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‘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
TTRAV
R A VEE LLSS
ELIZABETH GROSZ
First published in Australia and New Zealand in 2005
1st ed.
Bibliography.
ISBN 1 74114 572 4.
115
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Notes 215
References 241
Index 253
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these essays would probably have remained unpublished and certainly un-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.
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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,
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-
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. There is not a single position or
text addressed here that does not raise valuable, relevant, and perhaps even
irreplaceable insights; the task is to find what relevance it might have for
contexts that are yet to be developed, whose horizon is not yet elaborated.
The critique of texts never actually transforms texts or even necessarily pro-
duces better, more elaborated and developed texts; nor does it commonly
change the opinions of adherents to the positions and claims elaborated in
these texts. Critique tends to generate defensive self-representations or ges-
tures of counter-critique, which give the complacent reader a vague sense
Introduction 3
that one need not bother further with a position once it has been adequately
criticized. It tends to function as a form of dismissal of texts, rather than as
an analysis of the embeddedness of critique in that which it criticizes. I have
instead tried to seize and develop what is of use in a text or position, even in
acknowledging its potentially problematic claims or assumptions. No text
or position is without problems, contradictions, weaknesses, points of un-
easiness. I have tried to develop an affirmative method, a mode of assenting
to rather than dissenting from those ‘‘primary’’ texts—whether of Darwin,
Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Irigaray, or Deleuze or of feminist com-
mentators writing on these primary figures; one can write most generously
and with the most inspiration working on those texts one loves the most in-
tensely, which have had the most direct impact on one. The rest, those one
deems too problematic, can be left aside.
The various positions and texts addressed here share a respect for the
force of time, its paradoxical capacity to continue endlessly and yet be ca-
pable of being squandered, wasted. To have a life of its own, time deviates,
splits, divides itself—into a presence and into the perpetual fissuring of the
present that its placement on the threshold of past and future entails. As
Bergson recognized so astutely in Matter and Memory, to retain and pro-
tract itself, to stretch itself so that it can be conceived in terms of a continuity
between past, present, and future, time is not divisible into three orders, but
only into two. Time splits into two trajectories, one virtual, the other actual,
one which makes the present pass, and the other which preserves it as past.
One forms perception, the other memory; one opens onto anticipation and
the unknowable future, the other onto reminiscence and the past. Time func-
tions ‘‘simultaneously’’ as present and as the past of that present. The future,
which has no existence in the present, is generated through the untimely re-
activation of the virtuality of the past which has been unactualized in the
present. Time is this very split, ‘‘the powerful, non-organic Life which grips
the world.’’ 2 In short, to reformulate the Bergson of Creative Evolution, it is
we who are in time, rather than time that is in us; it is time which inhabits us,
subsists or inheres within and beyond us as the milieu of the living and as
the order and historicity of the universe itself. Time is the paradoxical, and
perhaps unthinkable, form of interiority without itself being interior, the
form of objects without being objective, the form of subjects without being
subjective or psychical, the form of matter without being material. We can
only approach it through its effects on objects, subjects, and matter, which
tend to obscure or absorb its characteristics and its force as their own.
Time is an excess, for it can never use itself up, and yet it is the only re-
4 Introduction
source we cannot protract, save up, share, or divide. It is not directly ma-
nipulable or controllable, it cannot be harnessed for profit or convenience,3
yet it affects everything, transforms all objects, processes, events with its
relentless passage. Whereas time is a continuous movement, our time, the
time of the living, is finite, limited, linked to mortality, and thus irreplace-
ably precious. This double orientation of temporal movement—one force
directed to the past, the other to the future—is a splitting of time, the gen-
eration of time’s divided present, a present that is never fully present. Nature
and culture, the psychical and the social, the material and the ideal, are, in
part, consequences of the unique dividing and differentiating force of tem-
porality, which is the dual force of preservation (time is preserved in and
as the past) and of dissipation (the present dissipates its force in producing
a future that differs from it). Culture, history, and subjectivity each exhibit
this dual directionality they inherit from natural forces, from the forward
push of temporality: this is culture’s evolutionary inheritance from biologi-
cal and chemical forces, which each different culture must harness, and deal
with in its own way if it is to survive and expand.
