Elizabeth Grosz

Impressions follow:

Pretty thin stuff after reading in object-oriented philosophy over the last few days. Via Deleuze, Grosz thinks in binaries: inside/outside, alive/notalive, 'primary forces' and the 'primitive' (which, in a typically psychoanalytic manner, are more revelatory, because earlier), and art as framing 'chaos' (which is out there) (and where neither 'framing' nor 'life' have any of the ethical force that they do in Butler's Frames of War); discussions of music as rhythmic and ordered work only so long as she doesn't discuss any particular music and just brackets off various postmodern, postrhythmic, and postmelodic soundmaking (indeed it's the automatic pop music so disdained by Deleuze that is most rhythmic and refrain-y) (and if she wants to discuss primitive and bodily aesthetics of sensation, EATING would have been a better site for investigation than music); her references to science use Darwin in the same way one might use a philosopher, as a site for thinking, when she might have done better, both in her references to birds and in her many vague references to 'the world', 'the universe', and even the 'vibrations' of sub-atomic particles, to engage with contemporary science. Certainly once we get "down" (if we want to think in these spatial metaphors) to sub-atomic particles, it's no longer suitable to distinguish between life and nonlife.

Useful for a good discussion of Von Uexküll and for the inevitable excess and 'mal-adaption' of sexual attraction, whether in birds, fish, or humans.… (more)

the conclusion especially made me feel kind of ecstatic!

"History produces not only the forces of domination but also the forces of resistance that press up against and are often the objects of such domination. Which is another way of saying that history, the past, is larger than the present, and is the ever-growing and ongoing possibility of resistance to the present’s imposed values, the possibility of futures not unlike the present, futures that resist and transform what dominates the present" (237).

“The resources of the previously oppressed - of women under patriarchy, of slaves under slavery, of minorities under racism, colonialism, or nationalism, of workers under capitalism, and so on -are not lost or wiped out through the structures of domination that helped to define them: they are preserved somewhere, in the past itself, with effects and traces that can be animated in a number of different contexts and terms in the present" (240).… (more)

"Pleasure is a crucial hinge, a bodily resource, that is of enormous strategic utility in the ongoing interplay and transformations of power and resistance. Pleasure is that which induces bodies to participate in power; pleasure is that which provides power with some of its techniques for the extraction of information or knowledge, and for imposing discipline through the subject’s very complicity in speaking and acting according to requirements of disciplinary regimes. But if pleasure can function in the service of power, as a means and end of power’s operations, so too pleasure is that wedge which serves and consolidates resistance" (191).… (more)