Subjectivity Without Subjects: From Abject Fathers to Desiring Mothers (review) (original) (raw)

Emily Zakin Kelly Oliver's latest book, Subjectivity Without Subjects: From Abject Fathers to Desiring Mothers (1998), continues the project she began in Family Values (1997). In her previous text, Oliver analyzed the association of women with nature and of men with culture, and proposed and developed an ethics beyond the principle of sacrifi ce. In her new work, she persists in these endeavors, examining various philosophical conceptions of paternity and maternity, as well as aspects of their lived reality, social structure, and cinematic representation, in order to suggest an alternative to the alienation supposed by the nature/culture divide. The thesis of the book is encapsulated in the intriguing notion suggested by the title: that we can think subjectivity without assuming the enclosed, autonomous, alienated subject of Western rationality or the castrated subject of patriarchal psychoanalysis. Motivated by an ethics of the other, Oliver suggests that a new concept of subjectivity requires a rethinking of our relations to, and our tropes of, paternity and maternity, both in intimate family relations and as metaphors for law, origin, and love. The book is organized into three sections (Abject Fathers, Desiring Moth