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The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely

by Elizabeth Grosz
Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2004
336 pp. Trade, $79.95; paper, $22.95
ISBN: 0-8223-3400-3; ISBN: 0-8223-3397-x.

Reviewed by Rob Harle (Australia)

harle@dodo.com.au

It is a brave philosopher that dares to go where many other philosophers have feared to tread. In her latest book––The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely, Elizabeth Grosz not only tackles the illusive concept of time head-on but does so with scholarly rigor and an engaging confidence.

The book is well written, meticulously researched and like Elizabeth Wilson’s recent book––Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body (see Leonardo Reviews, June 2005) is like a breath of fresh air in the areas of cultural and feminist studies. Both these books recognise the importance of corporeality to feminist critique and attempt to regain some sort of holistic balance; Wilson through neurology and biology––Grosz through evolution, temporality and corporeality, ". . . we need to turn again, with careful discernment, to those discourses, once rejected by feminists and political activists, that place the body in the larger cosmological and biological orders in which it always finds itself" (p. 3).

Grosz’s work outlines a new theory of becoming, ". . . to replace the prevailing ontologies of being in social, political and biological discourse". What makes this book all the more daring and provocative is her analysis of three of the seemingly strangest bedfellows––Darwin, Nietzsche and Bergson. The relationship of these three major thinkers is not as disparate as one may first think. Grosz brings to life some of the more obscure and little appreciated aspects of their philosophies and discusses these drawing on the work of Luce Irigaray and Gilles Deleuze.

The book has an Introduction, Three Parts (each with three chapters), Conclusion, Notes, and an excellent Bibliography and Index. Part I––Darwin and Evolution looks at Life, Force and Change; Biological Difference; and Evolution of Sex and Race. Part II––Nietzsche and Overcoming discusses Nietzsche’s concerns about Darwinism; History and the Untimely; and the Eternal Return and The Overman. Part III––Bergson and Becoming analyzes Bergsonian Difference; The Philosophy of Life; and Intuition and the Virtual.

Grosz insists that this work is ". . . very much an initial exploration" and whilst the body is integral to her discussion, the object of investigation is ". . . time: its modalities, its forms, its effects on both inorganic and organic materiality" (p. 4). To her credit, Grosz admits in previous work she underestimated the importance of the biological body. "Without some reconfigured concept of the biological body, models of subject-inscription, production, or constitution lack material force; paradoxically, they lack corporeality" (p. 4).

This book is very much a critique and analysis of time from a Western philosophical perspective or position. That is, time, whilst not seen perhaps as strictly linear, still "moves forward" (p. 247) from past to present to future. There is no detailed consideration of the Eastern philosophical notion of time being literally "cyclic". This is an important omission because it directly relates to the seemingly teleological aspect of Darwinian evolution (which Darwin himself did not endorse). Whilst material evolution seems to move from simple to ever more complex forms this is an illusion of time itself. And further, it is our human construction of time in the first place that creates the illusion.

Grosz discusses the concepts of past, present and future quite extensively but fails to mention what the Eastern philosophers discovered a millennium ago, that the only time that exists or is real is the "eternal present". Time, that is, an elapsed period from one state to another, is very much a condition of mind. Our contemporary Western notion of time is heavily influenced by the introduction of the Town Clock, invented by monks in the Middle Ages.

Whilst I believe a discussion of time as cyclic would have enhanced and added balance to Grosz’s reappraisal of time, the body and evolution, it does not detract from the importance of her work, especially as it relates to feminist critique and cultural/political investigation. This is an important book, written in a lively, vibrant style, unusual in such complex philosophical discourse. I recommend it as essential reading for all interested in philosophy, feminist critique and the new wave of holistic humanities studies.

 

 




Updated 1st June 2005


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