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38Contemporary Political Adventures of Meaning: What Is a Floating Signifier?Critical Inquiry 50 (2): 305-316. 2024.This text is the edited transcript of Catherine Malabou’s second Critical Inquiry visiting-professorship lecture at the University of Chicago in January 2022.
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39Before tomorrow: epigenesis and rationalityPolity. 2016.Is contemporary continental philosophy making a break with Kant? The structures of knowledge, taken for granted since Kants Critique of Pure Reason, are now being called into question: the finitude of the subject, the phenomenal given, a priori synthesis. Relinquish the transcendental: such is the imperative of postcritical thinking in the 21st century. Questions that we no longer thought it possible to ask now reemerge with renewed vigor: can Kant really maintain the difference between a priori…Read more
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82Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and NeuroscienceCambridge University Press. 2013.Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou defy theoretical humanities' deeply-entrenched resistance to engagements with the life sciences. Rather than treat biology and its branches as hopelessly reductive and politically suspect, they view recent advances in neurobiology and its adjacent scientific fields as providing crucial catalysts to a radical rethinking of subjectivity. Merging three distinct disciplines--European philosophy from Descartes to the present, Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, and…Read more
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17The Heidegger Change: On the Fantastic in PhilosophyState University of New York Press. 2011.Elaborates the author’s conception of plasticity by proposing a new way of thinking through Heidegger’s writings on change
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56The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and DialecticRoutledge. 2004.This book is one of the most important recent books on Hegel, a philosopher who has had a crucial impact on the shape of continental philosophy. Published here in English for the first time, it includes a substantial preface by Jacques Derrida in which he explores the themes and conclusions of Malabou's book. _The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic_ restores Hegel's rich and complex concepts of time and temporality to contemporary philosophy. It examines his concept of time, …Read more
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33Contemporary Political Adventures of Meaning: What Is Hegemony?Critical Inquiry 50 (1): 54-66. 2023.This article, originally delivered as a lecture at the University of Chicago, is a critical reading of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Following Antonio Gramsci, their book reverses the meaning of the term hegemony. The traditional use of the term (for military or political leadership) shifts and gives birth to a new signification. Hegemony currently designates a privilege but a discursive one only. It is the privilege c…Read more
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26Counterpath: traveling with Jacques DerridaStanford University Press. 2004.Counterpath is a collaborative work by Catherine Malabou and Jacques Derrida that answers to the gamble inherent in the idea of “travelling with” the philosopher of deconstruction. Malabou's readerly text of quotations and commentary demonstrates how Derrida's work, while appearing to be anything but a travelogue, is nevertheless replete with references to geographical and topographical locations, and functions as a kind of counter-Odyssey through meaning, theorizing, and thematizing notions of …Read more
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9The Mental State of NoiseAngelaki 28 (3): 95-99. 2023.What is the influence of music on the brain? And in what cases can this influence cause dysfunctioning? Among the different examples analyzed by Oliver Sacks, one is particularly significant: the phenomenon of synesthesia. Synesthesia is connected to having an extra one that associates different kinds of sensory information, music, and color. It can sometimes transform hearing music as a painful experience, transforming it into a pure literal meaning – to feel together – the secret condition for…Read more
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59You Be My Body for Me: Body, Shape, and Plasticity in Hegel's Phenomenology of SpiritIn Stephen Houlgate & Michael Baur (eds.), A Companion to Hegel, Wiley‐blackwell. 2011.This chapter contains sections titled: Catherine Malabou : “Unbind Me” Judith Butler : What Kind of Shape Is Hegel's Body in? Catherine Malabou : What Is Shaping the Body? Judith Butler : A Chiasm between Us, but No Chasm.
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44Morphing Intelligence: From Iq Measurement to Artificial BrainsColumbia University Press. 2019.Acclaimed philosopher Catherine Malabou traces the modern metamorphoses of intelligence, seeking to understand how neurobiological and neurotechnological advances have transformed our present-day view. She emphasizes the intertwined, networked relationships among the biological, the technological, and the symbolic.
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53Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, DeconstructionColumbia University Press. 2009.After defining plasticity in terms of its active embodiments, Malabou applies the notion to the work of Hegel, Heidegger, Levinas, Levi-Strauss, Freud, and ...
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47What should we do with our brain?Fordham University Press. 2008.But in this book, Catherine Malabou proposes a more radical meaning for plasticity, one that not only adapts itself to existing circumstances, but forms a ...
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74What Is Neuro-literature?Substance 45 (2): 78-87. 2016.Neuroliterature: this word is not a name for a new discipline, which—like neurolinguistics, neuropsychoanalysis, or neurophilosophy—would tend to explain the way in which our mental acts are rooted in biological neural processes. Even if we have to pay these new sciences the most acute attention to the extent that they are currently re-sketching the inner and outer boundaries of the Humanities, my purpose here is different and wishes to escape all forms of reductionism.Current neurobiology will …Read more
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74One Life Only: Biological Resistance, Political ResistanceCritical Inquiry 42 (3): 429-438. 2016.
