Womanizing Nietzsche

Kelly Oliver is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the editor of Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva'sWriting.

"Kelly Oliver has produced a powerful reading of the complex and commonly unrecognized investments that even philosophers who challenge the very limits of philosophy--Nietzsche, Derrida, Lacan--have in the containment and exclusion of women, femininity and maternity. . . . This book is an example of the best that feminist theory and philosophy have to offer each other." -- Elizabeth Grosz, Monash University"Who is Nietzsche and who will he have been--the last and most outrageous in a line of misogynistic philosophers since Plato or the thinker who opens the possibility for a genuine critique of essentializing conceptions of gender and of the debilitating fetishism of a narrow conception of reason? Womanizing Nietzsche puts the reader into the midst of the intense and sophisticated discussion of these questions that has raged since the appearance of Jacques Derrida's Spurs. . . . In articulating these themes Kelly Oliver brings to bear a comprehensive and systematic perspective on the work of Derrida, Irigaray, Kristeva and those writing in their wake." -- Gary Shapiro, University of Richmond

• Part One The Ethics of Reading; Chapter 1 Opening and Closing the Possibility of a Feminine Other; Chapter 2 Becoming Woman: Autocastration, Emasculation, and Self-Violence as Feminization; Part Two The Ethics of Sexual Difference; Chapter 3 The Question of Appropriation; Chapter 4 The Plaint of Ariadne; Part Three The Ethics of Maternity; Chapter 5 Emasculate Conception; Chapter 6 Save the Mother; conl Conclusion;