FEMINIST PHILOSOPHERS Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures. Elizabeth Grosz, ed. Ithaca: Cornell, 1999. Reviewed by Patricia MacCormack Australian feminism has firmly established itself as the cutting edge of philosophy interfaced with social and cultural theory. Although many of these Australian feminists have now left our shores, their web of influence continues to appear in brilliant philosophical works. Similarly, Australian interest in the analysis of the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze means the majority of commentators on this most exciting theorist are increasingly Antipodean, including not only monographs dealing with the work of Deleuze, but two feminist anthologies in the past two years, both hailing from Australians, Claire Colebrook and Ian Buchanan's Deleuze and Feminist Theory (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2000) and Elizabeth Grosz's Becomings. Becomings does not name itself a feminist text; in aim and analysis, however, the anthology hurls feminism into its own potential futures by leaving spatio-standpoint theory and replacing it with eleven complex essays on various ways to think human subjectivity as an open system considered materially and ethically through the idea of time. The most famous proponent of this thought is Deleuze, through his work, with Félix Guattari, on existence as temporally 'becoming' as opposed to spatial being. Deleuze makes an appearance in all the essays, either directly or conceptually, in chapters by influential philosophers such as Alphonso Lingis ('Innocence') and Manuel DeLanda ('Deleuze, Diagrams and the Open Ended Becoming of the World'). Temporality takes as its only given the idea of irreversible alteration, with the subject essentially volatile and unpredictable. Many would claim women have already been like this in culture - and negatively so. Becomings takes this volatility as an irrefutable, even scientific, given; frequent use is made throughout the essays of physics, and of theorists such as Henri Bergson. This notion of all subjectivity as constant mutation has some serious implications for feminism itself. One would be tempted to ask: 'If subjectivity itself is no longer definable where does that leave woman, her history and her (feminist) future?' However thinking the self temporally in Becomings is not so much an esoteric exercise in post-modernism as a way of bringing the complexity of temporal theory to a material and tactical level of application. Grosz states in her chapter 'Thinking the New: Of Futures Yet Unthought': 'What kind of difference must it be to differ not only from itself and what is other (difference as divergence, as the breakdown or failure of identity) but also to differ from its own differing; in short, to diverge in (at least) two directions at once? How to think of direction or trajectory without being able to anticipate a destination?'(19). Feminism has been challenged with this very conundrum since its inception. Before even considering the divergent desires of different feminists we have been forced to think of change as possible only within established relations of power; these too often allow feminist victories as air pockets within a relatively static social system. To imagine self and social assemblage temporally encourages thinking of real, effective transformation without predicting an end that leaves the rest of patriarchal culture intact. In this sense, thinking temporally elucidates patriarchal power as not given but forcefully remade at every moment. Male as well as female subjects are required to define themselves through “a pure propulsion into a future that does not rebound with echoes of an exchange dictated by the past.”(Grosz 'Becoming… An Introduction', 11) Subjects, thereby, are not relegated to simple definitions of feminist or non-feminist, or even male or female; rather, they can be thought only through an analysis of the effects of individual and social force. After all, feminism is not about hating certain subjects but dismantling, through action or reaction, certain prevalent forces that continue to oppress and deny women, although differently within nations, classes, races and other shifting systems. In her chapter entitled 'A Grammar of Becoming: Strategy, Subjectivism and Style', Claire Colebrook (another Australian) states: 'It is, then, a question not of deciding whether the 'subject' or the human is good or bad, strategic or defeatist, but of asking about the character of the forces that take hold of the subject. The problem of the subject cannot be decided in the domain of the subject as such; it demands attention to the way the subject occurs as action or reaction to … what?(122) Linda Martín Alcoff's engagement with the tension between ontological truth and post-modern relativity, 'Becoming an Epistemologist', explains the idea of temporal force, as opposed to immobilised concrete ideas of monolithic 'power'. She claims: 'If truth is not ontological, we can shift the problematic of truth to a consideration of its relation to power.' (64) In a spatio-temporal thinking of the subject, truth is either dispersed into many truths in time and speaking position, or it is taken as truthful at the peril of these diverse positions. Subjectivity as differentiation from the moment before does not necessitate a repudiation of the truth of that subject's past but, rather, the subject's past actively forms its interests and acts toward possible futures. Alcoff states: '[Truth] can acknowledge more readily the formative effects that language, discourse and power-knowledge have on the production of truths, rather than privileging the knowing subject as the necessary centre of the knowing process.' (75) Subjectivity itself becomes process, but process that acknowledges its materiality, its effects on others' bodies; most importantly, it points to ethical and feminist becomings. Dorothea Olkowski, surely one of the most exciting feminists writing at the moment, (whose book Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (1999) was written partly at ANU) ends her chapter 'Flows of Desire and the Body-Becoming' on this very point. She states: 'And finally there are the flows of desire and the body-becoming of the revolutionary residual subject … As the outsider, as deterritorialized, becoming is possible – becoming any dominated or exploited class, anything but the master nation, religion or race, anything but the global body. In neither case, from within or from without, can we predict the form of the future.'(116) Here we can see that thinking temporally, which is always about thinking the future through (but not immobilised by) our memory of the past, aligns itself especially with feminism. This may be because women have always been aligned negatively with their own metamorphic potential, and their unstable signification. Or, it may be because women have the most to gain through thinking temporal subjectivity toward possible different futures, enabling all women to be open to unique futures rather than a hegemenous 'feminist' future (defined by and for whom?). In any case, a theoretical engagement with becoming is not simply a post-modern tactic for subjective liberation but an empowering, corporeal and deeply politically active feminist project. Patricia MacCormack won the Mollie Holman doctoral medal for her PhD thesis in 2000. She is an honorary research associate in the Centre for Women's Studies at Monash University.