Society and Space – Environment and Planning D

Elizabeth Grosz discussion at the AAG – audio recording

The 2012 AAG meeting in New York brought philosopher Elizabeth Grosz into discussion with geographers in a session entitled “Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth- Author meets Critics”. The session was organised by Kathryn Yusoff and chaired by Jamie Lorimer.

The audio recording of the discussions is available in three parts:-

Part one - Jamie Lorimer; Elizabeth Grosz; Nigel H. Clark

Part two - Arun Saldanha; Kathryn Yusoff; Catherine Nash

Part three - Elizabeth Grosz response; discussion

An edited paper drawing on the discussion will appear in the print journal in the near future. In the meantime, we have made the audio recording available. Here’s the description of the session which gives a flavour of the fascinating discussion.

Rather than understand art as cultural accomplishment, Elizabeth Grosz argues that it is born from the intensities of chaos and disruptive forms of sexual selection—a corporeality that vibrates to the hum of the universe. Grosz contends that it is precisely this excessive, non-productive expenditure of sexual attraction that is the condition for art’s work. This intimate corporeality, composed of nonhuman forces, is what draws and transforms the cosmos, prompting experimentation with materiality, sensation and life. Drawing from The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely and Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, in this book, Grosz reads Darwin and Nietzsche against each other, taking up the unrealised possibilities of both to compose a new philosophy of life that argues for the generative (and destructive) forces of the environment and embodied difference. This “bioaesthetics” (Saldanha 2009)—that is biospheric and biopolitical—presents a formable challenge to geographers interested in art, sexuality, time and the territorialisation of the earth. How might we understand this distinctly different kind of biopolitics? Grosz argues that art is not tied to the reproduction of the known, but to the possibility of the new, overcoming the containment of the present to elaborate on futures yet to come. In this rethinking of sexual selection, Grosz suggests an intensely political role for art as a bioaesthetics that is charged with the creation of new worlds and forms of life. Grosz makes a radical argument for a feminist philosophy of the biosphere and for our thinking the world otherwise.