PLASTIQUE

theory@buffalo 16
 theory@buffalo 16
plastique:
dynamics of catherine malabou
Editors:
Jarrod Abbott and Tyler Williams

Editorial Board:
Rene Bermudez, Donald Cross, Paula Cucurella, James Godley,
Eleanor Gold, Daniel Haumschild, Jen Jaworek, Megan MacDonald,
Ajitpaul Mangat, Todd Miller, Antonia Nicoletti-Eaton, Brian O'Neil,
Jana Schmidt

Advisory Board:
David E. Johnson, Kalliopi Nikolopoulou, and Ewa Ziarek

Cover Design and Layout:

Tyler Williams

Cover Image: "Plate X: Anatomy," Diderot & d'Alembert Encyclopedie

(hosted by the ARTFL Project at the University of Chicago)

Funding for this issue was provided by:

The SUNY Buffalo Graduate Student Association (GSA) Scholarly
Publications Fund, the Department of Comparative Literature, the
Department of English, Eugenio Donato Chair of Comparative
Literature (Rodolphe Gasche), Melodia E. Jones Chair of French (Jean­
Jacques Thomas), the UB Gender Institute, The Center for the Study
of Psychoanalysis and Culture, the Comparative Literature GSA, the
English GSA, the Anthropology GSA, the Philosophy GSA, the Media
Studies GSA, the Romance Languages GSA

For more information and archived issues visit:

http:I I wings.buffalo.edu I theory

Copyright© 2012 theory@buffalo. All rights reserved.

ISSN 1535-5551
ISBN 978-0-9845662-2-8
 Contents

CATHERINE MALABOU & TYLER WILLIAMS

"How Are You Yourself?"
Answering to Derrida, Heidegger, and the Real 1

DANIEL W. SMITH
What Should We Do With Our Brain? A Review Essay 23

LISA HOLLENBACH
And Say the Machine Responded? 37

ARNE DE BOEVER
Brain Care: Malabou after Foucault 47

LENORA HANSON
Can Biopolitics Be Thought Plastically?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Plant Life, and Political Resistance 64

CAROLYN SHREAD
The Horror of Translation 77

EWA PLONOWSKA ZIAREK

Plasticity and Metamorphosis: On the Encounter
Between Deconstruction and Feminism from the Other Side 96

JOHN D. CAPUTO
Voir Venir: How Far Plasticity Can Be Stretched 107

ADRIAN JOHNSTON
The Real Unconscious:
A Friendly Reply to Catherine Malabou 124

CATHERINE MALABOU
Darwin and the Social Destiny of Natural Selection 144

Contributors 157

Call for Papers: theory@buffalo 17: The Word Flesh 160

 Editors' Note

Standardized abbreviations for texts by Catherine Malabou will be used in each essay's
in-text parenthetical citations. Full bibliographic information will also be included in
each essay's Works Cited page where applicable.

AH L'Avenir de Hegel: Plasticite, temporalite, dialectique.

Paris: Vrin, 1996.
"CCM" "A Conversation with Catherine Malabou." [with Noelle
Vahanian]. Journalfor Cultural and Religious Theory
9.1 (2008): 1-13.
CD Changing Difference: The Feminine and the Question
of Philosophy. Trans. Carolyn Shread. Malden: Polity, 2011.
CdD Changer de difference: lefeminin et Ia question philosophique.
Paris: Galilee, 2009.
FH The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic.
Trans. Lisbeth During. New York: Routledge, 2005.
"FH" "The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectic."
Hypatia. Trans. Lisabeth During. 15.4 (Fa112000): 196-220.
"FHU" "The Future of the Humanities."
theory@buffalo 14 (2010): 8-16.

HC The Heidegger Change: On the Fantastic in Philosophy.

Trans. Peter Skafish. Albany: SUNY P, 2011.

LCH Le change Heidegger: du fantastique en philosophie.

Paris: Leo Sheer, 2004.
NB Les nouveaux blesses. De Freud a Ia neurologie, penser les
traumatismes contemporains. Paris: Bayard, 2007.
NW The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage.
Trans. Steven Miller. New York: Fordham UP, 2012.
OA Ontologie de /'accident. Essai sur Ia plasticite destructrice.
Paris: Leo Scheer, 2009.
OAc The Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity.
Trans. Carolyn Shread. Malden: Polity, 2012.
I'DW Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction,
Deconstruction. Trans. Carolyn Shread.
New York: Columbia UP, 2009.
1'5£ Plasticite au soir de l'ecriture: Dialectique, destruction,
deconstruction. Paris: Leo Sheer, 2005.
QF Que faire de notre cerveau? Paris: Bayard, 2004.
SfL Self and Emotional Life: Merging Philosophy,
Psychoanalysis, and Neurobiology. (with Adrian Johnston].
New York: Columbia UP (forthcoming)
T Le Temps. Paris: Hatier, 2000.
WDB What Should We Do With Our Brain? Trans.
Sebastian Rand. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.
 Catherine Malabou & Tyler Williams

"How ARE You YouRSELF?"

