Family Values: Subjects Between Nature and CultureFamily Values shows how the various contradictions at the heart of Western conceptions of maternity and paternity problematize our relationships with ourselves and with others. Using philosophical texts, psychoanalytic theory, studies in biology and popular culture, Kelly Oliver challenges our traditional concepts of maternity which are associated with nature, and our conceptions of paternity which are embedded in culture. Oliver's intervention calls into question the traditional image of the oppositional relationship between nature and culture, maternal and paternal. Family Values also undercuts recent returns to the rhetoric of a "battle between the sexes" by analyzing the conceptual basis of these descriptions in biological research and the presuppositions of such suggestions in philosophy and psychoanalysis. By developing a reconception of maternity and paternity, Family Values offers hope for peace in the battle of the sexes. |
Contents
The Paradox of Love I | 1 |
Animal Body Mother II | 11 |
Maternal Law | 62 |
No Body Father | 119 |
Paternal Eros | 195 |
Family Values and Social Subjectivity | 231 |
| 244 | |
| 252 | |
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Common terms and phrases
analysis Animal Body Mother Antigone associated baby becomes biological blood Body Father Body Politic castration child circumcision Circumfession consciousness contract Dasein Derrida describes desire dialectic Dionysus discourse Don Juan duty embodied ethical ethical relationship experience family values fantasy father-son relationship father's body fatherhood fecundity female feminine fetus Freud Gift of Death Hegel Heidegger human Husserl identifies identity images imaginary father individual infant insofar intersubjective Irigaray Kofman Kristeva Lacan language Levinas Levinas's Luce Irigaray maintains male masculine maternal body Maternal Law matricide mediated Merleau-Ponty Moses murder Nietzsche notion object Oedipal Oedipal complex paradoxical Paternal Eros Phenomenology Phenomenology of Spirit philosophy placenta Polynices possible procreation promise psychoanalysis recognition rela relation represents reproduction responsibility rhetoric of family Ricoeur ritual Rousseau sacrifice Sartre says sexual signification Social Body soul sperm suggests superego surrogacy symbolic theory threat threatens tion transcendental ego unconscious virile subject woman women Zipporah