Kelly Oliver

W. Alton Jones Chair of Philosophy with appointments in African-American and Diaspora Studies, Film Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies

Degrees

BA, Philosophy, and Communications, Gonzaga University, 1979
PhD, Philosophy, Northwestern University, 1987

Research Area

Period and Figures: 19th and 20th Century Continental Philosophy, and Contemporary French Philosophy, particularly Derrida and Kristeva. Topics: Subjectivity, Language, Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, Feminism, Theories of Oppression, Film Theory. Read my trajectory of research.

In October 2009, I gave a keynote address at the 25th Anniversary Hypatia Conference in Seattle. The lecture is available as a podcast or you can watch it (and other videos) on my vimeo channel. I was also recently interviewed on the ABC News show "World View." That interview, which focuses on women in the military and my book Women as Weapons of War, can be viewed on the ABC website.

Click Here to hear a lecture I gave at the Vancouver Institute on 10/2/2004: "Conflicted love: Why we feel so unloved and unlovable"

Current Research

My latest book is entitled Technologies of Life and Death: From Cloning to Capital Punishment

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. To do so, it draws on the recently published seminars of Jacques Derrida to analyze the extremes of birth and dying insofar as they are mediated by technologies of life and death. With an eye to reproductive technologies, it shows how a deconstructive approach can change the very terms of contemporary debates over technologies of life and death, from cloning to surrogate motherhood to capital punishment, particularly insofar as most current discussions assume some notion of a liberal individual.

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. Technologies of Life and Death thus provides pointers for rethinking dominant philosophical and popular assumptions about nature and nurture, chance and necessity, masculine and feminine, human and animal, and what it means to be a mother or a father.

Publications

Articles

Little Hans's Little Sister
Julia Kristeva's Maternal Passions in The Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Vol. 18, no. 1, 2010.
Enhancing Evolution: Whose Body? Whose Choice? in The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 48. Spindel Supplement, 2010.
Animal Ethics: Toward an Ethics of Responsiveness in Research in Phenomenology, 40 (2010) 267-280.
Sexual Difference, Animal Difference: Derrida and Difference "Worthy of Its Name" in Hypatia, Vol. 24, no. 2, 2009.
Technologies of Violence and Vulnerability
Witnessing Subjectivity
Response to Reviews of The Colonization of Psychic Space: Towards a Psychoanalytic Social Theory in Symposia on Gender, Race and Philosophy, Vol. 4, no. 1, 2008.
Stopping the Anthropological Machine: Agamben with Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty in PhaenEx 2, no. 2, 2007.
Innocence, Perversion, and Abu Ghraib in Philosophy Today, Vol. 19, no. 53, 2007.
Animal Pedagogy: The Origin of 'Man' in Rousseau and Herder in Culture, Theory & Critique, Vol. 47, no. 2, 2006.
The Good Infection in parallax, Vol. 11, no. 3, 2005
Witnessing and Testimony in parallax, Vol. 10, no. 1, 2004

Books

Technologies of Life and Death: From Cloning to Capital Punishment, Fordham University Press, 2013
Knock me up, Knock me down: Images of Pregnancy in Hollywood Film, Columbia University Press, 2012.
Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human, Columbia University Press, 2009. (click here for an interview that features Animal Lessons)
Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex and the Media, Columbia University Press, 2007. (click here for an excerpt)
The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression, University of Minnesota Press, Fall 2004.
Noir Anxiety: Race, Sex and Maternity in Film Noir, University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Subjectivity Without Subjects, Rowman & Littlefield Press, 1998.
Family Values: Subject Between Nature and Culture, Routledge Press, 1997.
Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy's Relation to the "Feminine", Routledge Press, 1995.
Reading Kristeva, Indiana University Press, 1993.

Edited Books

Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Work of Julia Kristeva. Edited with Stacy Keltner, SUNY Press, 2009.
Living Attention: Essays in Honor of Teresa Brennan. Edited with Alice Jardine & Shannon Lundeen, SUNY Press, 2007.
Recent French Feminism, Oxford University Press, Fall 2004.
The Portable Kristeva, Columbia University Press, 2002. Between the Psyche and the Social, Rowman & Littlefield Press, 2002.
The French Feminism Reader, Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.
Enigmas: The Writing of Sarah Kofman, Cornell University Press, 1999.
Language and Liberation: Feminism, Philosophy and Language. Edited with Christina Hendricks, State University of New York Press, 1999
Feminist Interpretations of Nietzsche, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.
The Portable Kristeva, Columbia University Press, April 1997, pages 398. Editor’s Introduction, Norwegian translation, Agora, Journal for Metafysisk Spekulasjon, special issue on Kristeva, 2003, p. 34-52 (this issue made the best-seller’s list in Norway).
Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva's Writing