ANSWERING TO DERRIDA, HEIDEGGER, AND THE REAL

TW: In an interview that you gave in 2007, you reflected upon the
n..·lation between the masculinity of the discipline of philosophy

and your being a woman in it. In this interview, in which you were
addressing the topic of "prejudice" in the discipline of philosophy,
you said,

I have always been told that philosophy was a masculine

domain or field. ... I am always introduced in reference to
deconstruction, even today, even if it is at a distance with
deconstruction or by the question of my being a student of
Derrida. People associate my name to a man's name all the
time, I am thought of as a specialist of Hegel or as a specialist
of Derrida; I'm never myself. ("CCM" 6)

So, this issue of theory@buffalo is not about Hegel and it is not about
Dcrrida, and you are not being approached as a commentator on
t•ithcr of these two men to whom you have always, as you suggest,
lwcn asked to respond or follow. Instead, this issue of theory@buffalo
is about you yourself. When you say that "I'm never myself" because
you are always considered either a specialist of Hegel or Derrida,
what exactly is the status of this "myself" that you are never allowed
to be, and how, with an issue of theory@buffalo devoted exclusively
to your work, would you like to see yourself received on your own?
Or, another way of asking the same question: How are you yourself?
thcory<fVbuffalo 16

CM: This is a very beautiful question, and a very difficult one.

My answer to it will be ambivalent, contradictory even, as "I am
never myself" can be understood as both a complaint and a relief. A
complaint to the extent that it expresses a desire for recognition, a still
non-existing identity that seeks to find itself and be acknowledged
by others.
In my last book, Changing Difference, I showed that this want for
recognition pertained to the fact of being a "woman philosopher"­
an expression that, in itself, expresses an ontological, historical, and
existential impossibility. In the last chapter, "Woman's Possibility,
Philosophy's Impossibility" (CD 90-141), I argue that philosophy
doesn't clear any space for the feminine subject. In that sense, unless
she devotes herself to Gender Studies or feminism, a woman cannot
elaborate philosophical (that is, metaphysical) questions without
forging her identity as a thinker. This forgery consists most of the time
in thinking and acting like a man. Irigaray speaks about simulacrum
or mimicry in this respect. I describe the intellectual itinerary of a
"woman philosopher" as a three-step path.
The first step is "studying philosophy"-the woman
philosopher as a student. At this point, she is not aware of what is
going on. She just does what she thinks she has to do; that is, trying
to be as strong as male students, as rigorous, as conceptual, as
possible. She still is ignorant of the fact that this attempt at thinking
philosophically is an erasure of her gender identity. In France at least,
woman's thought is associated with literature or poetry, not with
concepts. So, the first step consists in neutralizing sexual difference.
It is the famous French "republican" or "universal" subject.
Then comes a second step, when the woman discovers that
other women are contesting this erasure and undertake to elaborate
a theory of the relationship between the feminine and philosophy. If,
as Irigaray says, mimesis or imitation is the only way for a woman
to enter the realm of philosophy-the woman has to consciously
mime masculine thinking and constitute this mimesis as a (her)
philosophical object. This is what Irigaray does with Plato, for
example. Woman is a replica, and has to thematize this ontological
status per se.
The third step is when the "woman philosopher" renounces
both erasing and not erasing her difference and tries to create
a new state of things, which necessarily makes the boundaries of
the philosophical field explode. This displacement of philosophy

2
 Catherine Malabou & Tyler Williams

lor w<�nt of an identity is perhaps what marks the specificity of the

ft•mininc.
As I said at the start, "I am never myself" also expresses a
n•lil'f. You may remember that, in one of the seminars I taught in
Huff<�lo, I spoke about the possibility of being a non-narcissistic
philosopher.• Undoubtedly, the links between masculinity and
rmrdssism in philosophy are extremely strong, as if developing a
philosophical meditation was a kind of self-deducing, self-attracting
11ctivity. Working with Derrida confirmed this feeling to the extent
thai, <IS you know, Derrida was extremely narcissistic, as he himself
'.,lllfl•sscs in Psyche.2 So perhaps the fact of being deprived of any fixed
or dl•termined identity is an opportunity to create a conceptual work
without auto-affecting yourself. The best way to not hear yourself
talk is undoubtedly to have no echo of yourself; that is, no image, no
rdll•ction. "I am never myself" means I that don't auto-affect myself.
That is why I like teaching in English; I can't hear myself speak in
this l<�nguage. This interruption of the "self-touching" inherent to
tlw l'sscnce of subjectivity is obviously a relief, an alleviation.

TW: In your 2010 seminar on Hegel and your 2011 seminar on

Writing,3 you have drawn a correlation between the female body and
tlw l'mpirical that is repressed in "every conceptual paradigm," and
here suggest that you-being-yourself involves "reminding" these
pnmdigms precisely of the empirical body they repress. Given the
n>rrcl<�tion between the female body and this project of reminding
mnccptual paradigms of their repressed body, are you here
suggesting that plasticity, as the "body of the trace," is a feminist
dl•construction?

