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.
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I. Life: Human and Inhuman Becomings
- 1. The Inhuman in the Humanities: Darwin and the Ends of Man
- 2. Deleuze, Bergson, and the Concept of Life
- 3. Bergson, Deleuze, and Difference
- Part II. Disturbing Differences: A New Kind of Feminism
- 4. Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom
- 5. The Future of Feminist Theory: Dreams for New Knowledges
- 6. Differences Disturbing Identity: Deleuze and Feminism
- 7. Irigaray and the Ontology of Sexual Difference
- Part III. Animals, Sex, and Art
- 8. Darwin and the Split between Natural and Sexual Selection
- 9. Sexual Difference as Sexual Selection: Irigarayan Reflections on Darwin
- 10. Art and the Animal
- 11. Living Art and the Art of Life: Women’s Painting from the Western Desert
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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