Elizabeth Grosz

Bergson, Deleuze and the Becoming of Unbecoming

Intuition is the joy of difference. Gilles Deleuze1 Deleuze understood Bergson as perhaps the greatest theorist of difference, the theorist whose insistence brought difference into philosophy and s...

Darwin and Feminism: Preliminary Investigations for a Possible Alliance

... whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involve fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which all previous ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ are necessarily obscured or even obliterated.

Habit Today: Ravaisson, Bergson, Deleuze and Us

Habit has been understood, through the work of Descartes, Kant and Sartre, as a form of mechanism that arrests and inhibits consciousness, thought and freedom. This article addresses the concept of habit through a different tradition that links it instead to an ever-moving world. In a world of constant change, habits are not so much forms of fixity and repetition as they are modes of encounter materiality and life. Habit is the point of transition between living beings and matter, enabling each to be transformed through its engagement with the other. The article focuses on the work of Ravaisson, Bergson and Deleuze, who understand habit as fundamentally creative and addressed to the future rather than consolidating the past. Habit, within this tradition, is the opening of materiality to the forms of engagement required by life, and the modification of life imposed by the requirements of a material universe. It is open-ended plasticity.

Feminist theory and the challenge to knowledges

Abstract This paper explores the phallocentric nature of methodologies, frameworks, and presumptions dominant within the social sciences and humanities. It attempts to analyse the recent history of feminist theory, from the 1960s to the 1980s, in the light of the challenges it has posed to mainstream methodologies, and to evaluate its effectiveness in terms of its ability to move beyond these frameworks. In particular, the common presumptions of neutrality, objectivity, truthful, perspectiveless knowledges, and transparent languages are examined from a feminist point of view.

The Untimeliness of Feminist Theory

A new format for NORA, Taking Turns is an open forum for brief and rapid assessments of changes emerging in the field, and its discontents. In this series, we invite Nordic as well as non-Nordic scholars to present their take on contemporary challenges for feminist scholarship and gender research. The first contribution is written by a well known feminist theorist, Professor Elizabeth Grosz. An Australian philosopher, living and working in the USA, Professor Grosz has published a wide range of work on, for instance, sexual difference and corporeality, space and time, Charles Darwin and Gilles Deleuze. Here she provides us with perspectives on the practice of feminist theorizing and on the necessity for us to return to materiality once more, to material forces, and to the issues of the biological.

Geopower: A Panel on Elizabeth Grosz's Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth

Rather than understand art as cultural accomplishment, Elizabeth Grosz argues that it is born from the intensities of chaos and disruptive forms of sexual selection—a corporeality that vibrates to the hum of the universe. Grosz contends that it is precisely this excessive, nonproductive expenditure of sexual attraction that is the condition for arts work. This intimate corporeality, composed of nonhuman forces, is what draws and transforms the cosmos, prompting experimentation with materiality, sensation, and life. In the book Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (2008, Duke University Press, Durham, NC), that is the subject of this panel discussion, Grosz sets out an ontology of art, looking at its forms of emergence as territorialising force, sexual selection, and nonhuman power. In Groszs terms, art is an art of existence. This is not a narrow understanding of art as a practice that is about taste, cultural accomplishment, or a reflection of society, but an art that is—at its most provocative—an extraction from the universe and an elaboration on it. This ‘geoaesthetics’ which is both biospheric and biopolitical, presents a formable challenge to geographers interested in art, sexuality, time, and the territorialisation of the earth. How might we understand this distinctly different kind of biopolitics? And what might Groszs concept of ‘geopower’ offer in terms of a renegotiation of a more active ‘geo’ in geopolitics? Grosz argues that art is not tied to the reproduction of the known, but to the possibility of the new, overcoming the containment of the present to elaborate on futures yet to come. In this rethinking of sexual selection Grosz suggests an intensely political role for art as a bioaesthetics that is charged with the creation of new worlds and forms of life. Grosz makes a radical argument for a feminist philosophy of the biosphere and for our thinking the world otherwise.

The time of violence: Deconstruction and value

Essays on the Politics of Bodies. I am interested in this paper in exploring the ways in which we may see violence both as a positivity and as the unspoken condition of a certain fantasy of the sustain ability of its various others or opposites, peace, love, and so on. Rather than simply condemn or deplore violence, as we tend to do regard ing the evils of war and suffering and the everyday horrors, we believe we can amelio rate it. I want to raise the question of violence not simply where it is most obvious and mani fest?in the streets, in relations between races, classes, sexes, political oppositions (though I hope what it will raise today does not avoid these issues); but also where is it less obvious, and rarely called by this name, in the domain of knowledges, reflection, thinking, and writ ing. I want not simply to condemn it, but to explore its constitutive role in the establish ment of politics, of thought, of knowledge. For this reason: that, as intellectuals or philoso phers (they are not always, or are only rarely, the same thing), we play a part in various struc tures of violence, whether we choose to or not, not only in our daily but also in our pro fessional and intellectual lives. But it is rare that we have the intellectual resources by which to think the level of our investment in the very violences that constitute our relations to work. I want to use some of the rather sen sitive and self-conscious resources provided by Jacques Derrida to look at the very violence of

The Nature of Sexual Difference

This paper addresses the question of sexual difference as a pre-eminent question not only of cultural and social but also of biological relations. If sexual difference is a biological force then it must pervade the world of animals as much as the cultural world of humans. Charles Darwin’s work may provide a framework from which to understand Luce Irigaray’s central conception of sexual difference. This paper explores the possible relations between them.

An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz: Geopower, Inhumanism and the Biopolitical

This article is an interview with Elizabeth Grosz by Kathryn Yusoff and Nigel Clark. It primarily addresses Grosz’s approaches to ‘geopower’, and the discussion encompasses an exploration of her ideas on biopolitics, inhuman forces and material experimentation. Grosz describes geopower as a force that subtends the possibility of politics. The interview is accompanied by a brief contextualizing introduction examining the themes of geophilosophy and the inhumanities in Grosz’s work.

Art and the Animal

Darwinism has opened up a way to engage with animal forces as those with which our own forces participate, and which direct us to a humanity that is always in the process of overcoming and transforming itself. It is the animal forces in us that direct us to what is regarded as the most human about us—our ability to represent, to signify, to imagine, to wish for, and to make ideals, goals, aims. What I would like to talk about today are the living connections between plants, animals, and the earth that makes human art possible. I want to look at the peculiar relations between the earth, animals, and art that have been largely unrepresented in most Western forms of art. Why does it make sense to ask about animal lineages, genealogies, and connections—even bestiaries—when talking about art and architecture? What is at stake in our conception of the human when we place the human not outside the category of the animal, as it has occurred since at least the seventeenth century, but within it? How are our conceptions of human accomplishments (whether in art, architecture, science, philosophy, governance, or social and political relations) transformed when we place the human within the animal? How and why does the animal imperil human uniqueness and dignity? What do we gain in restoring the human to the animal from which it has come?