On Elizabeth Grosz

I don't particularly take to Grosz's convoluted and ambiguous style, but she has raised some interesting (and controversial) points.

To summarize, she conceptualized the crisis as reason's "inability to rationally know itself, to enclose and know itself from the outside: the inadequation of the subject and knowledge" (26). To me, this means the failure of using reason to understand reason. Put another way, how do you know 'reason' is 'reason' when you use 'reason' to understand 'reason'?

That's like saying, that big comfy thing you sit on in the living room is a couch because that's the only thing I know that people sit on in the living room. It is that, because that is the only thing I know. And that is the crisis that she's trying to make us panic about. Our knowledge of things is 'knowledge' to us, not because the things are REALLY as they are, but because we understand them to be such.

In a word, she's saying, how can we ever know anything? She is problematizing knowledge as something fluid and susceptible to external inscriptions; therefore there is no Truth in the big somewhere out there.

I think there IS a truth out there--just that we probably won't ever get to it. As Grosz pointed out (most excruciatingly), it's not just our methodology that is flawed--our very beings, this body that we use to understand everything around us, is bombarded by so many factors that it becomes quite impossible for us to ever get to a neutral, eternal Truth about anything.