Scholars@Duke
Elizabeth Grosz

Elizabeth Grosz

Jean Fox O'Barr Women's Studies Distinguished Professor Emerita
Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies
elizabeth.grosz@duke.edu
Box 90760, Durham, NC 27708-0760
210 East Duke Bldg, Durham, NC 27708

Selected Publications

Chaos. Cosmos, Territory, Architecture

Journal Article Urdimento · December 18, 2025 The hereafter text is extracted from Elizabeth Grosz's book Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (2008). In it, Grosz focuses on the conditions of art's existence as a separation and ordering of compositional planes within chaos iman ... Full text Cite

The in(ter)vention of feminist knowledges

Chapter · January 1, 2024 If we continue to speak this sameness, if we speak to each other as men have spoken for centuries, as they have taught us to speak, we will fail each other. Again… words will pass through our bodies, above our heads, disappear, make us disappear. (Irigaray ... Full text Cite

Feminism and science

Chapter · January 1, 2024 Science today maintains an extremely high social profile. It is not only regarded as the purest and most ideal form of knowledge, it also acts as a paradigm for disinterested, objective and proven knowledge, incontestably providing our most secure sources ... Full text Cite

Introduction

Journal Article Crossing Boundaries Feminisms and the Critique of Knowledges · January 1, 2024 Humanity, Humanities:… learning or literature concerned with human culture; a term including the various branches of polite scholarship, as grammar, rhetoric, poetry, and especially the study of ancient Latin and Greek classics. ... Full text Cite

Creative Evolution

Book · January 1, 2022 First published in French in 1907, Henri Bergson’s L’évolution créatrice is a scintillating and radical work by one of the great French philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This outstanding new translation, the first for over a hundred y ... Full text Cite

Idealism: A Conversation with Elizabeth Grosz

Journal Article Concentric Literary and Cultural Studies · March 1, 2021 Full text Cite

Volatile bodies

Book · January 1, 2020 Volatile Bodies is based on a risky wager: that all the effects of subjectivity, psychological depth and inferiority can be refigured in terms of bodies and surfaces. It uses, transforms and subverts the work of a number of distinguished male theorists of ... Full text Cite

The nick of time: Politics, evolution and the untimely

Book · January 1, 2020 ‘Always one to take on big questions, Grosz wants to shift the attention of feminist and other radical social theory to the natural sciences, in order to ask how the biological induces the cultural and, further, how our immersion in time affects the materi ... Full text Cite

REFIGURING BODIES

Chapter · January 1, 2020 The matter/form distinction is refigured in terms of the distinction between substance and accident and between a God-given soul and a mortal, lustful, sinful carnality. Within the Christian tradition, the separation of mind and body was correlated with th ... Full text Cite

Bodies-cities

Chapter · August 7, 2019 Cite

Psychoanalysis and the body

Chapter · August 7, 2019 Cite

SPACE, TIME, AND BODIES

Chapter · January 1, 2019 Cite

Space, time and perversion: Essays on the politics of bodies

Book · January 1, 2018 Exploring the fields of architecture, philosophy, and queer theory, Grosz shows how feminism and cultural analysis have conceptually stripped bodies of their specificity, their corporeality, and the vestigal traces of their production as bodies. She invest ... Full text Cite

Bodies-Cities

Chapter · September 25, 2017 Full text Cite

Psychoanalysis and the body

Chapter · September 25, 2017 Cite

An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz: Geopower, Inhumanism and the Biopolitical

Journal Article Theory Culture and Society · May 1, 2017 This article is an interview with Elizabeth Grosz by Kathryn Yusoff and Nigel Clark. It primarily addresses Grosz’s approaches to ‘geopower’, and the discussion encompasses an exploration of her ideas on biopolitics, inhuman forces and material experimenta ... Full text Cite

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

Book · March 14, 2017 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 materiali ... Link to item Cite

Irigaray, The Untimely, and The Constitution of An Onto-Ethics

Journal Article Australian Feminist Law Journal · January 2, 2017 Full text Cite

Onto-Ethics and Difference: An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz

Journal Article Australian Feminist Law Journal · January 2, 2017 Full text Cite

Chaos, Territory, Art

Book · August 13, 2013 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. ... Cite

Habit Today: Ravaisson, Bergson, Deleuze and Us

Journal Article Body and Society · June 1, 2013 Habit has been understood, through the work of Descartes, Kant and Sartre, as a form of mechanism that arrests and inhibits consciousness, thought and freedom. This article addresses the concept of habit through a different tradition that links it instead ... Full text Cite

Philosophy

Chapter · May 20, 2013 Cite

Psychoanalysis and feminism

Chapter · May 20, 2013 Cite

Future, cities, architecture

Chapter · March 5, 2013 Cite

Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism

Book · February 1, 2013 Through an examination of a variety of cultural forms and texts, Sexy Bodies investigates the ways in which sexual bodies, sexual practices and sexualities are produced. ... Cite

Bodies and Knowledges: Feminism and the Crisis of Reason

Chapter · January 1, 2013 If the skin were parchment and the blows you gave me were ink. ... Full text Cite

Geopower: A panel on Elizabeth Grosz's Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth

Journal Article Environment and Planning D Society and Space · December 1, 2012 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 precisel ... Full text Cite

Utopie Wcielone – Czas Architektury

Journal Article Panoptikum. Audiovizualia, Film, Media, Sztuka, (Special Issue), Dys/ utopie · 2012 Cite

A Arte e o Animal

Chapter · 2012 Cite

Time Out of Joint

Chapter · 2012 Cite

Darwin i gatunek ludzki

Journal Article Przeglad Filozoficzno-Literacki [The Philosophical-Literary Review] · 2012 Cite