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51Modification in Being and Time, or The Form of DifferenceGraduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 31 (2): 391-401. 2010.
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36II. Philosophers, Biologists: Some More Effort If You Wish to Become Revolutionaries!Critical Inquiry 43 (1): 200-206. 2016.This text is an answer to Professor MacLeod's critique of my article "One Life. Political Resistance, Biological Resistance".
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53“Idealism”: a new name for metaphysics Hegel and Heidegger on a priori synthesisIn Anders Moe Rasmussen & Markus Gabriel (eds.), German Idealism Today, De Gruyter. pp. 189-202. 2017.
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159Can We Relinquish the Transcendental?Journal of Speculative Philosophy 28 (3): 242-255. 2014.I borrow the terms of the title question from Quentin Meillassoux’s book After Finitude, which I intend to discuss here, a book that has provoked a genuine thunderstorm in the philosophical sky.1 “The primary condition to the issue I intend to deal with here,” Meillassoux says, “is ‘the relinquishing of transcendentalism’” . The French expression is “l’abandon du transcendantal.”2 I think that “the relinquishing of the transcendental” is better than “the relinquishing of transcendentalism.” As f…Read more
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7Wozu das Leben sparen wollen, wo nichts mehr ist?In Michael Wetzel & Jean-Michel Rabaté (eds.), Ethik der Gabe: Denken Nach Jacques Derrida, De Gruyter. pp. 183-190. 1993.
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36The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, DialecticHypatia 15 (4): 196-220. 2000.At the center of Catherine's Malabou's study of Hegel is a defense of Hegel's relation to time and the future. While many readers, following Kojève, have taken Hegel to be announcing the end of history, Malabou finds a more supple impulse, open to the new, the unexpected. She takes as her guiding thread the concept of “plasticity,” and shows how Hegel's dialectic—introducing the sculptor's art into philosophy—is motivated by the desire for transformation. Malabou is a canny and faithful reader, …Read more
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17The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectic1Hypatia 15 (4): 196-220. 2000.At the center of Catherine's Malabou's study of Hegel is a defense of Hegel's relation to time and the future. While many readers, following Kojève, have taken Hegel to be announcing the end of history, Malabou finds a more supple impulse, open to the new, the unexpected. She takes as her guiding thread the concept of “plasticity,” and shows how Hegel's dialectic—introducing the sculptor's art into philosophy—is motivated by the desire for transformation. Malabou is a canny and faithful reader, …Read more
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283The future of Hegel: Plasticity, temporality, dialecticHypatia 15 (4): 196-220. 2000.: At the center of Catherine's Malabou's study of Hegel is a defense of Hegel's relation to time and the future. While many readers, following Kojève, have taken Hegel to be announcing the end of history, Malabou finds a more supple impulse, open to the new, the unexpected. She takes as her guiding thread the concept of "plasticity," and shows how Hegel's dialectic--introducing the sculptor's art into philosophy--is motivated by the desire for transformation. Malabou is a canny and faithful read…Read more
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85The End of Writing? Grammatology and PlasticityThe European Legacy 12 (4): 431-441. 2007.The word “grammatology” literally signifies the “science of writing.” One must acknowledge, however, that this science has never existed. Derrida's book Of Grammatology proposes to elaborate and to implement just such a project. Why has this grammatological project never been accomplished? For Derrida, “writing”1 can no longer simply designate a technique for the notation of speech. A distinction should be made, then, between “narrow” and “enlarged” meanings of writing. Indeed, is the extension …Read more
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87Phantom Limbs and Plasticity: Merleau-Ponty and Current NeurobiologyChiasmi International 17 41-52. 2015.When it comes to the body, to life, to the issue of being a living body in this world, it is of primary importance to give up what Merleau-Ponty calls “intellectualist psychology” as well as “idealist philosophy,” and to stress the empirical biological dimension of our existential situation. Merleau-Ponty insists on the necessity to take into account the most recent biological and neurobiological discoveries. This double approach constitutes the singularity and uniqueness of the Phenomenology of…Read more
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35Philosophy in ErectionParagraph 39 (2): 238-248. 2016.Dialectics operates, Derrida writes, ‘in raising or erecting what falls’. Yet the Hegelian system is problematized in the sense that, in the Genet column of Glas, what substitutes for the system is not a well-grounded philosophical alternative, but a sort of disseminal substitution itself, working within as much as against the system it resists. The confrontation staged by the text is not between homosexual transgression, on the one hand, and heterosexual normativity as the origin of the social …Read more
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24Philosophers, Biologists, Philosophers, Biologists: Some More Effort If You Wish to Become Revolutionaries! Response to Norman MacLeodCritical Inquiry 43 (1): 200-206. 2016.This text is an answer to Professor MacLeod's critique of my article "One Life. Political Resistance, Biological Resistance".
Kingston upon Thames, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Interest
17th/18th Century Philosophy |