Kelly Oliver
Her books include Response Ethics (2019), Carceral Humanitarianism: The Logic of Refugee Detention (2017), Hunting Girls: Sexual Violence from The Hunger Games to Campus Rape (2016), and Earth and World: Philosophy After the Apollo Missions (2015) and her most recognized work, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (2001).
First, with an eye to reproductive technologies, Oliver considers how the terms of debates over genetic engineering and cloning change if we challenge the assumption of liberal individualism at their heart.
In this book, she shows how the very terms of contemporary debates over technologies of life and death, from cloning to capital punishment change if we unseat the notion of an autonomous liberal individual.
She maintains that 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.
In the end, Oliver proposes a corrective for moral codes and political clichés that turn us into mere answering machines, namely, following Derrida, what she comes to call Response Ethics.
In Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human (Columbia University Press, 2009), Oliver argues that in the work of thinkers as diverse as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Agamben, Freud, Lacan and Kristeva, animals play a key theoretical role in defining what it means to be human.
In fact, Oliver is critical of rights-based ethical discourse that would simply expand its scope to include animals, since such a strategy would leave unquestioned assumptions about the nature of humanity on which rights depend.
Jessica Lynch, to Palestinian women suicide bombers, recent media coverage has turned them into "weapons" of war; their very bodies are imagined as dangerous.
Oliver argues that depression, shame, anger and alienation can be the result of social institutions rather than individual pathology.
She concludes that depression, shame, anger and alienation can be transformed into agency, individuality, solidarity, and community through sublimation and forgiveness.
In the course of her analysis, Oliver develops a theory of social melancholy as a counterbalance to medical and psychological discourses of women's depression.
By thinking of subjectivity as fluid, she navigates between two extremes that plague contemporary attempts to theorize difference: at the one pole, the position that I can understand anyone by just taking up her perspective, which makes communication unencumbered; and at the other, the position that I can understand no one because of radical alterity that prevents me from taking up her perspective, which makes communication impossible.
Oliver begins to explore the usefulness and limitations of the notion of recognition, and its flip side, abjection, in developing a theory of identity that opens the subject to otherness.
She does so in the context of analyzing popular culture (specifically religious forms of masculinity evident in the Promise Keepers Movement and the Million Man March), an analysis of adoption laws, and a critical engagement with films by Fassbinder, Polanski, Bergman and Varda.
In the last chapter, "Save the Mother", turning to new developments in biology, Oliver suggests a new model for conceiving of intersubjective relationships that moves us beyond the violent master-slave dialectic.
