Travels with "Darwin"

Abstract

Two new books by Elizabeth Grosz have recently been published. The Nick of Time, Politics, Evolution, and Untimely, and Time Travels, Feminism, Nature, Power. The first, an exploration of the space between natural and cultural, space in which biological blurs into and induces cultural through its own self-variation (1). The second, a series of essays exploring how reconsidering our concepts of time might result in new concepts of nature, culture, subjectivity, and politics (1). Both books argue for a concept of time shaped by critique of metaphysics of presence, a concept of time that is not given over to privilege of present, but points to future, to a probabilistic but still indeterminate yet-to-come that nevertheless may have power to transform human and non-human life in direction of those yet unknown futures. The Nick of Time is a timely contribution to history of philosophy. Making point that philosophy and theory in general do not address Darwinism, Grosz performs considerable service of addressing that failure (19). What will be of interest to philosophers is claim that Darwin produces a postmodern account of origin; that each origin is a function of language; that it depends on what we call a species; and that what we call a species refers to an arbitrarily chosen set of similarities that render differences marginal or insignificant. As such, it is argued, differences form continua whose divisions are arbitrary; differences of degree rather than differences of kind (25). To extent