Response Ethics

Kelly Oliver is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of thirteen scholarly books, ten anthologies, and over 100 articles, including work on campus rape, reproductive technologies, women and the media, film noir, and Alfred Hitchcock. Her work has been translated into seven languages, and she has been published in The New York Times. Alison Suen is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Iona College, USA. She is the author of The Speaking Animal (2015).

• Editor’s Introduction / Author’s Introduction / Part I: Interrelational Subjects and Social Sublimation / 1. The Gestation of the Other in Phenomenology / 2. The Look of Love and Ecological Subjectivity / 3. Social Melancholy, Shame and Sublimation / Part II: Responsible Subjects and Witnessing / 4. Witnessing Subjectivity and Testimony / 5. Witnessing, Recognition, and Response Ethics / 6. Between Ethics and Politics / Part III: Response Ethics and the Non-humans / 7. Animal Ethics: Toward an Ethics of Responsiveness / 8. Service Dogs: Between Animal Studies and Disability Studies / 9. Earth Ethics and Creaturely Cohabitation / Part IV: Witnessing in the Age of Spectacle / 10. Death as a Penalty and Instant Death / 11. Rape as Spectator Sport and Creepshot Entertainment / 12. The Spectacle of War / Bibliography / Index

Response Ethics employs vocabulary and concepts from poststructuralism, phenomenology, psychology, and psychoanalytic theory. Oliver draws heavily on the work of Levinas and Derrida, and responds to a wide range of other thinkers including Butler, Freud, Heidegger, hooks, Kant, Kittay, Kristeva, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre. Those who have interests in these philosophical methods, concepts, and thinkers, as well as those with interests in ethical theory, applied ethics, the unconscious, and subjectivity would benefit from this book. Ethics professors in particular should read this book, if only to present their students with a living philosopher active in the monumental task of working out a new ethical theory designed to address thorny current issues involving violence, identity politics, and technology.