Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art by Elizabeth Grosz


Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art
Title : Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0822350718
ISBN-10 : 9780822350712
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 280
Publication : First published July 27, 2011

In Becoming Undone, Elizabeth Grosz addresses three related concepts-life, politics, and art-by exploring the implications of Charles Darwin’s account of the evolution of species. Challenging characterizations of Darwin’s work as a form of genetic determinism, Grosz shows that his writing reveals an insistence on the difference between natural selection and sexual selection, the principles that regulate survival and attractiveness, respectively. Sexual selection complicates natural selection by introducing aesthetic factors and the expression of individual will, desire, or pleasure. Grosz explores how Darwin’s theory of sexual selection transforms philosophy, our understanding of humanity in its male and female forms, our ideas of political relations, and our concepts of art. Connecting the naturalist’s work to the writings of Bergson, Deleuze, and Irigaray, she outlines a postmodern Darwinism that understands all of life as forms of competing and coordinating modes of openness. Although feminists have been suspicious of the concepts of nature and biology central to Darwin’s work, Grosz proposes that his writings are a rich resource for developing a more politicized, radical, and far-reaching feminist understanding of matter, nature, biology, time, and becoming.

Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art Reviews

  • Justin Abraham

    This is an extraordinary book that goes in the changes-my-way-of-thinking-category forever.
    Grosz is erudite but writes so transparently. It's a pleasure. No pretension and you can tell she's enjoying it.

    Brilliant on the 'life' of events, "the life of animals and plants, the life of inhuman forces, the life of concepts, the life of sensations which impinge on and entwine, co-actualize, with human life" (35).

    Life and becoming which is interaction with matter, and the subject's freedom through an immersion in materiality.

    Feminism as now focused on "freedom to" not "freedom from".

    The division of sexual difference into at least two types is the way the dynamic natural world has produced endless variation and difference. Sexual selection allows the leaf to have 'another life', no longer bound up with the tree's capacity for survival but now a part of the bird's sexual life.

    The Umwelt - the organism's soap bubble world which its receptor organs allow it access to but deny, always, complete access for all organisms.

    Art is the linkage of bodies to the forces of the earth. Architecture is the first art because without cordoning of territory, nothing can be extracted, nothing can resonate, intensify, effect. (171)

  • Jes

    Picked this up about a year ago and finally finished it. I just love Grosz. Why can't everyone write this eloquently? Feminist theory + new materialism + feminist phenomenology + lots of Darwin.