Kelly Oliver

File clerk, Miss Fiona Fig, desperate for any adventure to help her forget her philandering husband, becomes a spy for British Intelligence during WWI.

A Fiona Figg Mystery

Betrayal at Ravenswick

Coopted by military operations, humanitarianism has never been neutral. Rather than welcoming refugees, host countries assess the relative risks of taking them in versus turning them away, using a risk-benefit analysis that often reduces refugees to collateral damage in proxy wars fought in the war on terrorism. Carceral Humanitarianism testifies that humanitarian aid and human rights discourse are always political and partisan. Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Logics of Refugee Detention

Carceral Humanitarianism

1917. Vienna. File clerk turned British agent, Fiona Figg, is more comfortable wearing a fake mustache than a ballgown.When a royal ball ends with a royal body in the middle of the dancefloor, Fiona trades her dancing slippers for practical oxfords and sets out to investigate.As she tracks her nemesis, the Black Panther, from Vienna to the Austrian countryside, a hunting accident makes her rethink her loyalties.Can Fiona prevent the Black Panther from striking again, save her own skin, and find a decent cup of tea, all before the enemy's emperor realizes she's a spy?

Villainy in Vienna

File clerk turned secret agent Fiona Figg is up to her fake eyebrows in missing maids, jewel thieves, double agents, and high treason in 1915 Paris.

High Treason at the Grand Hotel

Jessica James is sleeping on a desk in the attic waiting for a flight home to Montana. She blames her advisor, Professor Wolfgang "Wolf" Schumtzig, "Preeminent Philosopher and World Class Dick-Head." But when he's found dead in his office, her real education begins.

A Jessica James Mystery

Wolf

Oliver (philosophy, Vanderbilt U.) does not attempt to apply psychoanalysis to oppression. Rather she transforms psychoanalytic concepts such as alienation, melancholy, and shame into social concepts by developing a psychoanalytic theory based on a notion of the individual or psyche that is thoroughly social. The psyche and the social world are so

A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression

The Colonization of Psychic Space

If James Patterson and Janet Evanovich had a love child... meet Jessica James. She's obsessed with finding an old boyfriend. But can she track him down without leading the mafia straight to him? And what about the hot Federal Marshal hellbent on stopping her? Jessica is back in another witty, fast-paced, adventure full of suspense, romance, and Diet Mountain Dew.

Cottonmouth

Steve Edwin

Between the Psyche and the Social is the first collection that specifically features the field of psychoanalytic social theory emerging in and between psychoanalysis, feminism, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, and across the disciplines of philosophy, literary, film, and cultural studies. This collection of essays takes the psychoanalytic study of social oppression in some new directions by engaging--indeed, stirring up--unconscious fantasies and ethical tensions at the heart of social subjectivity.

Psychoanalytic Social Theory

Between the Psyche and the Social

Noir Anxiety

Penelope Deutscher

The work of the distinguished philosopher Sarah Kofman has, since her tragic death in 1994, become a focus for many scholars interested in contemporary French philosophy. The first critical collection on her thought to appear in English, Enigmas evaluates Kofman's most important contributions to philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, feminism, and literary theory. These insightful essays range from analyses of Kofman's first book, L'Enfance de l'art (1970), to her last, L'Imposture de la beauté (1995). This unique volume represents the major themes in Kofman's scholarship: literature and aesthetics; philosophy and metaphor; women, feminism, and psychoanalysis; and Jews and German nationalism. Selected essays explore and diagnose Kofman's personal struggles as they are reflected in her writing.

Essays on Sarah Kofman

Enigmas

Twelve-year-old Kassy O'Roarke wants to win the Thompson prize at her school newspaper. Her pesky little brother Percy and his key-stealing ferret try to help . . . and that's when the trouble begins. Apollo the cougar cub goes missing from their family's petting zoo. Kassy puts her detective skills to the test to find him before Animal Control does. Can Kassy outsmart the dogcatcher and rescue Apollo before being grounded for life? Join Kassy's fun-filled adventure cracking riddles, detecting clues, and solving a whole zoo of animal trouble in book one of the Pet Detective Mysteries.

Kassy O'Roarke, Cub Reporter

S. K. Keltner

Considers the social and political significance of Kristeva’s oeuvre.

Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Work of Julia Kristeva

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 clichés that turn us into mere answering machines.

From Cloning to Capital Punishment

Technologies of Life and Death

W Alton Jones Chair of Philosophy Kelly Oliver

First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Philosophy's Relation to the "feminine"

Womanizing Nietzsche

Lisa Walsh

Have we entered a historical moment of 'post-feminism'? This volume presents a timely and convincing 'no'. These essays demonstrate that there is a new generation of French women who take up questions of equality and difference from a position distinct from either first or second wave feminism, a position that often attempts to move beyond the binary of equality and/or difference to a new form of the individual.

Contemporary French Feminism

Alice A. Jardine

Shannon Lundeen

Interdisciplinary exploration of the scope and impact of Teresa Brennan’s lifework.

On Teresa Brennan

Living Attention

No longer is pregnancy a repulsive or shameful condition in Hollywood films, but an attractive attribute, often enhancing the romantic or comedic storyline of a female character. Kelly Oliver investigates this curious shift and its reflection of changing attitudes toward women's roles in reproduction and the family. Not all representations signify progress. Oliver finds that in many pregnancy films, our anxieties over modern reproductive practices and technologies are made manifest, and in some cases perpetuate conventions curtailing women's freedom. Reading such films as Where the Heart Is (2000), Riding in Cars with Boys (2001), Palindromes (2004), Saved! (2004), Quinceañera (2006), Children of Men (2006), Knocked Up (2007), Juno (2007), Baby Mama (2008), Away We Go (2009), Precious (2009), The Back-up Plan (2010), Due Date (2010), and Twilight: Breaking Dawn (2011), Oliver investigates pregnancy as a vehicle for romance, a political issue of "choice," a representation of the hosting of "others," a prism for fears of miscegenation, and a screen for modern technological anxieties.

Images of Pregnancy in Hollywood Films

Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down

Challenging the fundamental tenet of the multicultural movement -- that social struggles turning upon race, gender, and sexuality are struggles for recognition -- this work offers a powerful critique of current conceptions of identity and subjectivity based on Hegelian notions of recognition. The author's critical engagement with major texts of contemporary philosophy prepares the way for a highly original conception of ethics based on witnessing. Central to this project is Oliver's contention that the demand for recognition is a symptom of the pathology of oppression that perpetuates subject-object and same-different hierarchies. While theorists across the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences focus their research on multiculturalism around the struggle for recognition, Oliver argues that the actual texts and survivors' accounts from the aftermath of the Holocaust and slavery are testimonials to a pathos that is "beyond recognition". Oliver traces many of the problems with the recognition model of subjective identity to a particular notion of vision presupposed in theories of recognition and misrecognition. Contesting the idea of an objectifying gaze, she reformulates vision as a loving look that facilitates connection rather than necessitates alienation. As an alternative, Oliver develops a theory of witnessing subjectivity. She suggests that the notion of witnessing, with its double meaning as either eyewitness or bearing witness to the unseen, is more promising than recognition for describing the onset and sustenance of subjectivity. Subjectivity is born out of and sustained by the process of witnessing -- the possibility of address and response -- which puts ethicalobligations at its heart.

Beyond Recognition

Witnessing

In Womanizing Nietzsche, Kelly Oliver uses an analysis of the position of woman in Nietzsche's texts to open onto the larger question of philosophy's relation to the feminine and the maternal. Offering readings from Nietzsche, Derrida, Irigaray, Kristeva, Freud and Lacan, Oliver builds an innovative foundation for an ontology of intersubjective relationships that suggests a new approach to ethics.

Philosophy's Relation to the "Feminine"

Jessica James is back in award winning author Kelly Oliver's latest fast paced thrill ride. Donors to the new world class Chicago museum of Russian art are dropping like flies, and Jessica is at the center of the carnage. Can she track down the killer before she falls into his trap? Speaking of traps, this doozy puts Jessica in the middle of a love triangle she'd do anything to avoid. In her latest outting, Jessica once again puts her boots in the stirrups and cracks the whip on first class entertainment. Mystery, Suspense, Action, Adventure, Romance, and Laugh-out-Loud Humor. What more could you want in a page-turner? A riveting suspense novel that keeps you guessing until the end.

Kelly Oliver

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