Elizabeth Grosz is a professor at Duke University whose work engages deeply with the writings of prominent French philosophers. She delves into the complex theories and critical insights of thinkers such as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, and Gilles Deleuze. Her scholarship focuses on analyzing and interpreting their foundational ideas, connecting them to contemporary thought. Grosz offers readers a rich exploration of influential philosophical landscapes and their lasting impact.
Art is redefined as an expression of primal desire and eroticism, rather than merely a product of reason and refined taste. Elizabeth Grosz explores how architecture, music, and painting emerge from the disruptive forces of sexual selection, emphasizing that the significance of art lies in the sensory experiences and emotional intensities it evokes. This perspective shifts the focus from artistic intention to the visceral connections art creates, highlighting its role in expressing deep human desires.
Prominent feminist theorist rethinks the relationship between evolution and
the biological body through the study of three key figures--Darwin, Nietzsche,
and Bergson.
In these essays, philosopher Grosz explores the ways in which two disciplines that are fundamentally outside each other - architecture and philosophy - can meet in a third space to interact free of their internal constraints
Demonstrates that the sexually specific body is socially constructed: biology
or nature is not opposed to or in conflict with culture. Examining the
theories of Freud, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, and more
on the subject of the body, this title concludes that the body they theorize
is male.
Exploring the contributions of Darwin, Nietzsche, and Bergson, Elizabeth Grosz delves into the social and political ramifications of evolutionary change. Her analysis highlights how these thinkers inform contemporary cultural and social theory, revealing the interconnectedness of evolution and societal dynamics. Grosz's work invites readers to reconsider the implications of evolutionary concepts on modern life and thought.
Elizabeth Grosz addresses three related concepts-life, politics, and art-by
exploring the implications of Charles Darwins account of the evolution of
species.
In this new book, Elizabeth Grosz continues her investigations of role of the
body in thinking in art and science, as in politics and philosophy. Through a
fresh engagement with the work of Deleuze and the thinkers he admired, she
extracts a vital new ethics, itself part of a philosophy of nature beyond the
limits of 'the new materialism'. A stimulating and rigorous journey towards a
new philosophy for our times. John Rajchman, author of The Deleuze Connections
Philosophy has inherited a powerful impulse to embrace either dualism or a reductive monism-either a radical separation of mind and body or the reduction of mind to body. But from its origins in the writings of the Stoics, the first thoroughgoing materialists, another view has acknowledged that no forms of materialism can be completely self-inclusive-space, time, the void, and sense are the incorporeal conditions of all that is corporeal or material. Elizabeth Grosz argues that the ideal is inherent in the material and the material in the ideal, and, by tracing its development over time, she makes the case that this same idea reasserts itself in different intellectual contexts. Grosz shows that not only are idealism and materialism inextricably linked but that this "belonging together" of the entirety of ideality and the entirety of materiality is not mediated or created by human consciousness. Instead, it is an ontological condition for the development of human consciousness. Grosz draws from Spinoza's material and ideal concept of substance, Nietzsche's amor fati, Deleuze and Guattari's plane of immanence, Simondon's preindividual, and Raymond Ruyer's self-survey or autoaffection to show that the world preexists the evolution of the human and that its material and incorporeal forces are the conditions for all forms of life, human and nonhuman alike
