Grosz 2004

Grosz, Elizabeth. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

Introduction: To the Untimely

"Biological organization, whose morphological structures engender the variety of life in all its forms, instead of ensuring that life conforms to existing social categories, boundaries, and limits, instead of containing existence to what is or has been, opens up and enables cultural, political, economic, and artistic variation. ... Biology does not limit social, political, and personal life: it not only makes them possible, it ensures that they endlessly transform themselves and thus stimulate biology into further self-transformation." (1)

"need to have a more nuanced, intricate account of the body's immersion and participation in the world" (2)

"without some reconfigured concept of the biological body, models of subject-inscription, production, or constitution lack material force; paradoxically, they lack corporeality." (4_

"how the biological induces the cultural rather than inhibits it" (4)

time -- "a kind of evanescence that appears only at those moments when our expectations are (positively or negatively) surprised." (5)

"think of time through the temporality of objects, through the temporality of space and matter, rather than in itself or on its own terms" (5)

"We can think it only in passing moments, through ruptures, nicks, cuts, in instances of dislocation, though it contains no moments or ruptures and has no being or presence, functioning only as continuous becoming." (5)

"Time inhabits all living beings, is an internal, indeed constitutive, feature of life itself, yet it is also what places living beings in relations of simultaneity and succession with each other insofar as they are all participants in a single temporality, in a single relentless movement forward." (5)

Darwin linked live to the movement of time, turning life "form a static quality into a dynamic process" (7)

event -- "Events are ruptures, nick, which flow from causal connections in the past but which, in their unique combinations and consequences, generate unpredictabilty and effect seomtimes subtle but wide-ranging, unforeseeable transformations in the present and future." (8)

"Operating at a different, a faster or slower rater of speed than much of the material universe, life is always challenged to overcome itself, to invent new methods, regions, tactics, and goals, to differ from itself, to continually invent solutions to the problems of survival its universe poses to it, using the resources the universe offers it, for its own self-overcoming." (9)

untimely -- "The untimely is that which is strong enough, active enough, to withstand the drive of the present to similarity, resemblance, or recognition, for the untiely brings with it the difference that portends the future. The overman is the one who welcomes difference, the future, and its rewriting and transformation of the present, the one who is strong enough to seek his own erasure as man." (11)

Nietzsche; philosophy as "active modes of interpretation... Knowledge is now at play in the world, not a respite from it." (11)

"The more clearly we understand our temporal location as beings who straddle the past and the future without the security of a stable and abiding present, the more mobile our possibilities are, and the more transformation becomes conceivable. The more we affirm the value of the nick, the cut, or rupture, the more we revel in the untimely and the more we make ourselves untimely." (14)