Kelly Oliver is an American philosopher whose work contributes to the fields of feminism, film theory, media studies, political philosophy, and ethics. She is W. Alton Jones Chair of Philosophy and Professor of Women's Studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Oliver received her PhD in Philosophy from Northwestern University in 1987, and taught in the Philosophy departments at the University of Texas at Austin and SUNY Stony Brook prior to coming to Vanderbilt in 2005. Her most recent theoretical projects include a book on the use of animal images and metaphors in the history of philosophy and another on images of pregnancy and the pregnant body in Hollywood films.[1]
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Oliver is the author of dozens of scholarly articles, nine books, and six edited volumes. Her authored books include Animal Lessons: how they teach us to be human, Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex and the Media, The Colonization of Psychic Space: a Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression, Noir Anxiety: Race, Sex and Maternity in Film Noir, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, Subjectivity without Subjects, Family Values: Subjects between Nature and Culture, Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy's Relation to the 'Feminine', and Reading Kristeva.[2]
In Animal Lessons, Oliver analyzes the use of animal examples throughout the history of philosophy, arguing that in the work of thinkers as diverse as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Agamben, Freud, Lacan and Kristeva, animals play a key theoretical role in defining what it means to be human. While philosophers have historically been interested in maintaining a strong distinction between the animal and the human (often on the basis of reason), Oliver's analyses of these major thinkers suggests that much of philosophical discourse about humanity and ethics depends upon lessons learned from animal behavior.[3] Her point, however, is not that animals and humans are exactly the same, but instead that being human is dependent upon a particular relation to animals, and thus that the great chasm that Western philosophy posits between the two is untenable.[4]
While Oliver questions the viability of a strict animal/human dichotomy, however, Animal Lessons does not follow the typical trajectory of ethical work on animal rights. In fact, Oliver is critical of rights-based ethical discourse that would simply expand its scope to include animals, since such a strategy would leave un-questioned assumptions about the nature of humanity on which rights depend. In many cases, Oliver suggests, such assumptions, which form the foundation of much ethical theory through concepts such as property or desert (philosophy), are themselves inextricably connected with our thinking about animals.[5]
Thus, while Animal Lessons does not approach animal ethics in the traditional mode, Oliver argues that many of our most pressing contemporary ethical questions are connected with claims about animals. Atrocities of torture and genocide, for example, are frequently justified by comparing their victims to animals. As Oliver puts it in an interview about the book,
"The man-animal binary is not just any opposition; it is the one used most often to justify violence, not only man’s violence to animals, but also man’s violence to other people deemed like animals. Until we interrogate the history of this opposition with its exclusionary values, considering animals (or particular animals) like us or recognizing that we are also a species of animal does very little to change “how we eat the other,” as Jacques Derrida might say."[6]
In the end, Oliver calls for an approach to both ethics (both animal and human) that is mindful of our constitutive relationship to animals, which she playfully calls "a 'free range' ethics that breaks out of the self-centered, exclusionary, and domineering notions of individuality, identity, and sovereignty." Such an ethics would recognize humans' mutual dependency on animals, the environment, and other humans, and thus would be less concerned with traditional problems as individual rights and obligations than with living responsibly within that relationship of dependence. She writes:
In this era of species extinction and shrinking biodiversity, military occupation and expanded torture, record wealth for the few and poverty for the rest, gated-communities and record incarceration, we need a sustainable ethics more than ever. A sustainable ethics is an ethics of limits, an ethics of conservation. Rather than assert our dominion over the earth and its creatures, this ethics obliges us to acknowledge our dependence upon them. It requires us to attend to our response-ability by virtue of that dependence. It is an ethics of the responsibility to enable responses from others, not as it has been defined—as the exclusive property of man (man responds, animals react)—but rather as it exits all around us. All living creatures are responsive. All of us belong to the earth, not in the sense of property, but rather as inhabitants of a shared planet.[7]