Subjectivity Without Subjects - by Kelly Oliver (Paperback)

About the Book

What do the Promise Keeper's Movement and the Million Man March reveal about our notions of masculinity and paternal responsibility? What can such films as Varda's Vagabond and Bergman's Persona tell us about contemporary notions of masculinity and femininity? In this provocat...

Book Synopsis

In Subjectivity Without Subjects, well-known philosopher and feminist theorist, Kelly Oliver looks at aspects of popular culture, film, science and law to examine contemporary notions of paternity and maternity.

Oliver studies the roles of paternal responsibility, virility and race in such events as the Million Man March and the growth of the Promise Keeper's movement and suggests alternative ways to conceive of self-other relations and the subjective identity at stake in them. In addition she offers a detailed analysis of particular works by such well-known film-makers as Polanski, Bergman and Varda in developing a theory of identity that opens the subject to otherness or difference.

Review Quotes

"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, author of Today's Struggles, Tomorrow's Revolutions

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.

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.

Oliver reaches beyond the limits of professional philosophy without impairing her ability to be theoretically sophisticated.

About the Author

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).