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Fall 2006
Volume 06, Number 1

Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy

Book Reviews

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Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power

Elizabeth Grosz (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). 272 pages. Hardcover: $79.95, ISBN: 0-8223-3553-0; Paperback: $22.95, ISBN: 0-8223-3566-2.

Reviewed by Catherine Villanueva Gardner
University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, cgardner@umassd.edu

Elizabeth Grosz’s Time Travels is a collection of essays written over eight years. Together, these interconnected essays form an argument for, and the beginnings of, a feminist philosophy of time. For Grosz, a feminist philosophy of time constitutes a challenge, among other things, to more generally accepted notions of identity, gender/body, and the goals and theorizing of feminist politics. She argues that the feminist questions of, for example, power and identity must be placed within a larger framework that allows for a recognition of the forces of time and the material universe. Feminists may use these forces for their politics, but they are ultimately not theirs to control.

Not all the essays in Time Travels deal explicitly with feminist theorizing; moreover, within each essay there are multiple interconnected themes and explorations. The essays that will resonate the most with feminist philosophers are in Part I, "Nature, Culture, and the Future," and Part IV (the final section), "Identity, Sexual Difference, and the Future." Given the limitations of space, this review will focus on these essays.

Grosz draws on a variety of philosophical resources, for example, the work of Deleuze and Bergson as well as scientific resources such as the work of Darwin and Kinsey. In her analysis of the two latter figures, Grosz models the approach she advocates for feminist readings of primary texts: an engagement that is grounded on the assumption that each text contains insights that can be brought to bear on feminist politics, rather than a search for the political biases and philosophical flaws of the text. Throughout the whole collection Grosz often takes the approach of asking provocative questions and only supplying suggestions for ways forward. This reflects the way that she sees nature as giving culture a series of challenges, and time as becoming open-ended and offering multiple possibilities.

Part I is an exploration of the Darwinian theory of evolution and its accompanying ontology. In the first essay in Part I, "Darwin and Feminism: Preliminary Investigations into a Possible Alliance," Grosz lays part of the groundwork for her discussion of time with an in-depth interpretation of the Darwinian theory of natural and sexual selection that continues throughout this first section of essays.

Grosz explores the Darwinian account of natural selection as a dynamic principle, with random chance operating as a central force in the evolution of a species. As such, evolution must also be understood as being a force toward the future. Grosz brings out the way that the forces of evolution can encompass both the biological and the cultural. Culture is not separate from nature, nor is it the end of evolution; rather, it is also the product of species survival. Grosz examines the potential for feminist theorizing of this. She argues that politics can be seen as cultural evolution in that the feminist struggle itself—a struggle for survival under oppression—is the force that produces self-transformation. Like species survival, this feminist self-transformation is directed toward an unknowable, multiply possible future of political change.

Part II, "Law, Justice, and the Future," and Part III, Philosophy, Knowledge, and the Future," build a picture of the conceptualizing of time that forms the basis for Grosz’s feminist philosophy of time. The two essays in Part II, "The Time of Violence: Derrida, Deconstruction, and Value" and "Drucilla Cornell, Identity, and the Evolution of Politics," explore deconstructive notions of time in the work of Cornell and Derrida. The focus of Part III, "Philosophy, Knowledge, and the Future," is an examination of Bergson’s philosophy of duration, using the analyses of Bergson from the works of Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, and William James.

In chapter seven of Part III, "Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and the Question of Ontology," Grosz’s exploration of the metaphysics of Merleau-Ponty, particularly his work on Bergson, provides the grounding for her provocative claim that there is a need, one that has been more or less unrecognized, for a feminist ontology: an exploration of the real. Grosz argues that feminist theorizing, or any politics of change, cannot move forward without an understanding of the "real," "the force of events," the given. In other words, feminism needs to address questions of ontology. We must recognize that matter is resistant to our desires and, as such, generates the invention of solutions: things that do not yet and might not have existed. It is this expansion of future conceptual possibilities, what invention might bring to issues of sexual difference and solutions for oppression, that should be the task of feminism. This is in contrast to the generally held feminist goal that the future is produced through the need to change the present and is thus limited by the present.

Part IV, "Identity, Sexual Difference, and the Future," contains the most explicitly feminist essays of the collection. These essays explore the interconnections between Grosz’s account of a philosophy of time and feminist theory, in particular, the work of Irigaray on sexual difference. Of these essays, chapter eleven, "The Force of Sexual Difference," and chapter twelve, "Inhuman Forces: Power, Pleasure, and Desire," are the most intriguing. Chapter eleven is an argument for a third approach between what has been set up as only two possibilities for discussions of sexual difference: gender and body. Instead, Grosz argues for a discussion of sexual difference as the organization of materiality and what she calls messy biology, even though these concepts have been seen as outside, or even contrary to, feminist knowledge. Grosz argues that sexual difference is a form of an unknowable future. Time must be recognized as a force, rather than conceptualized as the passive result of the causal effects of the present. Time is, in a sense, within objects and is the force that directs their becoming. In chapter twelve, Grosz offers an alternative to the socially constructed identity and sexualities of the subject by calling for an examination of how inhuman forces constitute them. For Grosz, the feminist goal of the removal of the oppression of women must involve a necessary reconceptualization of women as subjects: as evolving multiple subjects that are produced by these forces.

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