Space, Time and Perversion by Elizabeth Grosz

Space, Time and Perversion Reviews

• 
  Susan

  Grosz is so smart, and I relly love her little "Bodies-Cities" essay included here, but I think she is so pig-headedly wrong about how she deals with the question of sexual difference. I was very disappointed with her essay on the "chora."
• 
  Andy

  Woof. If this wasn't such a foundational text for bodies and space I would not have bothered to finish it. It is outdated, boring, sometimes mildly offensive, but also really interesting to see where feminism has been.
• 
  Mentai

  I read this a while back and it gives a fair background as to the crisis in reason and epistemology from a feminist perspective. I want to have another look because it shows Grosz dealing with the bodily/material--discursive problematic through time and space before she got so focused on Darwin (and before she loves to stick the boot into other feminists.) My early notes are difficult to read but there seems to be some insight there about connecting the biological with the production of female knowledge.
• 
  Caleb

  Grosz is a truly inventive thinker, especially when she moves beyond the well-mapped terrain of psychoanalysis and into the biological and animal science discourses. I read this collection with an eye especially for her treatment of the erotic and human sexual intimacy...to this end, the brilliant and entertaining essay "Animal Sex" is particularly highly recommended. Her ability to refigure sex outside of functionalism and biological necessity is really impressive, and the way she explicitly situates each move within the discourse of feminist thought is very helpful. There are only a handful of thinkers who have taken up Irigaray and pushed beyond her insights into truly novel ideas...not just gesturing at something, but forging new connections that can become synapses of future thought. I would definitely place Grosz among them, and I find it an inspiration for philosophy as a practice of opening rather than closure.
• 
  Sarah Brewer

  So this text relies on and discusses work of past theorist. It spends a lot of time discussing sex and how that relates to bodies. It in my opinion seems to be retelling a lot of information without giving an any new thoughts. It does work as a good reference book and introductory work to this subject, but I was hoping for new ideas and not to reread what past theorist have said on gender and sexuality and desire.
• 
  CL Chu

  Kind of fascinated by her inclusion of Caillois's praying mantis in the discussion on sex and death from the phallic standpoint.
• 
  Alex Lee

  Grosz's title is both accurate and a little misleading. She is after the concept of a non-male subjectivity. In approaching the matter through concepts of space and time, she references Kant's notion of a priori constraints on subjectivity -- how the phenomenal world necessarily constructs subjectivity. However, there is little in this book about space or time, directly. Instead, Grosz spends most of her time differentiating psychoanalytic (and other discourses) facets of organization by pointing out the inherent assumptions of organization as being non-neutral and sexually biased... which has an alignment with Derrida's work in terms of how he continually debunks the transcendental position by pointing out the suppressed non-neutral content that helps stabilize the transcendental mark.
  
  This is a book she has written before, many times. So you must understand, while this is an interesting book, it was a little disappointing. I thought she would radically break out of the feminist patriarchal division and come up with a new synthesis, perhaps. But she doesn't really. Instead she sticks to obscuring the divisions of sexual pleasures/desires inherent within sexed definitions. I think a big part of this has to do with how she doesn't want to be wrong. So she sticks close to the topic at hand, and quotes thoroughly from other thinkers (like Deleuze and Foucault) and kind of doesn't really go out on a limb.
  
  Still, it's a solid work. I guess the fact that she keeps writing so many of these books and I keep buying them means that she isn't quite done saying what she wants to say, and I keep looking to her to say what she wants to say. But that doesn't quite happen, as we are always kept in check by the very divisions that she points out and can't quite eradicate from the discourse.
  
  This is a problem with feminism though, because as soon as its content is exceeded, it is really no longer feminist. I hate that Grosz sticks to this division because it continually only defines the present through the past (without giving a positive content suggestion to the future) but this problem is a way of opening a space for others, perhaps.
• 
  Samah

  very complicated but very interesting going to read it again