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49Love Bites! Or Taking Ethics to Heart: Response to Critics on Animal Lessons (review)Environmental Philosophy 9 (2): 187-199. 2012.
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31Strange KinshipEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 13 (1): 101-120. 2008.The development of the emerging science of ecology influenced the later work of both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Both use zoology, biology, and ecology intheir attempts to navigate between mechanism and vitalism, but their interpretations and use of the life sciences take them on divergent paths and lead them to radically different conclusions regarding the relationship between man and animal. This essay takes up the problematic of kinship with animals in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Beyond the…Read more
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43Tropho Ethics: Derrida’s Homeophatic PurityThe Harvard Review of Philosophy 15 (1): 37-57. 2007.
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68Subjectivity and Subject Position: The Double Meaning of WitnessingStudies in Practical Philosophy 3 (2): 132-143. 2003.
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92Enhancing evolution:Whose body? Whose choice?Southern Journal of Philosophy 48 (s1): 74-96. 2010.This essay critically engages the work of John Harris and Jürgen Habermas on the issue of genetic engineering. It does so from the standpoint of women's embodied experience of pregnancy and parenting, challenging the choice–chance binary at work in these accounts
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2Between the psyche and the social: psychoanalytic social theory (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield. 2002.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 subj…Read more
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25Alterity within bergman'spersona: Face to face with the other (review)Journal of Value Inquiry 29 (4): 521-532. 1995.
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135Julia Kristeva’s Maternal PassionsJournal of French and Francophone Philosophy 18 (1): 1-8. 2010.This article critically engages Julia Kristeva’s latest work on maternal passion as an antidote to what she calls “feminine fatigue.” Oliver elaborates, criticizes, and expands Kristeva’s view that maternity can be a model for thinking about passion and its relation to creativity and even to ethics. She relates Kristeva’s thinking about feminine fatigue to contemporary feminism in the United States.&nbsp
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156Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex, and the MediaColumbia University Press. 2007.Ever since Eve tempted Adam with her apple, women have been regarded as a corrupting and destructive force. The very idea that women can be used as interrogation tools, as evidenced in the infamous Abu Ghraib torture photos, plays on age-old fears of women as sexually threatening weapons, and therefore the literal explosion of women onto the war scene should come as no surprise. From the female soldiers involved in Abu Ghraib to Palestinian women suicide bombers, women and their bodies have beco…Read more
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97Conflicted loveHypatia 15 (3): 1-18. 2000.: 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 primar…Read more
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79The look of loveHypatia 16 (3): 56-78. 2001.: I begin to suggest an alternative to the notion of vision based in alienation and hostility put forth by Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan. I diagnose this alienating vision as a result of a particular alienating notion of space presupposed by their theories. I develop Irigaray's comments about light and air to suggest an alternative notion of space that opens up the possibility that vision connects us to others rather than alienates us from them.
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235Animal Ethics: Toward an Ethics of ResponsivenessResearch in Phenomenology 40 (2): 267-280. 2010.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 treatin…Read more
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87Sexual Difference, Animal Difference: Derrida and Difference “Worthy of Its Name”Hypatia 24 (2): 54-76. 2009.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 i…Read more
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42Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction, A Love StoryJournal of French and Francophone Philosophy 23 (2): 35-44. 2015.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-a…Read more
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89Kristeva’s Sadomasochistic Subject and the Sublimation of ViolenceJournal of French and Francophone Philosophy 21 (1): 13-26. 2013.Do representations of violence incite or quell violent desires and actions? This question--the question of the relation between mimesis and catharsis--is as old as Western Philosophy itself. In this essay, I attempt to think through how Kristeva might describe the difference between representations of violence that perpetuate violent desires and actions versus representations of violence that sublimate violent desires and thereby prevent violent actions
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14Women: The Secret Weapon of Modern Warfare?Hypatia 23 (2): 1-16. 2008.The images from wars in the Middle East that haunt us are those of young women killing and torturing. Their media circulated stories share a sense of shock. They have both galvanized and confounded debates over feminism and women's equality. And, as Oliver argues in this essay, they share, perhaps subliminally, the problematic notion of women as both offensive and defensive weapons of war, a notion that is symptomatic of fears of women's “mysterious” powers.
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44Ecological Subjectivity: Merleau-Ponty and a Vision of EthicsStudies in Practical Philosophy 4 (1): 102-125. 2004.
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18The Portable Kristeva (edited book)Columbia University Press. 2002.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 Se…Read more
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72Bodies against the law: Abu ghraib and the war on terror (review)Continental Philosophy Review 42 (1): 63-80. 2009.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 Americ…Read more
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16The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of OppressionU of Minnesota Press. 2004.We are, Julia Kristeva writes, strangers to ourselves; and indeed much of contemporary theory describes the human condition as one of alienation. Eloquently arguing that we cannot explain the developement of individuality or subjectivity apart from its social context, Kelly Oliver makes a powerful case for recognizing the social aspects of alienation and the psychic aspects of oppression.
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15Book review: Tamsin Lorraine. Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in visceral philosophy. Ithaca: New York: Cornell university press, 1999 (review)Hypatia 16 (1): 100-102. 2001.
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68Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-BindIndiana University Press. 1993."... 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…Read more
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14Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory (review)International Studies in Philosophy 28 (4): 138-139. 1996.
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30Conflicted LoveHypatia 15 (3): 1-18. 2000.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 re…Read more
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19The Look of LoveHypatia 16 (3): 56-78. 2001.I begin to suggest an alternative to the notion of vision based in alienation and hostility put forth by Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan. I diagnose this alienating vision as a result of a particular alienating notion of space presupposed by their theories. I develop lrigaray's comments about light and air to suggest an alternative notion of space that opens up the possibility that vision connects us to others rather than alienates us from them.
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Continental Philosophy |