LAUSR

Baraitser’s insights hold specific import for feminism. Although Baraitser’s book is not a book about feminism per se, her reassessment of time is certainly relevant to thinking about feminist politics in the present. This is most evident in the fourth chapter, ‘Delaying’. Here, Baraitser begins by asking, ‘In what ways might temporality be a form of politics?’ (p. 93). Her question is not entirely new. Feminist theorising on nostalgia and intergenerational politics and queer theorising on temporality have explored similar questions. Baraitser, however, delves deeper to consider why ‘delayed action’ and even actions that appear to not entail any action at all (e.g. staying) may be especially politically potent. To explore this question, she introduces the somewhat paradoxical idea of the political encampment. From the nearly two-decade-long Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp to the far more fleeting camps that appeared during the Occupy Movement in 2011, one can find examples of political actions defined by waiting, staying, maintaining, remaining and enduring. Yet, as anyone who has ever participated in a political encampment knows, these camps are not sites defined by stagnation. They are also, as Baraitser reminds us, ‘amode of potentially sustainable living that both experiments with and creates new collective imaginaries’ (p. 112). Baraitser further suggests that the recent re-emergence of the political encampment as a form of protest may itself reveal something about what it means to stay in relation to an elongated present. Rather than represent something new, she suggests that these camps may be best understood as ‘a time delay’ – a ‘reconnection with something that has remained, perhaps unnoticed, in public life’ (p. 113). To be clear, most of the examples that Baraitser references in Enduring Time are derived not from politics but rather from theory, literature and art. The point of her collection of essays, however, is not to offer close readings of events or cultural texts and objects but rather to use these collected meditations to disrupt our entrenched assumptions about time. In Enduring Time, Baraitser asks her readers not only to defamiliarise myriad taken-for-granted assumptions about time but also to consider the powerful political potential of time that appears to have stopped – the time we encounter in the delay, the wait, the repeated sequence. In the process, she also leaves her readers with a surprising revelation – that we may not be as pressed for time or as time-deprived as we thought.