Bio:  Besides her position at Vanderbilt, Kelly Oliver has been the Executive Co-Director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP).  She is the author of the following books:  Women as Weapons: Iraq, Sex and the Media (Columbia University Press, forthcoming), The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), Noir Anxiety: Race, Sex and Maternity in Film Noir (Co-authored with Benigno Trigo, University of Minnesota Press, 2002), Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), Subjectivity Without Subjects, From Abject Fathers to Desiring Mothers (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), Family Values, Subjects Between Nature and Culture (Routledge, 1997), Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy's Relation to "the feminine" (Routledge, 1995), and Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-bind (Indiana University Press, 1993).

Abstract: Reading the history of philosophy, feminists have pointed out that "female," "women," and "femininity" often fall on the side of the animal in the man-animal divide, as the generic use of the word "man" suggests.From Plato through Hegel, Freud and beyond, women have been associated with Nature, and instincts to procreate, that place them in the vicinity of the animal realm. We could say that since woman's alliance with the serpent in Genesis, Judeo-Christian traditions have remained suspicious of woman's proximity to animals.

Following Derrida's first posthumously published book L'animal que donc je suis (2006), I want to take a different tack in tracing the origin of what is sometimes called "the war between the sexes." Rather than try to separate woman from animal and align her with the other side of the divide, whether it is man or human, I will explore sexual difference from the side of animal difference. In other words, rather than try to introduce sexual difference into the history of philosophy or Western intellectual and cultural traditions by insisting on splitting man or human into two sexes as some feminist thinkers have done, I will insist on multiplying the animal and thinking beyond the category animal altogether. My thesis is that the binary opposition between man and animal sets up the binary opposition between man and woman. Thinking through animal differences or differences between various living creatures opens up the possibility of thinking beyond the dualist notion of sexual difference so ingrained in our culture and enables thinking toward a multiplicity of sexual differences. Dismantling the concept of animal not only opens up nearly infinite multitudes of differences between living creatures but also opens up differences on the other side of the man-animal divide to nearly infinite multitudes of differences between human beings. Differences between animals can help us to see differences between men (sic), not only obvious cultural differences, but perhaps not so obvious multitudes of sexual differences.