< 'M: According to traditional Western philosophical understanding of

the feminine, it is true that women are assimilated to bodies. As Lacan
says somewhere, men conceptualize, women engender [l'homme
niii(Oif, Iafemme engendre]. The metaphor of the concept/ child is well
known since Plato. Philosophy coincides with masculine pregnancy.
The act of conceptualizing is the masculine equivalent of giving
birth. Rousseau is very clear on that point: women are mainly bodies.
Th<�t is why he says that he writes two kinds of texts: philosophical
IJ'l•atises for men, and novels for women. Novels are supposed to talk
more directly to emotions, to arouse bodily manifestations. Being a
woman philosopher perhaps consists in maintaining both this body
par<1digm and, on the other hand, this philosophical rigor. That is

3
theory@buffalo 16

why I think that plasticity may be considered the body of the trace.
Is there something like a feminist deconstruction? If there were such
a thing, it would have to be defined, in the first place, as a feminist
deconstruction of feminism itself.

TW: This balance between the personal or autobiographical

importance of plasticity and the conceptual importance of it is also
what has defined you yourself, on your own. With this concept of
plasticity, you are not just a follower of a certain school of thinking
or a responder to or representative of the canonical list of male
philosophers. I suppose I am interested in, then, the way in which
plasticity as a concept situates itself within-or, as you say, at the
dusk of-these (post-structuralist) discourses.
Of your work, Clayton Crockett writes, "Catherine Malabou
[is] an incredibly significant thinker in the wake of French post­
structuralism, with the concept of plasticity being her original,
signature idea" (PDW xi). In the first paragraph of that same book,
you claim "plasticity [as a concept] gradually asserted itself as the
style of an era" (PDW 1). Later you write, "I realized that writing was
no longer the right image and that plasticity now presented itself as
the best suited and most eloquent motor-scheme for our time" (PDW
15).
Each of these three quotations suggests varying degrees of
epochality for plasticity: its appropriateness for a certain time and
a certain place. What exactly is plasticity, this original and signature
idea in which you are being yourself without just being a follower
or heir, and how does plasticity signal the wake/ dusk of post­
structuralism?

CM: This also is a beautiful and engaging question. Again, I will

give an ambivalent answer to it. First, plasticity is not my thing
or signature. It is autonomous, trapped within the movement of
contemporary philosophy itself, which, since Heidegger, appears
as an automatic, non-subjective drive to the origin, or the "more
originary." This origin is of course non-essential and non-substantial.
It is what Heidegger calls Erschlossenheit, the Opening.The origin as
what gives, what opens, what initially gives way to. As we know,
Being is for Heidegger more originary than beings, then writing, for
Derrida (this is the beginning of Of Grammatology) is more originary
than Being. I am inscribing my own work within this chain, and
plasticity appears as more originary than writing.It is an answer to

4
 Catherine Malabou & Tyler Williams

h111 h Being and writing in this sense.An historical emergence that has
nothing to do with "me." It is a phenomenological (in the Hegelian
ttt'llSl' of the term) appearing. It appears that a certain fashionability
hus priority over Being and writing, as if things had to mould or
"'"''IW their own opening before opening itself can occur. It is less
"
,·.� gibt," "it gives," than "it shapes" ... less the trace than the bodily

Incorporating movement of the trace.

At the same time, plasticity is not only a new version of the
origin, a link in the chain of the "more originary." If it is true that
ltlshionability has priority over Being, it means that Being itself
IH originarily shaped. This is what Nietzsche says: Being is only a
m•alion. It is then impossible to make any distinction between the
orlginary as an "arche," as the authentic "Ereignis," or Enowning,
tUid as an artifact, the empirical-historical occurrence of a work,
lwing a work of art. In that sense, to claim the originary dimension
of plasticity tends to destroy originarity itself, and produces a
dl•struction of post-structuralism's relation to history, clearing the
Hpnce for a non-historical transformation. Such a transformation is
niNo an interruption of the Derridean trace to the extent that it reshapes
Hp<King and temporalization themselves, and thus announces the
wuke of deconstruction conceived of the irreducibility of the trace.

TW: You gave a lecture in 2007 in which you referred to a "post­

dt•ronstructive" reading of Hegel around a notion of recovery as a
process of erasing the trace that would leave no scars.4 Would this
sl•nse of leaving no scars (as somehow bound up with this concept of
plasticity that is figured in the image of a salamander) be an example
of the type of re-inscription of plasticity now that has already existed
in a certain history?

<. M: Yes, this coming back of plasticity after its own historical
.1rhievement or accomplishment is exactly what you say: a re­
inscription that is a regeneration, a rebirth. Regeneration and
srarring are two different types of healings, the first one consisting
in preventing the second from occurring. When the salamander
losL'S a limb, the stump regenerates the stem cells cover the stump
and prevents the scarring from taking place in substituting a new
growth to the suture of tissues which gives way to a mark, or a trace.
The Hegelian statement according to which "the wounds of spirit
lwnl and leave no trace behind," shouldn't be interpreted, as it has
beL•n too often the case, as an assumption of the eternal nature of

5
theory@buffalo 16

Being, sublating its finite historical and temporal manifestation.

Regeneration has to be understood as the very expression of finitude,
as the attempt of a living being to protect and cure itself when
wounded or attacked. In that sense, the reemerging of plasticity after
its dialectical history must be seen as such a finite re-growth.

TW: How do you see this link between a conceptual or intellectual

history within which plasticity would situate itself (e.g., Derrida,
Heidegger, their fidelity or infidelity to Hegel and dialectics, etc.)
and the material history we live in every day in which we see
developments in epigenetics, biology, neuroscience, stem cell
research, etc.?

