Catherine Malabou
Edited by Tyler M. Williams
Introduction by Ian James
Catherine 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.
Introduction by Ian James
Part I: Philosophical Heritages
1. An Eye on the Edge of Discourse: Speech, Vision, Idea
2. Following Generation: Biological and Poetic Cloning
3. Philosophy in Erection: Derrida’s Columns
4. The Possibility of the Worst: On Faith and Knowledge
5. Before and Above: Spinoza and Symbolic Necessity
6. Can We Relinquish the Transcendental?
7. Is Science the Subject of Philosophy? Miller, Badiou and Derrida Respond
Part II: Masks
8. The Crowd: Figuring the Democracy to Come
9. Life and Prison
10. Odysseus’ Changed Soul: A Contemporary Reading of the Myth of Er
11. Epigenesis of the Text: New Paths in Biology and Hermeneutics
12. Reading Lázló Földényi’s Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears
13. Philosophy and the Outside: Foucault and Decolonial Thinking
Part III: Psyches, Brains, Cells
14. The Brain of History, or, the Mentality of the Anthropocene
15. Whither Materialism? Althusser/Darwin
16. Philosophy and Anarchism: Alternative or Dilemma?
17. One Life Only: Biological Resistance, Political Resistance
18. Philosophers, Biologists: Some More Effort If You Wish to Become Revolutionaries!
19. How Is Subjectivity Undergoing Deconstruction Today? Philosophy, Auto-Hetero-Affection and Neurobiological Emotion
20. Floating Signifiers Revisited: Poststructuralism Meets Neurolinguistics
Part IV: Destructive Forms
21. Is Retreat a Metaphor?
22. Plasticity and Elasticity in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle
23. Are There Still Traces? Memory and the Obsolescence of the Paradigm of Inscription
24. Phantom Limbs and Plasticity: Merleau-Ponty and Current Neurobiology
25. The Example of Plasticity: An Interview with Catherine Malabou
Works cited
Plasticity is a thoughtfully curated collection of essays by one of the most innovative and inspiring philosophers writing today. For the past several decades, Catherine Malabou has bravely blazed a trail towards something thus-far unprecedented: a novel form of naturalism shaped by the insights of European theoretical currents from German idealism through today. Malabou deftly addresses anew such perennial-yet-pressing philosophical tensions as those between mind and body, freedom and determinism, as well as transcendentalism and historicism. Malabou's oeuvre, both philosophically important and politically timely, opens up crucial possibilities for radically rethinking the interrelationships between philosophy, science, psychoanalysis, feminism, and politics.
Apart from confirming Catherine Malabou as a major philosopher with a sustained interest in biology, this collection highlights two underappreciated aspects of her thought: its political implications, ranging from her writing on the crowd, to the prison, sovereignty, decolonization, and anarchism; most of all, it demonstrates her relentless commitment to self-questioning.