Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Current Books in Womens Studies)

Politics & Social Sciences

Grosz, Elizabeth

Philosophy

Paul & Co Pub Consortium

Introducing the work of three French feminists - Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Michele L Doeuff - Sexual Subversions provides access to the work of these writers. In doing so this book raises some key issues of relevance to feminist research, addressing debates around the nature of feminist theory; the relationship between feminist thinking theory; the relationship between feminist thinking and male-dominated areas of knowledge; the strategies appropriate for developing non-patriarchal or woman-centered knowledges. No book on French feminists would be complete without including the contributions of Kristeva and Irigaray. The inclusion of Le Doeuff's work, which brings a different perspective to bear on the question of sexual difference, provides a counterbalance to literary appropriations of French feminism by Anglo-American readerships. Kristeva, Irigaray and Le Doeuff are the focal points of this study, precisely because each highlights the differences of the others, revealing the frameworks to which the others are committed. Nevertheless, while these writers do not present a common political or theoretical position or form a school, each does address the question of women's autonomy from male definition, affirms the sexual specificity of women, seeks out a femininity women can use to question the patriarchal norms and ideals of femininity and rejects the preordained positions patriarchy allots to woman. This book is intended for students and researchers in women's studies, philosophy and feminism.

Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists

Routledge

Jacques Lacan PB

Instead of treating art as a unique creation that requires reason and refined taste to appreciate, Elizabeth Grosz argues that art-especially architecture, music, and painting-is born from the disruptive forces of sexual selection. She approaches art as a form of erotic expression connecting sensory richness with primal desire, and in doing so, finds that the meaning of art comes from the intensities and sensations it inspires, not just its intention and aesthetic. By regarding our most cultured human accomplishments as the result of the excessive, nonfunctional forces of sexual attraction and seduction, Grosz encourages us to see art as a kind of bodily enhancement or mode of sensation enabling living bodies to experience and transform the universe. Art can be understood as a way for bodies to augment themselves and their capacity for perception and affection-a way to grow and evolve through sensation. Through this framework, which knits together the theories of Charles Darwin, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Jakob von Uexküll, we are able to grasp art's deep animal lineage. Grosz argues that art is not tied to the predictable and known but to new futures not contained in the present. Its animal affiliations ensure that art is intensely political and charged with the creation of new worlds and new forms of living. According to Grosz, art is the way in which life experiments with materiality, or nature, in order to bring about change.

Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (The Wellek Library Lectures)

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Columbia University Press

Flipping convention on its head, Eric Dietrich argues that science uncovers awe-inspiring, enduring mysteries, while religion, regarded as the source for such mysteries, is a biological phenomenon. Just like spoken language, Dietrich shows that religion is an evolutionary adaptation. Science is the source of perplexing yet beautiful mysteries, however natural the search for answers may be to human existence. Excellent Beauty undoes our misconception of scientific inquiry as an executioner of beauty, making the case that science has won the battle with religion so thoroughly it can now explain why religion persists. The book also draws deep lessons for human flourishing from the very existence of scientific mysteries. It is these latter wonderful, completely public truths that constitute some strangeness in the proportion, revealing a universe worthy of awe and wonder.

The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism

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. In The Incorporeal 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. A masterwork by an eminent theoretician, The Incorporeal offers profound new insight into the mind-body problem

"The location of the author's investigations, the body itself rather than the sphere of subjective representations of self and of function in cultures, is wholly new...I believe this work will be a landmark in future feminist thinking."- Alphonso Lingis. "This is a text of rare erudition and intellectual force. It will not only introduce feminists to an enriching set of theoretical perspectives but sets a high critical standard for feminist dialogues on the status of the body."- Judith Butler. "Volatile Bodies' demonstrates that the sexually specific body is socially constructed: biology or nature is not opposed to or in conflict with culture. Human biology is inherently social and has no pure or natural 'origin' outside of culture. Being the raw material of social and cultural organization, it is 'incomplete' and thus subject to the endless rewriting and social inscription that constitute all sign systems. Examining the theories of Freud, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, etc. on the subject of the body, Elizabeth Grosz concludes that the body they theorize is male. These thinkers are not providing an account of 'human' corporeality but of male corporeality. Grosz then turns to corporeal experiences unique to women-menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, and menopause. Her examination of female experience lays the groundwork for developing theories of sexed corporeality rather than merely rectifying flawed models of male theorists.

Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Theories of Representation and Difference)

Social Sciences

Indiana Univ. Pr

Essays at the intersection of philosophy and architecture explore how we understand and inhabit space.
To be outside allows one a fresh perspective on the inside. In these essays, philosopher Elizabeth Grosz explores the ways in which two disciplines that are fundamentally outside each another―architecture and philosophy―can meet in a third space to interact free of their internal constraints. "Outside" also refers to those whose voices are not usually heard in architectural discourse but who inhabit its space―the destitute, the homeless, the sick, and the dying, as well as women and minorities. Grosz asks how we can understand space differently in order to structure and inhabit our living arrangements accordingly. Two themes run throughout the book: temporal flow and sexual specificity. Grosz argues that time, change, and emergence, traditionally viewed as outside the concerns of space, must become more integral to the processes of design and construction. She also argues against architecture's historical indifference to sexual specificity, asking what the existence of (at least) two sexes has to do with how we understand and experience space. Drawing on the work of such philosophers as Henri Bergson, Roger Caillois, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, and Jacques Lacan, Grosz raises abstract but nonformalistic questions about space, inhabitation, and building. All of the essays propose philosophical experiments to render space and building more mobile and dynamic.

Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Writing Architecture)

Architecture

The MIT Press

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Books by Grosz, Elizabeth

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Grosz, Elizabeth. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Current Books in Womens Studies)

Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists

Jacques Lacan PB

Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (The Wellek Library Lectures)

Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (The Wellek Library Lectures)

The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism

The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism

The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism

Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Theories of Representation and Difference)

Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Writing Architecture)