CM: It is clear to me that the current dominant motif which

imposes itself as the most urgent and important hermeneutic tool
to understand our current world, or reality, is not so much the trace,
or the inscription of the trace, or the breaching of the origin, than
a reconstitution and regeneration which operates as erasures of the
trace.Derrida asks: What would a trace be that wouldn't be able to
erase itself? Paradoxically though, the trace never disappears from
his writings. No other· paradigm is ever approached or elaborated.
If you look at the way in which living systems are described by
current biology and neurobiology, it appears that the trace is not
accurate any longer to characterize the plasticity of the brain, of the
cell, of the genome even. Epigenetic processes, as well as processes
of dedifferenciation (stem cells), reprogramming (genic therapy),
reconstitution, regeneration, re-growth, self-graft, auto-replacement,
self-repairing (regenerative medicine) demand a new descriptive
model than that of the trace or of differance.
It would be very easy to interpret these new paradigms of
self-repairing and self-regeneration as a return to a metaphysics of
presence. Derrideans currently maintain that plasticity is a remnant
of classical ontology (of form, substance, the present). M y "post­
deconstructive" reading of Hegel assumes just the contrary: that there
can be a kind of self-repairing, a self-generation, that has nothing to
do with eternity or resurrection. Again, there can be a deconstructive
and finite process of self-repairing. This is precisely what comes after
the trace in deconstruction: the possibility of a reconstitution that is
not a return to presence. The salamander's re-grown leg is different
in shape and size from the former one. It is a reconstitution and a
return, but not in the mode of a representation. It is the inscription of

6
 Catherine Malabou & Tyler Williams

dlfl't•rl'llCC within the identical.

TW: This distinction that you are here drawing between regeneration
(or self-fashioning, self-repairing, etc.) and representing (or
rt•pn•s l•ntation) seems very close, if not the same, as the important
diHtinction you draw between plasticity and elasticity in your book,
Wltal Should We Do With Our Brain? Can you explain the importance
,,( drawing this distinction in terms of the relation that this self­
formiltion has to difference?

( 'M: That book is very much indebted to Luc Boltanski's and Eve
( "hhlpt..'llo's The New Spirit of Capitalism, which affirms that every
lr.lnd of theoretical opposition to capitalism is very easily and quickly
11Hiilmilated by capitalism itself.S For example, new management
Htl"llll·�ics have integrated totally what Deleuze says about
lllllllill.iism, or what Derrida says about dissemination (networks,
Htrpplcness, absence of a center or of a hierarchy, lean administration,
rtr.). Boltanski and Chiapello show that neurology is currently used
llH ,, paradigm for this new management organization. Within this
l'11pitnlistic reinvestment of neurology, the term that comes back all
tlw time is "flexibility." Management itself has to be flexible, the
workers have to be flexible, meaning that they cannot claim to be
111lill"hcd to anything-they have to be ready to leave at any time, to
ll'llVl' their family, hometowns, etc.
Flexibility has become the most important quality for global
l'•lpitn lism. And neurobiologists themselves are unfortunately
Hupporting such a translation of the neuronal in economical terms.
Tlwrl' would be no difference between the brain and a firm. The
hmin would be the mirror of economic organization. I think that our
tnsk is to oppose this assimilation. What resists it si plasticity.
It is interesting to see how the definitions of plasticity and
th·xibility are very close to one another. They are practically the
s.lllll'. Plasticity and flexibility both mean pliable and foldable in
t•vt•ry direction, but plasticity has something that flexibility does not
havl': resistance to formation. For example, once marble is formed,
:;rulpted, it cannot go back to its initial absence of form. Something
thnt is flexible or elastic goes back to its original form, so there is
1111 memory of the trace, no imprint in the flexible. For plasticity,
,.;omething is kept so it can resist a higher degree of deformation.
Mainstream ideology tends to make us believe that we are flexible
while we are plastic, that is, not indefinitely pliable or buoyant. We

7
theory@buffalo 16

all have a threshold of resistance that is impossible to ignore. Many

protest movements, occupations, demonstrations, manifestations of
the "indignes" everywhere in the world testify against this supposed
flexibility. . . .

TW: In this same book you argue that we are all neural subjects.6 If
neural subjectivity is formed by this plastic movement, and if this
movement is given by its capacity for resistance, and if there is a
certain danger in thinking of the neural machine as the flexibility
of capitalism, what would the political resistance of plasticity be or
look like?

CM: Well, the answer is in a way contained in the title, What Should
We Do With Our Brain? There is something to do. First of all, we have
to produce the political consciousness of the assimilation between the
neuronal and the economical. Very few people seem to be aware of
the political part played by the brain in the current capitalist ideology.
As long as people will ignore everything about the new biological
possibilities that are revealed by biology today, then it won't be
possible to resist anything. I think that political resistance has to find
a new way, a new form. In the same way that Marx talks about class­
consciousness, we have to talk about biological-consciousness. We
have to become aware of our own biological potentialities.This does
not only mean that we should become aware of what is going on in
the sciences; it is to l:?e aware of what is going on inside of us.A new
epistemology of labor could then be brought to light. According to
what we know about the brain and its plasticity, what is allowed and
what should be forbidden regarding the way work force [la force de
travail] is used? What are the needs of a plastic body? How to make
regenerative medicine more democratic? How can we appropriate
our new bodily essence? A complete analysis of our forces and limits
in the light of new biological data should be the first step of political
resistance today.

