Enduring Time by Lisa Baraitser
Book launch and panel discussion
19.00-20.30
Thursday 15th March
Swedenborg House
20-21 Bloomsbury Way
London
WC1A 2TH
Celebrating the publication of Lisa Baraitser’s Enduring time, a panel of scholars (Laura Salisbury, Stella Sandford and Raluca Soreanu) will engage with the book to consider the changing ways we imagine and experience time. Climate change, unending violent conflict, fraying material infrastructures, permanent debt and widening social inequalities mean that we no longer live with an expectation of a progressive future, a generative past, or a flourishing now that characterized the temporal imaginaries of the post-war period. Time, it appears, is not flowing, but has become stuck, intensely felt, yet radically suspended. The question the book raises is how we might now ‘take care’ of time? How can we understand change as requiring time not passing? What can quotidian experiences of suspended time – waiting, delaying, staying, remaining, enduring, returning and repeating – tell us about the survival of social bonds? And how might we re-establish the idea that time might be something we both have and share, as opposed to something we are always running out of?
Praise for the book
This work is a tour de force. It constitutes the most significant rethinking of “women’s time” since Kristeva’s influential article. [ …] 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, UC Berkeley).
The panel discussion will be followed by a wine reception.
