The Nick of Time

Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely

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by Elizabeth Grosz

Duke University Press

Due/Published December 2004, 336 pages, paper

ISBN 082233397X

In this philosophical work, Elizabeth Grosz points the way toward a theory of becoming to replace the prevailing ontologies of being in social, political, and biological discourse. Arguing that theories of temporality have significant and underappreciated relevance to the social dimensions of science and the political dimensions of struggle, Grosz engages key theoretical concerns related to the reality of time. She explores the effect of time on the organization of matter and the emergence and development of biological life. Considering how the relentless forward movement of time might be conceived in political and social terms, she begins to formulate a model of time that incorporates the future and its capacity to supercede and transform the past and present.

Grosz develops her argument by juxtaposing the work of three major figures in western thought: Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzche, and Henri Bergson. She reveals that in theorizing time as an active, positive phenomenon with its own characteristics and specific effects, each of these thinkers had a profound effect on contemporary understandings of the body in relation to time. She shows how their allied concepts of life, evolution, and becoming are manifest in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Luce Irigaray. Throughout The Nick of Time, Grosz emphasizes the political and cultural imperative to fundamentally rethink time: the more clearly we understand our temporal location as beings straddling the past and the future without the security of a stable and abiding present, the more transformation becomes conceivable.

"Superbly written, deftly executed, and wonderfully instructive, The Nick of Time is a first-class piece of writing and thinking. It is unique in that it is interested in 'philosophy of life' issues not only for their own sake but also because of Elizabeth Grosz's wider theoretical and practical commitments, such as feminism and a radical cultural politics."--Keith Ansell Pearson