While the essays gathered together here do not systematically explore the
cultural inheritance of the force of (natural) time—this is the detailed ob-
ject of investigation of a companion text, The Nick of Time (2004)—they do
attempt to demonstrate what a focus on the reality of time might give to the
ways we may reconceptualize identity, politics, culture, and sexual differ-
ence. They attempt to provide alternative methods, questions, and concepts
to those that lie behind our unreflective concepts of subjectivity, identity,
and the social, not so much replacing as complicating them.
If time, becomings, and the future are the primary objects of investiga-
tion in this text, there are also a number of other themes or recurring con-
cepts that underlie and materialize and cohere in these writings on tempo-
rality, unevenly running through and threading together disparate chapters.
Among these themes are:
1. The forgotten or repressed dependence of concepts of culture, desire,
subjectivity, identity, and sexuality—concepts that have been the object
of constructionist explanation in the humanities and social sciences—on
concepts of nature, biology, and inhuman forces, which constructionism
has tended to construe merely as raw materials at the very ‘‘beginning’’ (if
there is one) of constructive processes which drop out of relevance as they
are synthesized, symbolized, and transformed into cultural products. These
‘‘others,’’ these inhuman, subhuman, and extrahuman forces—forces that
structure culture, the law, representations, and all the other products of the
Introduction 5
ing and transforming how we understand our own identities, agency, sexu-
ality, and interpersonal relations. We have tended, in feminist and other po-
litical and social discourses, to understand this more intimate domain as
the realm of agency, in which subjects exercise some element of freedom in
their choices and decisions about how to live their lives. If we take seriously
an understanding of the force of temporality and the abundance of ways
in which the future exceeds our expectations, we must modify the ways we
understand agency and its cognate terms. In what follows, I do not claim
that agency and identity are impossible, but rather that subjectivity, sexu-
ality, intimate social relations are in part structured not only by institutions
and social networks but also by impersonal or pre-personal, subhuman, or
inhuman forces, forces that may be construed as competing microagencies
rather than as the conflict between singular, unified, self-knowing subjects or
well-defined social groups. Subjects, groups, do not lack agency; on the con-
trary, they may, perhaps, have too much agency, too many agents and forces
within them, to be construed as self-identical, free, untrammeled, capable
of knowing or controlling themselves. This is not to claim that subjects are
not free, or not agents, but that their agency is mitigated and complicated
by those larger conditions that subjects do not control.
6. Sexuality, pleasure, desire need not be represented only through oppo-
sitional or binarized divisions between self and other, subject and object,
heterosexual and homosexual—just as ontologies need not be understood
only in terms of the divisions between matter and mind, nature and culture,
the biological and the psychological, the natural and the historical. While
this binary structure has long been recognized as a pervasive form of con-
tainment of the subordinated term through its negative or contradictory re-
lation to the dominant term,4 there are a number of strategies developed to
problematize its conceptual dominance. Early feminist reversals of opposi-
tional terms, where the dominant term is put into the subordinated position
and the subordinated term in the position of dominance, were complicated
and further elaborated through a more Derridean and Irigarayan under-
standing of the necessity, along with reversal, of revealing the dependence
of the dominant term on its expulsion of the subordinate term, of showing
the subordinated term as the heart or center of the dominant term. Der-
rida proposed a tripartite strategy for shaking up and provisionally unhing-
ing the binary structure—reversal, displacement, and the creation of a new
or third term which requires both terms—in order to provisionally enable
the subordinated term an autonomy from its dominating other.5 Derrida
understood that the tenacity of the binary structure means that its terms,
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