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.”