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Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power Time travels 23/3/06 9:45 AM Page i ‘What does it mean to introduce time into thought? Bergson formu- lated 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 ineliminable part of a “new Bergsonism” of the twenty-first century?’ John Rajchman, author of The Deleuze Connections Time travels 23/3/06 9:45 AM Page ii TIME Time travels 23/3/06 9:45 AM Page iii TRAVELSTRAVE LS Feminism, Nature, Power ELIZABETH GROSZ Time travels 23/3/06 9:45 AM Page iv First published in Australia and New Zealand in 2005 Copyright © Elizabeth Grosz 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Grosz, E. A. (Elizabeth Anne) 1952- . Time travels : feminism, nature, power. 1st ed. Bibliography. ISBN 1 74114 572 4. 1. Time – Philosophy. 2. Biology – Philosophy. 3. Feminist theory. 4. Becoming (Philosophy). 5. Social change. I. Title. 115 Set in Minion by Tseng Information, Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Printed by Ligare Book Printers, Sydney 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 268 7293 Grosz / TIME TRAVELS / sheet 5 of CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 PART I. NATURE, CULTURE, AND THE FUTURE 1. Darwin 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 Tseng 2005.3.24 07:16 268 7293 Grosz / TIME TRAVELS / sheet 6 of 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 Tseng 2005.3.24 07:16 268 7293 Grosz / TIME TRAVELS / sheet 7 of ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 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- Tseng 2005.3.24 07:16 268 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 7293 Grosz / TIME TRAVELS / sheet 8 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. Tseng 2005.3.24 07:16 268 7293 Grosz / TIME TRAVELS / sheet 9 of INTRODUCTION 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 Travels brings 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 not have been.1 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 Travels develops 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, Tseng 2005.3.24 07:16 268 2 Introduction and overwrites and redirects the present in an indeterminacy that also in- habits and transforms our understanding of the privilege of the present. Although they deal with a wide range of topics (from female sexuality to conceptions of power to how we understand cultural studies) and theorists (from Darwin and Nietzsche to Derrida, Irigaray, and Deleuze), they never- theless remain focused primarily on the question of becomings: how becom- ings are possible, what forms they take in biological, cultural, political, and technological processes, what transformations they may effect and what im- 7293 Grosz / TIME TRAVELS / sheet 10 of plications they have for how we understand ourselves and our world. Written over an eight-year period, these essays reflect on the question of time and its relentlessly forward movement into the future. While resisting the temptation to predict, to forecast, to extrapolate trends of the present into the future, they are all, in different ways, directed to how we can gen- erate and welcome a future that we may not recognize, a future that may deform, inflect, or redirect our current hopes and aspirations. They welcome a concept of the future which we do not control but which may shape and form us according to its forces. These essays speculate on the becoming-art of politics; that is, they share a common interest in advocating a politics of surprise, a politics that cannot be mapped out in advance, a politics linked to invention, directed more at experimentation in ways of living than in policy and step-by-step directed change, a politics invested more in its processes than in its results. While covering a wide variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers, from Darwin and Nietzsche, through pragmatism and phenome- nology, on to postmodern philosophy and politics, this book has attempted, wherever possible, to avoid the usual critical gestures. Rather than under- take the expected path of political and philosophical analysis, in which a thinker’s position is subjected to rigorous criticism and its errors, contradic- tions, and points of weakness singled out or overcome, I am more concerned with seeking out positivities, crucial concepts, insights on what is of value in the texts and positions being investigated.
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