Enduring Time - Softcover

Lisa Baraitser is a Reader of Psychosocial Studies, in the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, UK and the author of Maternal Encounters (2008).

Enduring Time is an extended meditation on the often-despised forms of time both revealed in and required by the practices of care that `take' time. Baraitser shows us how to think and revalue the forms of time's suspension experienced in and through maintenance, grief, waiting ... to see what endures. A beautiful and profound book that calls us to notice what might otherwise be missed or dismissed, it brings to the fore the multiform labours underpinning the maintenance of existence by theorising the temporal underbelly of `our times'. Baraitser shows us what, in our haste, we often can't see: the ways time doesn't `pass', and how, in that stuck time, the question of care surfaces. -- Stella Sandford, Professor of Philosophy, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University London, UK Baraitser: "brilliant and capacious" A prodigious and capacious work that offers a complex and surprising reflection on time and, along the way, a new theoretical foundation for psychosocial studies. Drawing on a wide range of cultural and theoretical accounts of time, its multiple forms, Baraitser give us a new way of thinking about a time that does not move, one that remains, fraught with the anachronistic and the "useless" as minor paths toward affirmation. This book releases "maintenance" from the shadows of disavowed social life. The time at issue here is one that conforms neither to project nor to progress, but slowly and insistently returns our attention to the repetitive practices that make life with and for others. The "useless" comes to characterize as well modes of thinking that seek value, even reparation, in the time that remain, in the wake of destruction, but also in the face of closing horizons. This work is actually a tour de force, even though it prizes work that does not always gain a monumental status in the public eye. It constitutes the most significant rethinking of "women's time" since Kristeva's influential article. It produces an alliance between maternal and queer thinking through recourse to the pervasive character of the "unproductive" - the work is as provocative as it is persuasive. In other words, it changes multiple frameworks at once, finding and asserting the value of "not moving on" as it links to both the ethical and aesthetic potentials of our enduring ties with others. Finally, it brings philosophy, psychoanalysis, cultural theory, feminism and race theory, art and art criticism, together with trenchant social critique, philosophical meditation, and psychoanalytic inquiry in a brilliant and capacious way. Without any recourse to essentialism, Baraitser shows us for the first time the temporal world of care, of maintenance, their nonproductive and nonteleological potentials in an ethics that illuminates our world as one of time-consuming practices of staying with and for one another in the midst of destruction and repair. -- Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley, USA