Matter, Life and Other Variations

Journal Article Philosophy Today · 2012 Cite

Irigaray og Kjønnsforskjellens Ontologi

Journal Article Agora. Journal for Metafysisk Spekulasjon · 2012 Cite

Becoming Undone

Book · September 12, 2011 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. ... Cite

Matter, Life, and Other Variations

Journal Article Philosophy Today · 2011 Why is it an excess of order rather than an emergent order that makes objects, things, processes, and events, including life, possible? Because materiality as we understand it in Western philosophy is always already in opposition to what it is not. ... Link to item Cite

The practice of feminist theory

Journal Article Differences · August 20, 2010 Full text Cite

Differences Disturbing Identity: Deleuze and Feminism

Chapter · March 8, 2010 Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences explores the place and function of affect in feminist knowledge production, investigating what it means to work with and through affect, as well as the kinds of ethical and ... ... Cite

The untimeliness of feminist theory

Journal Article Nora Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research · March 1, 2010 Full text Cite

Embodied Utopia - time of architecture

Journal Article Panoptikum: Audiovizualia, Film, Media, Sztuka · 2010 The focus of Elisabeth Grosz’s essay is the complex relation between three concepts: utopia, time and embodiment. Starting with the most significant classical specimen examples of the form, namely works by Plato and Thomas More and inspired by the analogy ... Link to item Cite

Sensation: The Earth, a People, Art

Chapter · January 1, 2009 Cite

Conversations

Book · January 1, 2008 Conversations is an important collection of interviews in which Luce Irigaray discusses the full range of her work and ideas with leading academics in the fields of Continental Philosophy, Feminist Theory and Critical Theory. Covering all the key topics th ... Cite

Deleuze, Bergson and the Concept of Life

Journal Article Revue Internationale de Philosophie · 2007 Cite

Derrida and feminism: A remembrance

Journal Article Differences · December 1, 2005 Full text Cite

Bergson, deleuze and the becoming of unbecoming

Journal Article Parallax · December 1, 2005 Full text Cite

Time Travels

Book · June 1, 2005 Together these essays demonstrate the broad scope and applicability of Grosz’s thinking about time as an undertheorized but uniquely productive force. ... Cite

Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth

Journal Article IDEA (Interior Design/ Interior Architecture Educator’s Association · 2005 Cite

The Nick of Time

Book · December 6, 2004 Prominent feminist theorist rethinks the relationship between evolution and the biological body through the study of three key figures--Darwin, Nietzsche, and Bergson. Superbly written, deftly executed, and wonderfully instructive. ... Cite

The time of architecture

Chapter · December 16, 2003 Cite

Histories of the present and future: Feminism, power, bodies

Chapter · December 1, 2003 There is much about feminist theory that is in a state of flux right now; major transformations are occurring regarding how feminist politics and its long- and short-term goals and methods are conceived. The debates about the place of identity in political ... Cite

Naked

Chapter · January 1, 2003 Cite

Jacques Lacan: a feminist introduction

Book · September 11, 2002 Grosz gives a critical overview of Lacan's work from a feminist perspective. Discussing previous attempts to give a feminist reading of his work, she argues for women's autonomy based on an indifference to the Lacanian phallus. ... Cite

Feminist Futures?

Journal Article Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature · 2002 Full text Link to item Cite

Notes on the Thing

Journal Article Perspecta · 2002 Full text Link to item Cite

Architecture from the Outside

Book · June 22, 2001 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. ... Cite

Histories of a feminist future

Journal Article Signs · January 1, 2000 Full text Cite

Becomings. Explorations in Time, Memory and Futures

Book · 1999 This volume explores the ontological, epistemic, and political implications of rethinking time as a dynamic and irreversible force. ... Cite

Darwin and Feminism: Preliminary Investigations for a Possible Alliance

Journal Article Australian Feminist Studies · January 1, 1999 Full text Cite

The time of violence: Deconstruction and value

Journal Article Cultural Values · June 1998 Full text Cite

Of Being-Two: Introduction

Journal Article Diacritics · 1998 Full text Link to item Cite

Space, Time, and Perversion

Book · 1995 She investigates the work of Michael Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler and Alphonso Lingis, examining the ways in which the functioning of bodies transforms understandings of space. ... Cite

Volatile Bodies. Toward a Corporeal Feminism

Book · 1994 Volatile Bodies is based on a risky wager: that all the effects of subjectivitiy, psychological depth and interiority can be refigured in terms of bodies and surfaces. It uses, transforms and subverts the work of a number of distinguished male theorists of ... Cite

A thousand tiny sexes: Feminism and rhizomatics

Journal Article Topoi · September 1, 1993 Full text Cite

Merleau-ponty and irigaray in the flesh

Journal Article Thesis Eleven · January 1, 1993 Full text Cite

Feminism and the Body.

Journal Article Hypatia · 1991 Full text Cite

Freaks

Journal Article Social Semiotics · January 1, 1991 Full text Cite

Sexual Subversions

Book · March 1, 1989 The book introduces the works of three well known French feminists: Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Michele Le Doeuff. ... Cite

Notes Towards a Corporeal Feminism

Journal Article Australian Feminist Studies · December 1, 1987 Full text Cite

General editors' note

Journal Article Australian Feminist Studies · December 1987 Full text Cite

Editorial

Journal Article Australian Feminist Studies · December 1, 1987 Full text Cite

Feminist theory and the challenge to knowledges

Journal Article Women S Studies International Forum · January 1, 1987 This paper explores the phallocentric nature of methodologies, frameworks, and presumptions dominant within the social sciences and humanities. It attempts to analyse the recent history of feminist theory, from the 1960s to the 1980s, in the light of the c ... Full text Cite

Irigaray and the Divine

Book · January 1, 1986 Cite

Semiotics, Ideology, Language

Book · January 1986 Cite