TW: So what do you anticipate being the result or consequence of

this political shift in biological consciousness?

CM: I expect an increased regulation of exploitation. A

democratization in the use of new medicines, which, at the moment,
are reserved for the happy few.Clearer protocols. Better information.
Numerous creations of banks of organs and of stem cells.... In

8
 Catherine Malabou & Tyler Williams

l;mnn•, the biologist Marc Pechanski is fighting for the creation of

11h•m n•ll resources. This should lead to a collective appropriation of
our bodies. This would perhaps determine new relationships to the
Nod.ll body; to the way we feel part of the same community. There
will soon be a presidential election in France, and no candidate
t•vt•r talks about these problems. Barack Obama explicitly used the
problem of stem cells as a theme for his campaign. I am not sure
tlwrt• has been genuine progress in the democratization of their use,
tho u g h
.

TW: You here draw a direct line between plasticity and democracy
wlwn you say that the result of this much-needed shift in biological
nmsriousness should yield a democratic politics of medicalization.
I find this correlation interesting. In What Should We Do With Our
llmi11 ?, you draw an analogy between brain plasticity and democracy
wlwn you describe neuroplasticity as an organic sharing that undoes
tr.ulitionally mechanical presumptions about the brain. But that,
""d the parallelism you draw between an Alzheimer's patient and
1111 l'mployee, for example, is only ever an analogy to describe the
pl11stic workings of the brain: the Alzheimer's patient is like an
t•mployee; brain plasticity is like democracy. But just now you have
drnwn a direct connection between the concept of plasticity and a
th•rnocratic public policy, as if there is something about plasticity that
lll'l"l'ssitates democratic legislation. Do you think there is something
11bout plasticity itself that yields a necessarily democratic politics?
E��rlier in our conversation, you thematized the central distinction
lwtwecn plasticity and elasticity as a "resistance to formation." You
tlwn said that a democratization of bodies and medicine should
occur as a result of a shift in biological consciousness that plasticity
provokes. But do you see this link between democracy and plasticity
to Dl' a necessary one? And is democracy, then, like plasticity, a
"rl·sistance to formation"?

<. "M: Coming back to medicine and medicalization, let me insist

on the problem of the modulation of the brain as it pertains to
rwuropharmacology and other applications of the neurosciences.
Wt• know that increasingly ubiquitous drugs can modulate our
lwhnviors (Ritalin, oxytocin, etc). This is another aspect of the issue
of democratization: how far are we allowed to go in the modulation
of our brain activity and is it possible to regulate the market of
rwuropharmacology industry? How can we approach molecular

9
theory@buffalo 16

transformations of the brain through the use of neuropharmaceuticals

in terms of neuronal liberation rather than in terms of normalization
and conduct stabilization?
The concepts of plasticity and neuronal liberation seem to
refuse the static equilibrium of "health," compelling us to move
beyond the normal I pathological binarism. Using the example
of neuromodulators, we might state that this biological rebellion
inscribed within plasticity-that is the refusal of the norm, of the
paradigm of the normal and pathological-is the democratic core
of the concept of plasticity. And yes, the link between plasticity and
democracy is of course a necessary one, if we understand democracy
at this stage as the possibility, for each of us, to be free and well
informed in the possible modulation of our biological identity.

TW: Derrida drew a direct correlation between deconstruction

and democracy by saying that they both work as a continuation
of the Englightenment tradition whereby everything can be put to
question, democracy being the right to say anything and everything.
In a 2010 essay in theory@buffalo, you expressed djssatisfaction with
Derrida's formulation of the future of the humanities as something
messianic, which, you say, "may just as well not happen" ("FHU"
15). Your point of contention was that, by declaring democracy and
deconstruction undeconstructible, Derrida ignores or overlooks the
becoming-empirical of the transcendental. Plasticity, and the plasticity
of the brain in particular, you argue, accounts for this becoming.
The presumption here, then, is that plasticity "deconstructs" what
Derrida held to be undeconstructible: namely, the democracy of
deconstruction. Would you suggest that plasticity's democracy
would work as a deconstruction of a democracy that was previously
held to be undeconstructible?

CM: It would be very pretentious of me to affirm that I have found

a means to render democracy deconstructible! I will just say that the
problem of a democratization concerning the biological subject­
that involves a redefinition of this very subject itself, which goes well
beyond its characterization as simply "bio-political"-is just currently
emerging. This redefinition opens up a new space that until now was
considered alien to politics, and consequently also to democracy: the
plasticity of the organism. When Derrida comments on Aristotle's
statement that man is a political animal, he never goes a far as to
inscribe the zoological part of the subject within the political. He

10
 Catherine Malabou & Tyler Williams

n•mains on the contrary totally faithful to the Heideggerian critique

ol tlw so-called metaphysical zoological definition of man brought
to li�ht by Aristotle and developed throughout the philosophical
tmdition. The crossing point between biology and history is, against
dt•mnstruction itself and in a more radical way than the one Foucault
hrtH announced, where a deconstruction of a certain conception of
dt•nwcracy should start.

