Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power

Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies

by Elizabeth Grosz

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.

Genres: Feminism, Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction, Academia, Womens Studies

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Elizabeth Grosz is a professor at Duke University. She has written on French philosophers, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray and Gilles Deleuze.

Grosz was awarded a Ph.D. from the Department of General Philosophy at the University of Sydney, where she became a lecturer and senior lecturer from 1978 to 1991. In 1992, she moved to Monash University to the department of comparative literature. From 1999 to 2001, she became a professor of comparative literature and English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She taught in Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University from 2002 until joining Duke University in 2012.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Adrian Colesberry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just finished this on a plane. Fantastic. The front chapters on Darwin were wonderful. Elizabeth Grosz is a champ for reading Darwin. If you ask me, the main thing wrong with the entire 20th century is that people didn't read or misread Darwin. Grosz's call for feminists to look at Darwin (and others) for how their thinking can advance the feminist project, rather than engaging in criticisms of their work as sexist, is crucial for the health of feminism. Identity politics is a dead end when practiced to the exclusion of a more Darwinian strategy that acknowledges the absurdity of trying to corral human variations into rigid categories.

In the middle part of the book on ontology and epistemology, Grosz advocates a re-engagement in the realm of ontology, where feminists have only ever been concerned with epistemology. I don't have as much reading under my belt in this area of philosophy, so I didn't get as much out of it and it took me a while to get through.

The last part of the book, about female sexuality, was right up my alley. Wonderful stuff. I was a bit miffed at the end when Grosz rhapsodizes about the ineffable complexity of female sexuality as opposed to the mathematically characterizable nature of male sexuality. How did we suddenly get kicked off the bus of being complex. Same old hack about men being easy. Oh well. That's one tiny complaint about a book that in the main, was amazing.

[Liza · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Pleasure is a crucial hinge, a bodily resource, that is of enormous strategic utility in the ongoing interplay and transformations of power and resistance. Pleasure is that which induces bodies to participate in power; pleasure is that which provides power with some of its techniques for the extraction of information or knowledge, and for imposing discipline through the subject’s very complicity in speaking and acting according to requirements of disciplinary regimes. But if pleasure can function in the service of power, as a means and end of power’s operations, so too pleasure is that wedge which serves and consolidates resistance" (191).

[Erica Avey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essays in philosophy, left with many underlines and questions, that will undoubtably be returned to again and again.

[Diane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Elizabeth Grosz' work, and this book is no different. I particularly appreciate her concept of life derived from Darwin and connected to the work of Derrida and Deleuze.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

made me think differently about Darwin. also TIME.