Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 224
Trim: 6 x 9⅜
978-0-8476-9252-1 • Hardback • December 1998 • $132.00 • (£102.00)
978-0-8476-9253-8 • Paperback • November 1998 • $28.00 • (£21.95)
978-1-4616-4267-1 • eBook • November 1998 • $26.50 • (£19.95)
Kelly Oliver is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Family Values: Subjects Between Nature and Culture (1997) and Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy's Relation to "the Feminine"(1995).
Chapter 1 Introduction
Part 2 Part I: Abject Fathers
Chapter 3 The Morality of American Manhood, Responsibility and Virility
Chapter 4 Fatherhood and the Promise of Ethics
Chapter 5 Abjection in Fassbinder's Dispair and Polanski's The Tenant
Part 6 Part II: Desiring Mother
Chapter 7 Kristeva's Imaginary Father as a Screen for the Desiring Mother
Chapter 8 Recognition, Witnessing, and Identity: Drucilla Cornell on Family Law
Chapter 9 Face to Face With the Mother: Alterity in Bergman's Persona
Part 10 Part III: Subjectivity Without Subjects
Chapter 11 Fractal Politics: How to Use the Subject
Chapter 12 Between Soma and Psyche: Kristeva and the Crisis in Meaning
Chapter 13 Subjectivity Without Subjects: Circulation from Vision to Visions
Chapter 14 Beyond Recognition: Witnessing the Other Otherwise in Varda's Vagabond
Chapter 15 Notes
Chapter 16 Bibliography
Chapter 17 Index
Subjectivity without Subjects takes on the much-needed project of theorizing identity and subjectivity as loving openness to difference. Oliver argues that theories of witnessing can overcome the limitations of a Hegelian notion of recognition by acknowledging when recognition is impossible. Her account of a subject as an open system provides a response to contemporary debates about responsibility and agency that avoids the trap of conceiving subjects as either completely active or passive. Oliver's reading of such events as the Million Man March and various films provide practical applications of the theoretical points she makes, rendering this book wonderfully accessible to the student and layperson as well as refreshingly concrete.
— Tamsin Lorraine, Swarthmore College
Oliver reaches beyond the limits of professional philosophy without impairing her ability to be theoretically sophisticated.
— Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy
In her brilliant new book, Kelly Oliver shows us why feminists were so right to insist that the personal is political. Oliver provides us with a convincing argument that our basic ideas of mothers and fathers have left us in a world of subjectivity without subjects. Only by confronting the heart of the matter of personal life can we develop an approach to a feminist politics of liberation that might lead all of us to be significantly less discontented.
— Drucilla Cornell, Rutgers University