Love and Vulnerability
Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson
Love and Vulnerability: Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson developed out of the desire for dialogue with the late feminist philosopher Pamela Sue Anderson’s extraordinary, previously unpublished, last work on love and vulnerability. The collection publishes this work for the first time, with a diverse, multidisciplinary, international range of contributors responding to it, to Anderson’s oeuvre as a whole and to her life and death.
Anderson’s path-breaking work includes A Feminist Philosophy of Religion (1998) and Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness (2012). Her last work critiques, then attempts to rebuild, concepts of love and vulnerability. Reason, critical self-reflexivity, emotion, intuition and imagination, myth and narrative all have a role to play. Social justice, friendship, conversation, dialogue, collective work are central to her thinking.
Contributors trace the emergence of Anderson’s late thinking, extend her conversations with the history of philosophy and contemporary voices such as hooks and Butler, and bring her work into contact with debates in theology; Continental and analytic philosophy; feminist, queer and transgender theory; postcolonial theory; African-American studies. Discussions engage with the Me Too movement and sexual violence, climate change, sweatshops, neoliberalism, death and dying, and the nature of the human.
Originally published as a special issue of the journal, Angelaki, this large, wide-ranging collection, featuring a number of distinguished contributors, makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning interdisciplinary research on interpersonal relations, sympathy and empathy, affect and emotion.
Table of Contents
Editorial Introduction
Pelagia Goulimari
Anderson’s Last Writings
1. Towards a New Philosophical Imaginary
Pamela Sue Anderson (edited by Sabina Lovibond and A. W. Moore)
2. Reorienting Ourselves in (Bergsonian) Freedom, Friendship and Feminism
Pamela Sue Anderson (edited by Nicholas Bunnin)
3. Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability: Undoing an Oppressive Form of (Wilful) Ignorance
Pamela Sue Anderson (edited by Nicholas Bunnin)
4. Creating a New Imaginary for Love in Religion
Pamela Sue Anderson (edited by Paul S. Fiddes)
“living a life”
5. Pamela Anderson and “Vulnerability”
Alan Montefiore
6. Vulnerability as a Space for Creative Transformation
Laurie Anderson Sathe
7. Pamela Sue Anderson: Witness to the Gospel, Prophet to the Church. What Might the Church Hear from her Work?
Susan Durber
8. Equality and Prophecy
Michí¨le Le Doeuff
Anderson’s Conversations with Others
9. Vulnerable Selves and Openness to Love
Nicholas Bunnin
10. Pamela Sue Anderson’s Journeying with Paul Ricoeur
Morny Joy
11. Mortal Vulnerabilities: Reflecting on Death and Dying with Pamela Sue Anderson
Alison Jasper
12. Forgiveness, Empathy and Vulnerability: An Unfinished Conversation with Pamela Sue Anderson
Paul S. Fiddes
13. The Concern with Truth, Sense, et al.: Androcentric or Anthropocentric?
A. W. Moore
Extending the Conversations
14. Vulnerable and Invulnerable: Two Faces of Dialectical Reasoning
Sabina Lovibond
15. Wisdom, Friendship and the Practice of Philosophy
Beverley Clack
16. The Disavowal of the Female “Knower”: Reading Literature in the Light of Pamela Sue Anderson’s Project on Vulnerability
Dorota Filipczak
17. Anderson’s Ethical Vulnerability: Animating Feminist Responses to Sexual Violence
Emily Cousens
18. Conditioned Responsibility, Belonging and the Vulnerability of Our Ethical Understanding
Chon Tejedor
19. Love’s Luck-knot: Emotional Vulnerability and Symmetrical Accountability
Carla Bagnoli
20. The Three Faces of Vulnerability: My Vulnerability, the Vulnerability of the Other and the Vulnerability of the Third
Xin Mao
21. Anderson on Vulnerability
Alison Assiter
22. A Threshold for Enhancing Human Life: Anderson on Capability and Vulnerability
Kristine A. Culp
23. Exploring Affectivity: An Unfinished Conversation with Pamela Sue Anderson
Andrea Bieler
24. The Openness of Vulnerability and Resilience
Roxana Baiasu
25. The Risks of Love and the Ambiguities of Hope
Günter Thomas
26. On the Theme of Liberated Love and Global Feminist Discourse
Ashmita Khasnabish
27. The Idea of Ethical Vulnerability: Perfectionism, Irony and the Theological Virtues
Stephen Mulhall