Kelly Oliver

Witnessing and Testimony

Contemporary debates in social theory around issues of multiculturalism have focused on the demand or struggle for recognition by marginalized or oppressed people, groups, and cultures. The work of Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth, in particular, have crystallized issues of multiculturalism and justice around the notion of recognition. In Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, I challenge what has become a fundamental tenet of this trend in debates over multiculturalism, namely, that the social struggles manifest in critical race theory, queer theory, feminist theory, and various social movements are struggles for recognition. Testimonies from the aftermath of the Holocaust and slavery do not merely articulate a demand to be recognized or to be seen. Rather, they witness to pathos beyond recognition. The victims of oppression, slavery, and torture are not merely seeking visibility and recognition, but they are also seeking witnesses to horrors beyond recognition. The demand for recognition manifest in testimonies from those othered by dominant culture is transformed by the accompanying demands for retribution and compassion.

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. In part, the book seeks to disarticulate a tension between ethics and politics that runs through these issues in order to suggest a more ethical politics by turning the force of sovereign violence back against itself. In the end, it proposes that deconstructive ethics with a psychoanalytic supplement can provide a corrective for moral codes and political cliches that turn us into mere answering machines.

Animal Ethics: Toward an Ethics of Responsiveness

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.

The Good Infection

Given the increasing influence of religious fundamentalism on politics (e.g. the Christian right in the United States or the Muslim fundamentalism associated with Al Qaeda), the question of how we can conceive of law and order, or society itself, without employing repressive ideals becomes more urgent. We need a way of conceptualizing the origin and process of idealization (which is necessary for meaning, signification and community) without recourse to the absolute moral ideals of ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’. The current rhetoric used by the United States government against terrorism employs these moral ideals as does the rhetoric used by ‘the terrorists’ against the United States.

Animal Pedagogy: The Origin of 'Man' in Rousseau and Herder

Abstract Animal metaphors and examples in texts of Rousseau and Herder appear as either ideal or abject ancestors and are thereby assimilated into the history of man. In spite of their differences, for both Rousseau and Herder, men become civilised by eating animals. And, their use of animal metaphors and illustrations belie the very distinction between man and animal that their invocation seeks to establish.

Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty (review)

In her book Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty (1998), Cathryn Vasseleu takes issue with Martin Jay’s thesis in his expansive volume Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (1994). Vasseleu persuasively argues that rather than denigrate vision, French theorists—Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Irigaray— are trying to reconceive of vision in more productive terms. Vasseleu argues that Irigaray goes further than either Merleau-Ponty or Levinas towards developing an alternative theory of vision by developing an alternative vision of light. Primarily working with Irigaray’s engagement with Merleau-Ponty and with Levinas in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993), Vasseleu shows how Irigaray develops a theory of what she calls the texture of light. Rather than reduce vision to touch, which is one of her (debatable) criticisms of MerleauPonty, on Vasseleu’s reading, Irigaray emphasizes the touch of light on the eye. It is not, then, that vision and touch are not separate senses; but rather that vision is dependent upon the sense of touch. Vasseleu describes a texture as

Earth Ethics and Creaturely Cohabitation

In this chapter, Kelly Oliver develops an ethics of earth based on terraphilia, or loving the earth, that gives rise to connectedness beyond the autonomous moral subject, beyond humanism, and beyond recognition. Terraphilia is grounded on belonging to the earth as the home that we share with all living creatures. Oliver argues that this ethos of the earth can provide the grounds for a nontotalizing, nonhomogenizing earth ethics, if we can imagine a dynamic ethics based on the response-ability of biosociality and biodiversity rather than on universal moral principles that may close down the possibility of response. Oliver argues that earth ethics opens rather than closes the possibility of response and response-ability. In this way, earth ethics operates like Heidegger’s poiesis or Derrida’s poetic as if in order to open onto the alterity of earth rather than use it up in one totalizing worldview.

The male gaze is more relevant, and more dangerous, than ever

In her canonical essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Laura Mulvey follows Freud in identifying activity with masculinity and passivity with femininity. Following Freud, she also makes a di...

Service Dogs: Between Animal Studies and Disability Studies

For at least the last thirty years, there has been an ongoing debate between animal studies and disability studies on the comparative status of highly intelligent animal species versus severely cognitively disabled human beings when it comes to membership in the moral community, which was spearheaded by Peter Singer’s claims that some animals should have more rights than some humans based on their intelligence and functionality (see Singer 1999, 2009; see also McMahan 2009). Eva Kittay and other disability scholars, especially feminists, have responded with outrage, along with compelling arguments. In this essay, I consider beings whose intelligence and functionality put them at the intersection of animal studies and disability studies, and embody some of the contradictions within both discourses, namely, service dogs. Obliquely engaging the Singer-Kittay debates, I suggest that both sides make questionable assumptions about humans and animals, which come to the fore when considering service dogs and their human companions. Specifically, I focus on the notion of functionality in relation to issues of dependence and independence in order to rethink the human-animal divide in terms of what feminist philosopher Cynthia Willett calls “interspecies ethics” (2014). While endorsing Kittay’s claim that we have an ethical responsibility to that which sustains us, I challenge her feminist ethics of dependence insofar as it is limited to interdependence between humans and discounts or disavows our dependence on nonhuman animals. The feminist insistence on acknowledging the fact that women perform most of the labor of dependence

The Severed Head: Capital Visions by Julia Kristeva (review)

The comParaTiST 37 : 2013 of essays that pay attention to the impossibility for some people to cross national and international borders with ease. Happily, Christopher Miller’s essay “The Slave Trade, La Françafrique, and the Globalization of French” locates the origins of “global French” in the history of the French slave trade, and counters an occasional celebratory “globalism” that can seem utopian when one considers the number of immigrants or refugees across the globe (whether Frenchspeaking or not) who are either not allowed to travel without an often impossibletoobtain visa, or who perish en route as “illegals,” or who are deported, due to the very real existence of national borders and border police who exclude those who are deemed to be from racially, economically or politically “undesirable” groups. Nevertheless, this brilliant volume could and should easily be used as an extremely valuable resource with which to reread and renew the teaching and study of literatures in French at a time when the very discipline of “French” has been called into question as a field of study.