Introduction: To the Untimely

Abstract

This book is an exploration of how the biological prefigures and makes possible the various permutations of life that constitute natural, social, and cultural existence. Its goals are interdisciplinary: to explore a series of questions about the movement of time that overlap with and are the shared concern of a number of di√erent disciplines: philosophy, politics, history, the social and natural sciences, cultural studies, feminist, antiracist, and queer politics, the visual and plastic arts. It focuses on the space between the natural and the cultural, the space in which the biological blurs into and induces the cultural through its own self-variation, in which the biological leads into and is in turn opened up by the transformations the cultural enacts or requires. It explores the region between biology and culture; between bodies and sociotemporal organization, between the sciences of life and the study of social organization—a philosophical exploration on the cusp of science studies on the one hand and political theory on the other. Biological organization, whose morphological structures engender the variety of life in all its forms, instead of ensuring that life conforms to existing social categories, boundaries, and limits, instead of containing existence to what is or has been, opens up and enables cultural, political, economic, and artistic variation. Biology is a system of (physical, chemical, organic) di√erences that engenders historical, social, cultural, and sexual di√erences. Biology does not limit social, political, and personal life: it not only makes them possible, it ensures that they endlessly transform themselves and thus stimulate biology into further self-transformation. The natural world prefigures, contains, and opens up social and cultural existence to