Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures (review)

In her introduction to Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures (1999), editor Elizabeth Grosz states that the book "raises time as a question, as the question of the promise of the new" (6). This is an apt description of a quite heterogeneous collection of essays: while few of the authors represented engage in an explicit analysis of time as such, they all seek to rethink time and temporality in terms of becoming, duration, and futurity. Loosely centered around the figures of Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and especially Gilles Deleuze, the volume can be seen as an attempt to reconsider, expand upon, and interrogate these philosophers' readings of time in the context of various fields of inquiry.

The eleven essays included in Becomings are of uniformly high quality and treat a number of important issues. Of the book's three sections, the first, "The Becoming of the World," focuses most concretely on how the concept of becoming is understood in various disciplines. Grosz's own essay challenges conventional understandings of where life begins, blurring the boundaries between physics and biology and encouraging us to incorporate virtuality and chance into our conception of the new. The physical sciences also figure prominently in Manuel De Landa's chapter, an application of Deleuze's nonessentialist, "neorealist" epistemology to the task of "reconceptualiz[ing] the world in order to give time and history a creative role, with the vision of an open future that this implies" (30). By contrast, John Rajchman is concerned with specifying the role of becomings in the political sphere and with confronting the problem of "the time of the political" (42) in a Deleuzian context. Linda Martín Alcoff concludes this section by taking the first steps toward an epistemology "based on becoming" rather than on the "conceptual impossibility" (55) of perfect knowledge and an ideal relationship between the knower and the known.

The essays comprised by the second section, "Knowing and Doing Otherwise," explore the possibilities inherent within subjective becomings and the implications of such becomings for both personal and intersubjective experience. Edward S. Casey demonstrates how a perceptual act as simple as glancing at someone subverts everyday temporality, inasmuch as it "lacerates" and disrupts the durational linearity that we normally take for granted. While Casey draws heavily on Deleuze and Bergson in his analysis, Dorothea Olkowski is much less accepting in her elaboration of the disturbing implications of Deleuze's conceptualization of desire as a series of pre-personal syntheses for feminist understandings of embodiment and subjectivity. The emphasis on subjectivity continues in Claire Colebrook's chapter, in which she considers whether, on Michel Foucault's and Deleuze's interpretations, subjectivity can be conceived of as an effect of "a strategy of becoming" rather than a strategy of "reactivism, recognition, and being" (118). Finally, Eleanor Kaufman applies many of the issues discussed in the preceding three essays to her feminist analysis of the interdependency of thoughts and materiality in Pierre Klossowski's Les Lois de l'hospitalité (1965).

The most diverse group of essays in Becomings is contained in the book's final section, "Global Futures." Here futurity figures most prominently, and the framework of Grosz's conception for the volume is stretched the furthest. In response to Rosi Braidotti's (1994) condemnation of biotechnologies as "freezing" time and undermining our experience of duration, Gail Weiss argues that, although problematic, these emerging technologies nevertheless afford the possibility of "new ways of linking bodies up to one another, expanding their interconnections, and, in so doing, increasing their intercorporeal potentialities" (174). In the second chapter of this section, Pheng Cheah proposes the Derridean notion of spectrality as a framework for understanding "the relation of the living national body to the bourgeois postcolonial state" (194). The volume concludes with Alphonso Lingis's moving tribute to the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement in Peru, in which he depicts the very hopelessness of their struggle as constitutive of liberation, innocence, and a profound sort of futurity. Lingis's chapter, which melds...