Research Interests
Feminist theory, Psychoanalysis, Film theory, Cultural studies, Designated emphasis in women, gender, and sexuality
Kaja Silverman is Emerita Professor of Rhetoric and Film & Media, and the author of eight books: James Coleman; World Spectators; Speaking About Godard; The Threshold of the Visual World; Male Subjectivity at the Margins; The Acoustic Mirror; The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema; The Subject of Semiotics; and Flesh of My Flesh. She retired from UC Berkeley in June 2010. She is currently the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Chair of Contemporary Art at the History of Art Department, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104.
Silverman’s writing and teaching are focused primarily on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, photography, time-based visual art and literature, but she continues to write about and teach courses on cinema, and she has both a developing interest in painting, and an ongoing commitment to feminist theory. She is in the middle of writing a book about photography, called “The Miracle of Analogy.”
Publications
Books
Flesh of My Flesh (Stanford University Press, 2009).
James Coleman, ed. Susanne Gaensheimer (Munich: Hatje Cantz, 2002); monograph on James Coleman filling the catalogue for a major exhibition.
World Spectators (Stanford University Press, 2000).
Speaking About Godard (New York: New York University Press, l998) New York University Press); written with Harun Farocki. German translation, Von Godard Sprechen, (Vorwerk Verlag, l998).
The Threshold of the Visible World (Routledge, l996).
Male Subjectivity at the Margins (Routledge, l992).
The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Indiana University Press, l988).
The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford University Press, l983).
Articles and Book Chapters
"How to Stage the Death of God," in English and Finnish, in Eija-Liisa Ahtila: Fantasized Persons and Taped Conversations (Helsinki: Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, 2002), 182-96.
"The Author as Receiver," October no. 96 (2001), 17-34.
"La Passion du Signifiant, in Ou en est l’interpretation de l’oeuvre d’art," ed. Regis Michel (Paris: Ecole National Superieure des Beaux-Arts, 2000).
"Freiheit, Mutterschaft, Vermarktung," in Hanjo Berressem, Dagmar Buchwald, Heide Volkening, ed. Grenzuberschreibungen: Feminismus und Cultural Studies (Bielefeld, Germany: Aisthesis Verlag, 2001), 137-62.
"Apparatus for the Production of an Image," Parallax no. 16 (2000), 12-28.
"The Language of Care," in Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture, ed. Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch (Yale University Press, 2000), 150-153.
"Speak, Body," Discourse, vol. 22, no. 2 (2000).
"The Language of Things," in Dinge, die wir nicht verstehen/Things we don’t understand, ed. Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2000).
"Prolegomena to World Spectators," in Video Cultures: Multimediale Installation der 90er Jahre, ed. Ursula Frohne (Karlsruhe, l999), 79-93.
"Politische Ekstase," trans. Bertolt Fessen, in Filmasthetik, ed. Ludwig Nagel (Vienna: Akademie Verlag, l999), 140-75.
"In Her Place" (with Harun Farocki), Camera Obscura, no. 37 (dated January l996, but actually published in Summer l998), 93-122.
"Worte wie Liebe" (with Harun Farocki), Texte Zur Kunst, no. 27 (l997), 21-40.
"Sprich Korper," in Split Reality: Valie Export (Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, l997), 36-48.
"Dem Blickregime Begegnen," trans. Roger Buergel, in Privileg Blick: Kritick des Visuellen Kultur, ed. Christian Kravagna (Berlin:Edition ID-Archive, l997), 41-64.
"Der Blick," in Konturen des Unentschiedenen, ed. Jorg Huber and Martin Heller (Zurich: Museum fur Gesstaltung Zurich Stromfeld, l997),239-56.
"Narcissism, The Impossible Love," in Triangulated Visions: Women in Recent German Cinema (Albany: State University of New York, l997).