Catherine Malabou

: 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

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 ..

In Spinoza, God is without a name and without a shape. His essence is the very form of the necessity of nature, the infinite regularity, actuality and rationality of what there is. Nothing good, nothing bad in this. All representations of God as a legislator, a creator or a father, endowed with intentions, are only human projections produced by an inadequate understanding of what a cause is. A true cause is never separated from its effect, but is immanent to it, which means that it remains within it. As cause of himself, that is of nature, God is nothing but his own effectuation, and in that sense, he cannot be said transcendent, that is external, to what he produces. Are the readings of Spinoza that characterize him only as a thinker of “immanence” and/or “self-regulation” totally fair though? Do they do justice to the major issue of the origin of the sacred as developped in the Theological-Political Treatise? Where does sacredness come from for Spinoza? Can it be reduced to a sheer error or illusion, a temporary hole in the tissue of immanence, or does it open a specific space in immanence that remains to be explored? What exactly are the relationships between necessity and faith, between truth and its irreducible symbolic dimension? And what does “symbolic” means there where God is impersonal? Following Spinoza scriptural hermeneutics, and discussing it also with thinkers like Levinas, we will develop a new approach to Spinoza’s concept of revelation, pertaining to his vision of the sacred as an economy of signs without a referent. In doing so, we would like to show that Spinoza’s critique of religious dogmatism or fanatism is not to be confused with the dismissal of the sacred, it is on the contrary propedeutical to the philosophical delineation of sacredness.

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, relating it to perennial topics in philosophy such as substance, accident and the identity of the subject. Catherine Malabou's also contrasts her account of Hegelian temporality with the interpretation given by Heidegger in _Being and Time_, arguing that it is the concept of 'plasticity' that best describes Hegel's theory of temporality. The future is understood not simply as a moment in time, but as something malleable and constantly open to change through our interpretation. The book also develops Hegel's preoccupation with the history of Greek thought and Christianity and explores the role of theology in his thought. Essential reading for those interested in Hegel and contemporary continental philosophy, _The Future of Hegel _is also fascinating to those interested in the ideas of Heidegger and Derrida

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 Perception. My first issue here is to interrogate what currently remains from this approach by confronting it to the neurobiological one. I will situate the confrontation in the specific context of two neural pathologies that cause profound modifications of the body schema. First, phantom pains and phantom limbs, second anosognosia. Merleau-Ponty sees these pathologies as new versions of the Freudian concept of disavowal or psychic refusal. Neurobiologists deprive them of any unconscious dimension. Are we then facing a conflict between meaning and absence of meaning, or does current neurobiology confer a new and unexpected future to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology?Cet article examine le rapport entre l’ouvrage classique de Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, et les récentes découvertes de la neurobiologie. Plus précisément, l’étude de Catherine Malabou analyse le nouveau sens du sens chez Merleau-Ponty – qu’elle considère comme plus riche que celui que promeut la neurobiologie. L’auteure affirme néanmoins que le sens du sens chez Merleau-Ponty et celui de la neurobiologie sont plus proches qu’il ne semble. C’est pourquoi elle soutient qu’un dialogue authentique est possible entre la neurobiologie actuelle et les résultats de la Phénoménologie de la perception.Quando si tratta del corpo, della vita, dell’essere un corpo vivo in questo mondo, è fondamentale abbandonare quella che Merleau-Ponty definisce “psicologia intellettualistica” o anche “filosofia idealista”, e mettere in rilievo la dimensione empirica e biologica della nostra situazione esistenziale. Merleau-Ponty insiste sulla necessità di tener conto delle più recenti scoperte biologiche e neurobiologiche. Questo doppio approccio costituisce la singolarità e l’unicità della Fenomenologia della percezione. Il mio primo obiettivo sarà quello di interrogare quanto sopravvive di questo approccio mettendolo a confronto con quello neurobiologico. Svolgerò questo confronto calandolo nel contesto di due patologie neurologiche che causano profonde modificazioni dello schema corporeo. In primo luogo il fenomeno del dolore fantasma e degli arti fantasma, in secondo luogo l’anosognosia. Merleau-Ponty interpreta queste patologie in termini analoghi a quanto Freud chiamava disconoscimento o rifiuto psichico. I neurobiologi le spogliano invece di qualsiasi dimensione inconscia. Ci troviamo allora di fronte a un conflitto tra il significato e l’assenza di significato, o dobbiamo piuttosto concludere che la neurobiologia attuale conferisce alla fenomenologia merleaupontyana un nuovo e inatteso futuro?

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 affective neuroscience-- Johnston and Malabou triangulate the emotional life of affective subjects as conceptualized in philosophy and psychoanalysis with neuroscience. Their experiments yield different outcomes. Johnston finds psychoanalysis and neurobiology have the potential to enrich each other, though affective neuroscience demands a reconsideration of whether affects can be unconscious. Investigating this vexed issue has profound implications for theoretical and practical analysis, as well as philosophical understandings of the emotions. Malabou believes scientific explorations of the brain seriously problematize established notions of affective subjectivity in Continental philosophy and Freudian-Lacanian analysis. She confronts philosophy and psychoanalysis with something neither field has seriously considered: the concept of wonder and the cold, disturbing visage of those who have been affected by disease or injury, such that they are no longer affected emotionally. At stake in this exchange are some of philosophy's most important claims concerning the relationship between the subjective mind and the objective body, the structures and dynamics of the unconscious dimensions of mental life, the role emotion plays in making us human, and the functional differences between philosophy and science.

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 of the concept of writing the work of writing itself or must one suppose that the “modifiability” of the concept is not of the order of writing? This essay will propose that an original modifiability, not reducible to the single operation of writing, is initiated from the beginning as well. I call this modifiability “plasticity.” “Plasticity of writing” would then be the paradox inherent in the redefinition of writing itself that may explain the “failure” of any “grammatology.”

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 be present in my discourse, but not as a possible new foundation for literature. Speaking from the continental philosophical point of view, I am interested in the way neurological research helps both radicalizing and...

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.

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 and innate? Can he deduce, rather than impose, the categories, or justify the necessity of nature? Recent research into brain development aggravates these suspicions, which measure transcendental idealism against the thesis of a biological origin for cognitive processes. In her important new book Catherine Malabou lays out Kants response to his posterity. True to its subject, the book evolves as an epigenesis – the differentiated growth of the embryo – for, as those who know how to read critical philosophy affirm, this is the very life of the transcendental and contains the promise of its transformation.

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.

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?

"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."

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 conferred to a certain word or category serving as a unifying symbol for different and even heterogeneous forms of political resistance. Hegemony thus understood retains an idea of direction but without any dominating intention. It just orients multiple revolt movements without reducing their differences. Such a unifying symbol appears as a specific signifier devoid of any content or reference, thus ready to bear any contextual meaning. Does this new understanding of hegemony succeed in providing a nondogmatic and nonbinding process of unification, or does it secretely reinstall the logic of commandment?

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 arrival, drifting, derivation, and catastrophe. In fact, by going straight to the heart of the Derridean idea of “spacing,” she finally makes it seem as though Derrida has never written about anything but travel. Malabou's text is punctuated by a series of postcards received by Derrida from destinations such as Istanbul and Porto, Laguna Beach and Athens, which are inspired by his reading of her evolving discussion. Writing in a familiar and unguarded manner, as if he were “on vacation” from his own writing, Derrida still remains totally faithful to that work and invites the reader to reflect on much of what haunts his texts as well as his daily life, questions of distance and death, the relation to the other, and exile.