This text aims at disturbing and displacing the politics of identity through theorizing sexual difference as an ontological force. Grosz suggests a theoretical move in order to develop and ask new kinds of questions concerning:
not the body – but messy biology, matter, materiality
not ideology – but force, energy, affect
not gender – but sexual difference
To provide alternative approaches and forgo a reduction of ontology to epistemology (which she believes structuralism and poststructuralism is guilty of) she turns to Deleuze’s work on “the outside” and Irigaray’s project of sexual difference.
Grosz Interpreting Irigaray’s Notion of Ontology and Sexual Difference:
* A transformation of ontology entails a transformation of our conceptions of epistemology, and vice versa. How we understand space and time transform our conceptions of matter, subjectivity, and politics. A reconfiguration of subjectivity will dramatically change our understanding of space and time.
* Sexual difference should be seen as a constituting difference preexisting entities, rather than a difference between entities.
* Irigaray does not seek the “real” woman beyond patriarchy – she wants to counter male domination, challenge conceptual systems, and allow for ways to think, read, and write otherwise. She wants to open up the position of knowing subject to the occupation of women.
* Sexual difference exists in virtuality, as a future anteriority, because it is impossible to specify in advance what will come out of the installment of sexual difference.
* Sexual difference entails an ontology that cannot be understood as self-identical but must be composed of difference and engaged in becoming.
* This difference comes out of the central ontological difference between time and space.
* The challenge facing feminism is to articulate a future in which futurity itself has a feminine form. This may render the feminine obsolete or the object of profound or inhuman becomings.
* This defines an ontology of becoming where time is privileged as a repressed or feminized condition of the world, conceived of in terms of the preeminence of an undeterminable, incalculable future. A subject is never what it is; it is always in the process of becoming something else.
Grosz notion of time as a force of differing leads her to consider the works of Darwin, Nietzsche, Bergson and, most importantly, Deleuze. Through them she gives a schematic characterization of time as 1) an active force forward 2) the underlying, inherent principle of the transformation of objects/space 3) the never changing force of variation 4) a singularity underlying the multiplicity of changing things 5) the outside in which other forces impinge on each other 6) an enduring past which can be illuminated again and again through the active work of the present.
Such an understanding of time is important to feminist theory, writes Grosz, since it supersedes the past and the present and enables us to access the untimely. It allows us to envision a future unlike the present without being able to specify in advance what it entails. It is the investment in the power of the leap that makes feminism a project without end. Feminism as processes and becomings will ensure that difference continues to be made.
QUESTIONS: How are ontology (of becoming) and epistemology linked in Grosz way of thinking? In what ways does theorizing sexual difference as an ontolgical force avoid reducing ontology to epistemology? How come sexual difference is said not to exist at the same time as it is said to be consitutive? Why is sexual difference, as an ontological force (beyond the realm of subjectivity and identity politics), in need of theorizing feminist subjects in order to come forth?
4 comments:
Is Grosz proceeding with a conception of time itself as feminine, or simply making time, because of its historical configuration as feminine, important? I ask because she points out that time creates space, makes it possible, and this strikes me as a kind of feminization of the event of any creation, permanently binding the feminine and the maternal.
In response to Abe's question, I believe that in this essay Grosz says that Kant indicated that of space and time, space was masculine and time feminine. I get the sense that Grosz wants to do what many of the writers this semester have attempted to do: to enter the statements and claims of masculine narrative and creatively reread them in such a way as to draw the 'woman' and the 'feminine' out of the discursive negation or disempowerment those claims have resulted in; and simultaneously to offer innovative and more effective understandings of the philosophic tropes themselves. Thus, in this piece, by accepting, deviantly, the notion of time as feminine, and then asserting the immense potency and perpetual transformation inherent in time, Grosz gives new force to the discursive characterization of the feminine, and perhaps also indicates what was and is at stake in masculinity's hegemonic narrative. Kant's valorization of space over time need not be accepted as truth but understood in terms of power.
To me it sounded more like Kant masculinized time and feminized space, at least according to Irigaray (p.177) It is this traditional association of women with space that Irigaray and Grosz want to defy by affirming women's closer alignment with temporality. I agree with Abe that this kind of creative perspective on time, in which futurity has a feminine form, brings to mind the maternal and also, for me, the chora. Especially when she says on p181 "time itself, while it is the principal of emergence and transformation, never itself emerges and transforms..."
I found the discussion of the way in which a reconceptualization of time will pave the way for an ontology of difference and change very compelling. configuring time as the substrate of space in which before and after happen enables us to conceive the present in terms of its potential to become a different future. the current reliance of time upon space instead positions conceptualization in a position of constantly carrying a present framework forward as change is always implicated in the present configuration, rather than outside it.
however, i found less compelling the idea that femininity has been allied with a spatialization while masculinity with a temporialization. although there are ways in which traditional depictions of frivolity and domesticity as well as sensibility have mapped women onto bodies stuck in space with no mind to move them in time, there are other competing ideas which i think do establish even patriarchal assertions of women in time. these include i think the implications of domesticity and sensibility for the interior. the ability to feel and the ability to nurture both indicate an interior register. furthermore, conceptions of women as secret or private compound these ideas. conversely, traditional allegiance of men with the external seem to entail a spatial externality. in other words, i would say that the idea that Kant has masculinized time and feminized space is too reductionist even along a traditional monolithic duality.
rather, i would say that these interiorizations and externalizations instead ground both women AND men in space and leave neither one in time. is not interiority a spatial term? thus the impenatrability of the One is that of a space that displaces time. and so the conceptualization of a time is not a feminization of it except insofar as any proliferation of difference is such.
Post a Comment