Saturday, March 05, 2005

The Nick of Time

Took a day trip to STL today to meet up with some friends from Carbondale and stopped in at Borders. What sections do you peruse when you go to one of the big box book stores? There's no rhetoric section, so generally I take a look at philosophy, sociology, women/gender studies, labor studies. At least that's more or less where I browsed today. What I vaguely hoped to find wasn't there, but I did find something that seemed to be just what I was looking for all the same: Elizabeth Grosz's The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Duke, 2004). Sections divided among Darwin, Nietzsche, and Bergson. Here's a little blurb from the back:

"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."

Katherine Hayles says this book "is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how memory, historicity, and politics connect to and are reconfigured by temporality."

And Brian Massumi says the book offers "a contemporary dialogue on the politics and philosophy of change."

I'll blog more once I've read it, which may be a little while, seeing as I have still yet to finish Booth and also have a Cs paper to get ready.

1 comment:

Donna said...

I like that idea! I've just been reading the intro, where she says, "We need to understand [the body's] open-ended connections with time and space, its place in dynamic natural and cultural systems, and its mutating, self-changing relations within natural and social networks." I'm admittedly behind when it comes to thinking about networks and complex systems, so this project of hers really appeals to me. I would definitely be up for a Grosz carnival this summer.