Time Travels

Grosz Elizabeth Grosz

Description

Recently the distinguished feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz has turned her critical acumen toward rethinking time and duration. Time Travels brings her trailblazing essays together to show how reconceptualizing temporality transforms and revitalizes key scholarly and political projects. In these essays, Grosz demonstrates how imagining different relations between the past, present, and future alters understandings of social and scientific projects ranging from theories of justice to evolutionary biology, and she explores the radical implications of the reordering of these projects for feminist, queer, and critical race theories.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 notion that justice is only immanent in the future and thus 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 Deleuze, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Luce Irigaray. Together these essays demonstrate the broad scope and applicability of Grosz's thinking about time as an undertheorized but uniquely productive force.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 22 juin 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822386551
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

TIM E TR AV ELS

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N E X T WAV E : N E W D I R E C T I O N S I N W O M E N ’ S S T U D I E S

A series edited by Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan,

and Robyn Wiegman

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TTRAVELLSS

Feminism, Nature, Power

ELIZABETH GROSZ

Duke University Press Durham and London 

© Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States

of America on acid-free paper 

Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan

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Systems, Inc. Library of Congress

Cataloging-in-Publication Data and

republication acknowledgments appear on the last printed pages of this book.

Acknowledgments Introduction 

vii

PA RT I . N AT U R E , C U LT U R E , A N D T H E F U T U R E

. Darwin and Feminism: Preliminary Investigations into a Possible Alliance  . Darwin and the Ontology of Life  . The Nature of Culture 

PA RT I I . L AW, J U S T I C E , A N D T H E F U T U R E

C O N T E N T S

. The Time of Violence: Derrida, Deconstruction, and Value  . Drucilla Cornell, Identity, and the ‘‘Evolution’’ of Politics 

PA RT I I I . P H I L O S O P H Y, K N O W L E D G E , A N D T H E F U T U R E

. Deleuze, Bergson, and the Virtual  . Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and the Question of Ontology . The Thing  . Prosthetic Objects 



PA RT I V. I D E N T I T Y, S E X U A L D I F F E R E N C E , A N D T H E F U T U R E

. The Time of Thought  . The Force of Sexual Difference  . (Inhuman) Forces: Power, Pleasure, and Desire . The Future of Female Sexuality 

Notes  References Index 





A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

My thanks go to a number of institutions and individuals without whose support and prompting these essays would not have been written. The earli- est of the essays were written when I worked in the Critical Theory and Cul- tural Studies Program at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. The majority were written while I was employed in the Departments of Com- parative Literature and English at the State University of New York at Buf- falo. And the last essays, and the book as a whole, were completed when I moved to the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers Uni- versity. My great thanks to the faculty, staff, and students in these depart- ments and universities for their patience and tolerance during the writings of these various papers. My special thanks to the organizers of various seminars and conferences for which I produced the majority of these essays. With- out their invitations, and provocations, I doubt that I would have had the resources and the energy to write these for their own sake. Each was under- taken for a specific topic, purpose, or function. I hope that by modifying them and putting them together in a collection such as this, the individual inspirations for each are not lost. I need to single out for special acknowledgment a number of individuals who read various manuscripts, provided moral support, critical comments, a shoulder to cry on, or a strong pep talk when I wanted to stop. While I can only provide a list of names here, such a list does not do justice to the depth of obligation I feel for their help. My thanks, then, to Judith Allen, Geoffrey Batchen, Sue Best, Pheng Cheah, Claire Colebrook, Drucilla Cor-

viii

Acknowledgments

nell, Joan Copjec, Mimi Long, Isabel Marcus, Sally Munt, Tony Nunziata, Kelly Oliver, Michael Pollak, John Rajchman, Jacqueline Reid, Jill Robbins, Gai Stern, Gail Weiss, and Carol Zemel. Your friendship and support have made an immense difference to me. My special thanks to the four anony- mous readers of the manuscript for their various suggestions: the book as a whole is tighter and more cohesive because of their comments. I owe a debt that I can never repay to Nicole Fermon, whose wit and wisdom, grace and good will, buoyed and inspired me through the long period of production of this book. Without her encouragement, her suggestions and provocations, these essays would probably have remained unpublished and certainly un- polished. My gratitude to my family, to Eva Gross, Tom Gross, Irit Rosen, Tahli Fisher, Daniel and Mia Gross, as well as to Mary Gross, and Glenn, Daniel, and Luke Rosewell.

IN T R O D U C T IO N

Time remains the central yet forgotten force that motivates and informs the universe, from its most cosmological principles to its most intimate living details. Cultural life in all its complications, no less than natural existence, is structured by and responds to a force that it does not control and yet marks and dates all its activities and processes.Time Travelsbrings together a series of disparate essays which focus on the implications and effects of conceiving a temporality in which the future remains virtual and beyond the control of the present. These essays are various conceptual ‘‘travels’’ in, explorations of, how reconsidering our concepts of time might result in new concepts of nature, culture, subjectivity, and politics: they are explorations of how far we can push the present to generate an unknown—what is new, what might 1 not have been. Various, usually implicit, concepts of time are relevant to and underlie many of the central projects of feminist theory, theories of the law and jus- tice, and the natural sciences and their relations to the social sciences and humanities. Questions about culture and representation, concepts of sub- jectivity, sexuality, and identity, as well as concepts of political struggle and transformation all make assumptions about the relevance of history, the place of the present, and the forward-moving impetus directing us to the future. But temporality is very rarely the direct object of analysis in these various discourses and projects.Time Travelsdevelops a concept of a tempo- rality not under the domination or privilege of the present, that is, a tempo- rality directed to a future that is unattainable and unknowable in the present,