Catherine Malabou

The End of Writing? Grammatology and Plasticity

The word “grammatology” literally signifies the “science of writing.” One must acknowledge, however, that this science has never existed. Derridas 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.”

Negativity, Unhappiness or Felicity: On Irigaray's Dialectical Culture of Sexual Difference

Written in two voices, this article shows that Luce Irigaray’s thought offers an alternative to the subject/object structure dominant in philosophy. The article engages with dialectical thought and especially Hegel, exploring Irigaray’s focus on sexual difference. The authors elucidate negativity and felicity in politics, history, and personal life.

One Life Only: Biological Resistance, Political Resistance

That a resistance to what is known today as biopower—the control, regulation, exploitation, and instrumentalization of the living being— might emerge from possibilities written into the structure of the living being itself, not from the philosophical concepts that tower over it; that there might be a biological resistance to the biopolitical; that the biomight be viewed as a complex and contradictory authority, opposed to itself and referring to both the ideological vehicle of modern sovereignty and to that which holds it in check: this, apparently, has never been thought.

Plasticity and Elasticity in Freud's ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’

Is there anything beyond the pleasure principle? Such is the fundamental issue which Freud addresses, in 1929, to psychoanalysis and consequently also to himself. The pleasure principle is a homeostatic tendency, inherent to the psychic apparatus, to maintain the quantity of excitation present in it at as low a level, or at least at constant a level, as possible. Freud assumes very early that this principle governs and masters all psychical events. In the beginning of ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, he declares:

Plasticity and Elasticity in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle

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.

The Brain of History, or, The Mentality of the Anthropocene

Abstract: How is it possible to account for the double dimension of the “anthropos” of the Anthropocene ? At once both a responsible, historical subject, and a neutral, non-conscious and non-reflexive force? According to Chakrabarty, the “anthropos” has to be considered a geological force; according to Smail, it has to be considered an addicted brain. A subjectivity without being for the former, an emotional and dependent biological and symbolic entity for the latter. As an in between solution, I propose a rereading of the concept of “mentality” proposed by Braudel and his followers from the Annales School. The mental would be intermediarily located between the inorganic and the neural, thus helping to fill the gap between two opposed concepts of history, that are both implied in the current redefinition of ecology.

Thresholds of Resistance: Between Plasticity and Flexibility

In this encounter, Malabou elaborates on the implications of a dynamic understanding of plasticity and on what such implications could mean for our traditional approaches to subjectivity. Exposing biology to the symbolic enables care to arise as a central concern in ways that resist concepts of writing, code, or trace. Far from reproducing ideological paradigms and promoting efficiency, productivity and flexibility, a plastic ethos encourages a heightened attention to what lies beyond limits, opening the way for a liminal exploration of differences.

Power and Performance at Play: A Question of Life or Death

As she demonstrates the insufficiencies and impotentialities of traditional philosophical discourses in this article, Malabou advocates for a more plastic and energetic approach to performance, foregrounded by such works as Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo. Acknowledging that the sovereign power of life should not entail restricting the self to preconceived and closed systems enables new, paradoxical modalities of reading to emerge, as illustrated by Derrida’s observations on the signature of a text being deferred to an addressee. In such a celebratory rehabilitation of ambiguities and equivocalities, Malabou makes palpable that the loop of life should be more centrifugal than centripetal, even as it inaugurates a new type of philosophical critique and discourse that celebrates contradictions and inconsistencies.

II. Philosophers, Biologists: Some More Effort If You Wish to Become Revolutionaries!

Norman MacLeod’s response to my essay “One Life Only: Biological Resistance, Political Resistance” is extremely helpful because it allows for a long-awaited discussion, that is, for a new type of exchange among biologists and philosophers (see Norman MacLeod, “Response to Catherine Malabou, ‘One Life Only: Biological Resistance, Political Resistance,’ ” Critical Inquiry 43 [Autumn 2016]: 191–99). The problem is that this discussion is not the one imagined by MacLeod. Rather, it is generated, in a certain sense, by the holes in his response and argument. When I speak of a “new type of exchange among biologists and philosophers” I mean a discussion that goes beyond the classical, well-known

Before and above : Spinoza and symbolic necessity

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.