Catherine Malabou

La création de « puces synaptiques » qui seraient dotées d’une certaine plasticité ouvre-t-elle la voie à une intelligence artificielle vraiment « intelligente », même si de façon différente des êtres humains? Ou la nature des avancées de ce type, d’une plasticité à des années lumières de celle du cerveau humain, nous contraignent-elles à beaucoup plus de scepticisme? Pour la philosophe Catherine Malabou, l’essentiel est de permettre aux deux intelligences, naturelle et artificielle, de s’enrichir l’une l’autre. De ne jamais fermer la voie des possibles, que ce soit par des réflexions philosophiques, des fictions ou des expérimentations.

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, and allows her classic “maître” to speak, if not against his own grain, at least against a tradition too attached to closure and system. Malabou's Hegel is a “plastic” thinker, not a nostalgic metaphysician.

A career-spanning collection of published and unpublished writings from one of today's leading French philosophers 25 essays showcase Malabou's rounded philosophical project: 17 previously published and 8 brand newDemonstrates the interdisciplinary range and expansive applicative scope of her concept of plasticity Presents a full portrait of Malabou's philosophy which shows her project as a coherent conceptual problem rather than a collection of disparate topics and themesIncludes a critical introduction by Malabou expert Ian JamesCatherine Malabou is one of the foremost, most innovative intelligences working in contemporary French philosophy today. Her work articulates a coherent conceptualisation of 'plasticity' by merging recent neurobiology and medicinal sciences with the history of philosophy and political theory.Across the essays gathered in Plasticity: The Promise of Explosion, Malabou carves a philosophical space between structuralism, deconstruction, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis and speculative realism. By demonstrating the plastic transformability at the heart of these disciplines, a change that always promises future explosion, Malabou, as a female philosopher, also articulates the need to 'change difference' within patriarchal concepts of tradition itself.The collection is divided into four thematic parts, each of which showcases a major aspect of Malabou's conceptualisation of plasticity. In his introduction, Ian James situates Malabou's work within contemporary philosophy and navigates the contours of her unique work.--Back cover.

"John McAfee hat eine Unabhängigkeitserklärung der Währungen (Declaration of Currency Independence) verfasst, in der er proklamiert, dass die Zeit gekommen sei, das Staatsmono- pol der Herstellung von Devisen und der Kontrolle ihrer Flüsse in Frage zu stellen und das Band zwischen Geographie und Währung aufzulösen. Die Philosophin Catherine Malabou erläutert in ihrem Artikel die ökonomischen und philosophischen Hintergründe ihrer Entscheidung, diese Erklärung zu unter- zeichnen. John McAfee has drafted a Declaration of Currency Independence in which he proclaims that the time has come to question the state monopoly on the production and control of foreign exchange and its flows and to break the link between geography and currency. In her article, philosopher Catherine Malabou explains the economic and philosophical background leading to her decision to sign this declaration."

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 bond, on the other, but instead a confrontation between two perspectives on the transcendental. The problem of Glas is that the two columns seem to ‘come out the same’ at the very moment when they seem to radically differ or diverge. Put differently, this problem is that of a contagion between the two sides. Why is there a risk of contagion and of similarity? What does this do to the transcendentality in question?

A quelles conditions peut-on tenter une mise en perspective critique des pensées de Heidegger et de Levi-Strauss ? Une telle question exige l'examen du concept de « structure » chez les deux auteurs. De la « structure de l'existence » à la « structure du mythe » ou à celle du jeu, quelle différence, quel écart ? Et n'est-ce pas précisément le territoire secret qui sépare la différence et l'écart qu'il faut explorer ? C'est là ce qu'entreprend l'auteur, retrouvant ainsi la question originaire de la déconstruction To what extent is a critical confrontation between Heidegger and Levi-Strauss possible ? Such a question demands examining closely the concept of « structure » in both works. From « structure of existence » to « structure of myth » or of « play », what difference and what gap ? Between difference and gap : such is the secret territory which opens itself here. The author shows that this opening is the very possibility of deconstruction.

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 for relinquish, it implies something softer, gentler, than abandon. Abandonment means a definite separation, whereas relinquishing designates a negotiated rupture, a farewell that maintains a relationship with what it ..

We try to explore here the Derridean concept of "possibility." Such a concept has no contraries. It does not oppose effectivity or necessity, or even impossibility, but stays what it is in any case: possible. Trying to negate it or to contradict it only leads to denial. To Derrida, this strange status of possibility is addressed as the question of faith as such, as it appears in "Faith and Knowledge." Every belief is always, at its foundation, belief in the possibility of a completely different history altogether, in what Derrida calls the "utterly other chance." Is deconstruction the legible form of this otherness?

Because he introduces a nonplastic element in his definition of the plasticity of mental life—that is, elasticity—Freud ruins the possibility of thinking what he precisely wishes to think, the plastic coincidence between creation and destruction of form. The characterization of the death drive as “elastic” deprives it of its plastic power and of its capacity to resist the pleasure principle. If we are not able to prove that the destruction of form has and is a form, if form is always on the side of Eros and of pleasure, it becomes impossible to prove that there is anything beyond the pleasure principle.

Comment la philosophie de Hegel pourrait-elle encore promettre quelque chose puisqu'elle est apparue, aux yeux des lecteurs contemporains, comme une entreprise d'annulation du temps? Le savoir absolu n'est-il pas le resultat du processus dialectique par lequel l'esprit releve toute temporalite et par la toute surprise, l'evenement se produisant toujours trop tard? D'une absence de pensee de l'avenir dans la philosophie de Hegel decoulerait une absence d'avenir de la philosophie hegelienne elle-meme. C'est contre une telle assertion que le present ouvrage s'inscrit en faux; il se propose pour cela de travailler le concept de plasticite, montrant comment il forme en profondeur, a la fois comme sa structure et comme son rythme, le contenu speculatif. Est plastique ce qui est susceptible de recevoir comme de donner la forme, mais aussi de l'aneantir. Hegel degage ce concept de son sol natal, l'art, pour le rendre a sa veritable origine : le developpement de la subjectivite. Est dit plastique, en effet, le rapport que la subjectivite entretient avec l'accident, avec ce qui arrive. L'auto-determination apparait comme proces de temporalisation au sein duquel la subjectivite, dans l'attitude contrastee d'un voir venir, se donne et par la recoit sa propre forme, anticipant son avenir tout en renoncant a en maitriser l'irruption. La plasticite du concept hegelien de temps est le foyer de resistance clandestin ou se prepare la reponse a l'accusation de vulgarite portee par Heidegger a l'encontre de ce meme concept.