About the Book
While concepts of time underlie many of the central projects of feminist theory, law and justice, and the natural sciences as well as ideas about political struggle, temporality is rarely their direct object of analysis. In her essays brought together in this volume, Elizabeth Grosz moves questions about time and duration to the fore in order to explore how rethinking temporality might transform and revitalize key scholarly and political projects. Dealing with time in relation to topics ranging from female sexuality to conceptions of power to understandings of cultural studies, these essays reveal Grosz's advocacy of a politics of invention, a politics that cannot be mapped out in advance--one that is more invested in processes than in results. Grosz's reflections on how rethinking time might generate new understandings of nature, culture, subjectivity, and politics are wide-ranging. She moves from a compelling argument that Charles Darwin's notion of biological and cultural evolution can potentially benefit feminist, queer, and antiracist agendas to an exploration of modern jurisprudence's reliance on the sense that the future is always beyond reach.
She examines Henri Bergson's philosophy of duration in light of the writings of Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and William James, and she discusses issues of sexual difference, identity, pleasure, and desire in relation to the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Deleuze, and Luce Irigaray. Together, these essays demonstrate the broad scope and applicability of Grosz's thinking about time as an under-theorized but uniquely productive force.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Part I. Nature, Culture, and the Future
1. Darwinism and Feminism: Preliminary Investigations into a Possible Alliance 13
2. Darwin and the Ontology of Life 35
3. The Nature of Culture 43
Part II. Law, Justice, and the Future
4. The Time of Violence: Derrida, Deconstruction, and Value 55
5. Drucilla Cornell, Identity, and the “Evolution” of Politics 71
Part III. Philosophy, Knowledge, and the Future
6. Deleuze, Bergson, and the Virtual 93
7. Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and the Question of Ontology 113
8. The Thing 131
9. Prosthetic Objects 145
Part IV. Identity, Sexual Difference, and the Future
10. The Time of Thought 155
11. The Force of Sexual Difference 171
12. (Inhuman) Forces: Power, Pleasure, and Desire 185
13. The Future of Female Sexuality 197
Notes 215
References 241
Index 253
About the Author :
Elizabeth Grosz is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (also published by Duke University Press); Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space; Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies; and Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. She is the editor of Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures.
Review :
"Elizabeth Grosz has long been recognized as one of the most astute commentators on feminism, continental philosophy, and cultural studies. Renowned for her clarity and rigor, she has a well-deserved reputation as a major feminist philosopher. In Time Travels Grosz manages to surpass her already magisterial standards and produce a tour de force of originality. Here, Grosz finds her own voice and argues for a new theory of time and life. This is an exciting, inspired, and inspiring book."--Claire Colebrook, author of Gilles Deleuze "What does it mean to introduce time into thought? Bergson formulated this question in the nineteenth century; Deleuze took it up again in postwar France. In her philosophical travels through legal studies, new technologies, and debates in Darwinism, Elizabeth Grosz brilliantly pursues its punch for us today: What would it mean for feminism to include an evolutionary materialism of time, and what would it mean for it to become an uneliminable part of a 'new Bergsonism' of the twenty-first century?"--John Rajchman, author of The Deleuze Connections "Grosz offers an alternative to the socially constructed identity and sexualities by calling for an examination of how inhuman forces constitute them."--Catherine Villanueva Gardner, American Philosophical Association Newsletter "In its drive towards the future - a future seen as radically open and indeterminable - Grosz's work provides a positive and invigorating vision of the role of cultural theory. It also offers a compelling re-envisioning of the present, and the present's relationship to the future. The structure of the book, as a collection of connected but disparate essays, means that it does not, and does not attempt to, develop a totalising theory of temporality. Rather, it opens up new directions both in how we think about theory and the consequences - and futures - of cultural and feminist theory."--Karen Hall, Limina