TW: In your comments on the brain, you seem to be asserting an

"historical epistemology" of the sciences. Hans-Jorg Rheinberger,
lor t•xample, defined such a project as a reflection "on the historical
l'onditions under which, and the means with which, things are
n\ilde into objects of knowledge" (3). What you are suggesting here
Nt'l'ms to share this epistemological module-that the becoming­
"nowlcdge-object of the brain, particularly regarding its capacity
for mutation and transformation, invites a political shift of
mnsciousness regarding the status of life, bodies, and organisms.
But "historical epistemology" also addresses the manner in which a
Nril•ntific object becomes an object of knowledge in a process that is
historically and politically circumscribed, which means that a given
political climate both shapes and is shaped by scientific knowledge
(Uachclard had much to say about this). By bringing your work on
the brain into conversation with Boltanski's book, you also suggest a
rl•ciprocal relation (a mutual transformation) between scientific and
Nocio-political codetermination whereby, for example, paradigms for
thinking plasticity in the brain can also be found in certain critiques
o( capitalism, flexibility, and resistance.
But the reason I am phrasing this question in terms of historical
t•pistemology is because your earlier remarks on Derrida seemed to
rt•duce the concept to the trace to a mere paradigm or apparatus
for thinking a scientifically and historically circumscribed politics,
as if the trace is only ever a vehicle for constructing quantifiable
knowledge. But for Derrida the trace "is" not anything at all,
the trace never appears as such. It seems to me that, in order for
there to be anything like an historical epistemology or a reciprocal
transformation of science and politics, there must always necessarily
be a trace. Even a trace that would ruin the very epistemic or
transformative relations it makes possible.
My question is in three interrelated parts, then. First, what
l'Xactly do you mean by "trace" when you say that the paradigm
today to think our time is not so much the trace, or the inscription of

II
theory@buffalo 16

the trace? Second, doesn't this historical epistemological phrasing of

this statement risk treating "the trace" less as a conditional synthesis
of space and time [espacement] and more as a present and observable
object of scientific/ epistemic knowledge? And, lastly, wouldn't
"doing away with the trace" be always already a condition the trace?

CM: According to the great French epistemologist Georges

Canguilhem, the becoming object of a thing, its becoming object of
knowledge or science goes conjunctly with the formation of a concept
of this object. Let me recall his definition of a concept formation: "To
elaborate a concept is to vary both its extension and its intelligibility.
It is to generalize it by incorporating its exceptions. It is to export
it outside its original domain, to use it as a mode or conversely to
find it a model, in short it is to give to it, bit by bit, through ordered
transformations, the function of a form" (qtd in FH 7). I think we
are dealing here with something quite different from the Derridean
notion of the trace. As you say, the trace is not an object. Derrida
also often says that it is not a concept. We also know that Derrida
deconstructs the paradigm of episteme. In Changing Difference, I have
analyzed his ambiguity regarding the status of grammatology as a
science. In a certain sense, grammatology should be the science of
the trace, which would and should, according to Derrida himself,
replace Saussure's general semiology. But because episteme always
refers to an ontological status of objects, it cannot be a satisfactory
frame for grammatology. That is why I never said that the trace
was a "vehicle for constructing quantifiable knowledge." There is a
difference between a concept and what I call a "motor scheme," that
is a dominant hermeneutic tool that, at each historical epoch, imposes
itself as the most significant and useful motif to interpret the real.
Clearly, the trace was such a motif. Plasticity is replacing it as both
a scientific object and concept and as a motor scheme. Which means
that the novelty of our time consists in the fact that the motor scheme
has to have a scientific and epistemological dimension, a status
that was purely and simply evacuated in and by deconstruction.
The idea of a "conditional synthesis of space and time" conveys a
non-deconstructed transcendental meaning, which is of no use or
accuracy today. The plastic activity of forming a concept is a gesture
whose transcendental dimension disappears in the materiality of
its result or production. Regarding your last sentence about "doing
away with the trace" being the very meaning of the trace: again, the
issue is that the trace never erases itself in deconstruction . . . .

