Impressions follow:

Pretty thin stuff after reading in object-oriented philosophy over the last few days. Via Deleuze, Grosz thinks in binaries: inside/outside, alive/notalive, 'primary forces' and the 'primitive' (which, in a typically psychoanalytic manner, are more revelatory, because earlier), and art as framing 'chaos' (which is out there) (and where neither 'framing' nor 'life' have any of the ethical force that they do in Butler's Frames of War); discussions of music as rhythmic and ordered work only so long as she doesn't discuss any particular music and just brackets off various postmodern, postrhythmic, and postmelodic soundmaking (indeed it's the automatic pop music so disdained by Deleuze that is most rhythmic and refrain-y) (and if she wants to discuss primitive and bodily aesthetics of sensation, EATING would have been a better site for investigation than music); her references to science use Darwin in the same way one might use a philosopher, as a site for thinking, when she might have done better, both in her references to birds and in her many vague references to 'the world', 'the universe', and even the 'vibrations' of sub-atomic particles, to engage with contemporary science. Certainly once we get "down" (if we want to think in these spatial metaphors) to sub-atomic particles, it's no longer suitable to distinguish between life and nonlife.

Useful for a good discussion of Von Uexküll and for the inevitable excess and 'mal-adaption' of sexual attraction, whether in birds, fish, or humans. ( )