself and for the hope of ethical thinking.

Nel Noddings, one of the central figures in the contemporary discussion of ethics and moral education, argues that caring--a way of life learned at home--can be extended into a theory that guides social policy. Tackling issues such as capital punishment, drug treatment, homelessness, mental illness, and abortion, Noddings inverts traditional philosophical priorities to show how an ethic of care can have profound and compelling implications for social and political thought. Instead of beginning with an ideal state and then describing a role for home and family, this book starts with an ideal home and asks how what is learned there may be extended to the larger social domain. Noddings examines the tension between freedom and equality that characterized liberal thought in the twentieth century and finds that--for all its strengths--liberalism is still inadequate as social policy. She suggests instead that an attitude of attentive love in the home induces a corresponding responsiveness that can serve as a foundation for social policy. With her characteristic sensitivity to the individual and to the vulnerable in society, the author concludes that any corrective practice that does more harm than the behavior it is aimed at correcting should be abandoned. This suggests an end to the disastrous war on drugs. In addition, Noddings states that the caring professions that deal with the homeless should be guided by flexible policies that allow practitioners to respond adequately to the needs of very different clients. She recommends that the school curriculum should include serious preparation for home life as well as for professional and civic life. Emphasizing the importance of improving life in everyday homes and the possible role social policy might play in this improvement, _Starting at Home_ highlights the inextricable link between the development of care in individual lives and any discussion of moral life and social policy

Between the Psyche and the Social is the first collection that specifically features the field of psychoanalytic social theory emerging in and between psychoanalysis, feminism, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, and across the disciplines of philosophy, literary, film, and cultural studies. This collection of essays takes the psychoanalytic study of social oppression in some new directions by engaging—indeed, stirring up—unconscious fantasies and ethical tensions at the heart of social subjectivity