12
 Catherine Malabou & Tyler Williams

TW: In the third and most recent seminar that you have conducted
hc•n• in Buffalo (Spring 2011), you sought to show how plasticity, as
tlw �l'if-formation of form, complicates the "more originary" status
ol tlw trace through recent biological breakthroughs regarding the
nlll�lruction of self-generative synthetic life. By showing that life can
nllltiltt� itself as life without relying upon any sense of artificiality
ur prosthesis (e.g. a bacteria that can be created in a lab and fashion
IIHl'lf organically in order to take over a cell, as Dr. Venter has
n•n•ntly done in synthetic cell research7), you argued that the trace
mn no longer sufficiently account for a viable theory of life because
tlw auto-formation of life's plasticity proposes serious problems to
,, po�t-structuralist discourse that relies thoroughly on a concept of
diffl•rence. Whereas Derrida subordinated form to the trace in Of
< ;t'llmmatology, you seem to want to do the opposite. But this raises
11 l)Uestion about autoimmunity that is not unrelated to my earlier
lllll'�tion. In trying to invert Derrida's subordination of form to the
trnre, are you implicitly arguing that structures of life (e.g. time,
Hpare, survival, finitude, autoimmunity) are themselves conditioned
by the manner in which that life is formed?
I will try to rephrase this question a little bit and make it
more explicit. It is my understanding that the notion of difference
prevailing in post-structuralist discourses attempts to come to
tt•rms with a certain status of being-in-the-world: a structure of
life from which autoimmunity is inextricable and, for that reason,
finitude, space, time, etc. necessarily condition and contaminate
any experience. But you argue that the difference post-structuralism
inscribes in formed life, as it is differentially lived (i.e. finitely,
�patially extended, temporally constructed, etc.), would be undone
or reformed by a change in the technical formation of life. As if the
way life comes into being unquestionably alters the manner in which
life is lived. But it seems to me that even if life were created in a
laboratory through synthetic cells, that formed life would still be­
in-the-world as a finite existence, would still be spatially extended,
and that spatial extension would be temporalized, etc. That is, if
the trace makes explicit an autoimmunity that is constitutive of
formed life (which is why Derrida subordinates form to the trace),
how does the formation of life (as you seem to argue) actually affect
these differential structures? It seems to me that it would only make
autoimmunity, the trace, spacing, more necessary to a theory of life.

13
theory@buffalo 16

CM: The formation of life requires, as its essential condition of

possibility, the reversibility of difference. Venter's extraordinary
performance (I think it is the best name for his experience) shows
this: a writing (as you know, the DNA in the synthetic bacteria's
cells was replaced with a sentence by Joyce) that proceeds from a
deconstitution of difference. The fact that difference, with an "e" or
with an "a," appears to be derived, at least not irreversible and not
originary, is the most stunning philosophical revelation of the last
10 years! It means that, contrary to what Derrida affirms in his last
books, nothing is in reality undeconstructible.

TW: With this issue of difference and post-structuralism in mind-and

the problem of elaborating a theory of life that would not somehow
be indebted to a primordiality of the trace or autoimmunity-!
wanted to ask you to elaborate a little bit on the role of "resistance"
in plasticity that you mentioned not long ago. Unlike flexibility or
elasticity, you argued that plasticity maintains a mode of resistance; it
"keeps" something, and this keeping gives plasticity its destructively
explosive capacity. In this sense, in What Should We Do With Our
Brain?, as well as thus far in this conversation, our discussion of
plasticity's resistance (biologically and/or politically) has always
treated it in terms of a revolutionary progressivity. But I wanted to
ask to what degree the resistance of plasticity could also be thought
as conservative?
You have often discussed plasticity as the self-forming
mutability of a concept, as that which makes a "vulgar" concept
"general." In an essay you wrote, entitled "Grammatology and
Plasticity,"8 you argue that plasticity is what allows "writing" to
become a generalized concept from out of its particular, vulgar
understanding (i.e., how "writing" can become espacement for
Derrida while maintaining an analogical adherence to writing as
notation in its everyday sense). You also argue this in The Future
of Hegel regarding the "vulgar" concept of time, which requires
a mutability of the concept itself (and, this "itself" is what makes
plasticity a self-formation). The same could also be said of the ontic­
ontological difference in your book, Le change Heidegger.
But as much as plasticity is often treated as a revolutionarily
destructive and explosive force that would situate itself "at the dusk
of" these discourses, an idea of plasticity as the mutability of the
concept seems, in fact, to preserve and conserve these concepts.
It seems impossible not to note that because of plasticity these

14
 Catherine Malabou & Tyler Williams

concepts survive. As much as plasticity's resistance may name the

"dusk" of these discourses of difference, doesn't it also make them
possible, preserve and conserve them, make a place for them? And
wouldn't the risk that plasticity always takes-that it conservatively
preserves that which it seeks to progressively resist-be a trace
always inscribed in its formation? Would this mean that part of
what plasticity resists is plasticity itself? And wouldn't this make
"plasticity" another name for "autoimmunity"?

('M: To conserve is not necessarily a conservative gesture. I agree

thnt plasticity keeps a memory of what it replaces or comes after.
I low could it be otherwise? But we could present things in reverse:
is the persistence of this memory a proof that these discourses were
inscribed on plasticity's body as traces, or that these discourses
were always already plastically inhabited by the possibility of their
own transformation? That the trace was already ready to start its
metamorphosis as a form? But, as we know, plasticity has also a
destructive, explosive dimension, which threatens any attempt at
conservation, preservation and memory. So the circular inscription
of the trace within plasticity, or of plasticity within the trace, is
constantly exposed to its own deflagration.
Autoimmunity is itself a very plastic concept. Recent research
shows that immunity is not a dynamic that opposes a self to a
non-self, and privileges preservation over destruction. The border
lwtween the self and the non-self appears to be much more porous
than we thought. Some bacteria for example, hosted by our
organisms, pertain neither to the self nor to the non-self, are neither
protective nor destructive. In that sense, the teleological conception
of immunity is currently falling apart. Autoimmunity becomes a
much more complex notion then, to the extent that the "auto-" has
no strict limits. I would then be much more reserved than Derrida or
l:sposito in the use of this term.

TW: I suppose that what we have been circling around is the way
in which you situate plasticity or form as something that would be
more originary than the trace Derrida talks about, and the epochal
t•mergence of plasticity as something "post-deconstructive." If this
is n formal departure from Derrida and from deconstruction and
from this canonical progression that you trace from Heidegger (for
t•xample) through Derrida, Derrida's work maintains an obvious
privilege of something that he ca11s "literature." But you seem to

15
theory@buffalo 16

suggest (if not a privilege) at least an emphasis on the scientific over

the literary. Your interest is in neural formation, and the relation of
these formations to structures of capitalism, subjectivities, etc.
Would you agree with this disinctiont made between your
emphasis on science versus the emphasis that continental philosophy
has 'traditionally' placed on literature or poetry? And, how do you
see a relation between the literary and scientific-especially since
you are still a part of this tradition that has always been, in post­
Heideggerian philosophy, to put it mildly, suspicious of the scientific
in favor of the poetic?

CM: Derrida says that there is no other possible definition of

deconstruction than that deconstruction is what happens or
occurs. La deconstruction, c'est ce qui arrive. He means that, in fact,
deconstruction can only be its own material accomplishment.9 The
problem is that deconstruction is both what happens and what has
happened. So, the Real-this is my contention, which I develop at
the end of Plasticity at the Dusk ofWriting-the Real is deconstructed.
Deconstruction has become Real. It has happened, it has occurred.
It implies that there is a kind of material factual and already
accomplished deconstruction of the Real, which allows us to lay
foundations for a new materialism and to engage deconstruction
on a new path. Curiously, it seems that the last Derrida does not
take this into account. He sees deconstruction as something still to
come, as something that has in reality not yet occurred. There is a
contradiction between saying "deconstruction is what happens,"
and "deconstruction is what will happen." "What will may be, or
perhaps happen"-you know that the motif of the "perhaps" has
become very important in his last texts. Deconstruction then becomes
a new messianism. Of course, Derrida does not call it "messianism"
but rather "messianicity without messianism." Still, it remains a
messianism, the opening to the utterly other which may or may not
come.
So, it seems to me that within deconstruction itself, within the
Real (and on that sense I am very Hegelian, because the Real, which
Hegel calls the Actual, is always the proof in the last instance)­
it seems to me that the Real has cut itself off from this messianic
tendency of deconstruction, and we currently have to face the
deconstructed nature of the Real. One of the reasons I am turning
toward current biology is, as I said previously, because it integrates
deconstruction to the organic, in a way, it embodies it, assimilates

16
 Catherine Malabou & Tyler Williams

it, trnnsforms it in a leaving and material reality. The fact that it is

rww impossible to consider program and promise as two opposites
h·rms, to the extent that the genetic program is becoming an obsolete
notion; that the living being has the capacity to replace itself; that
tlw genome is plastic, that all which appeared, until recently, as
tlm•sholds of irreversibility, are exploding, all this shows that a
living being is a deconstructed structure, that deconstruction, that
Is the lack of presence of the self to itself, is an ordinary datum, fate,
which cannot be constitute a task of thinking anymore. The future
of the deconstructed real is an issue, not deconstruction of presence.
What Derrida calls literature does not necessarily coincide, as you
know, with "literary texts," but corresponds to the structure of the
promise, as opposed to that of program. Literature is the realm of the
possible, a possible that won't and doesn't need to become actual.
Possibility as such, that is also pure impossibility (to actualize itself).
In many texts, as "Faith and Knowledge" for example,10 Derrida
rontrasts literature, understood as this promised possibility, to
Mdt•nce, or "tele-technoscience," understood as a set of anticipating,
t•ulculation and programming strategies. If we take into account that
nrrrcnt biology erases the frontier between promise and program­
this is the main task of epigenetics-what does such an opposition
lwl'ome? What remains of it? Where is the frontier between the
Ml'il•ntific and the literary (and again, Venter's performance directly
nddresses such an issue)? To oppose the poetic to technoscience, as
l lt•idegger does, has become a pure and simple nonsense.

TW: Several poets and novelists may be unhappy to hear that poetry
.md literature do not exhibit or express this deconstruction of the
Rt•al.

( "M: They do. I of course never said the contrary. Whati am challenging
is the border between literature and science. Undoubtedly, it is
dramatically changing and redrawing itself.

TW: You suggest that the "right" reading of literature (or poetry)
would be one removed from messianism, but how do you
characterize this "messianism" in Derrida's treatment of literature,
.md how should literature be read if this messianism is what diverts
I kidcgger's reading of poetry and Derrida's reading of literature
from the "right way"? What would this "right way" look like
.md, if this "right way" would be aligned with the materiality of a

17
theory@buffalo 16

deconstructed Real, how would the practice of reading literature be

any different than, say, a scientific methodology, or the 'reading' of
a brain scan?

CM: If I get you well, there would be no other alternative than that of
messianism against brain scan reading. I don't think this is the case.
The intermediary space between these two extremes is precisely the
site of the philosophy to come . . . .

TW: Do you think that this turn toward science as the site of the
deconstruction of the Real exposes, claims, or suggests, a certain
impotency in the practice of poetry or literature? What does this
say about the prevalence poetry has always enjoyed as the kin to
philosophy? And, if poetry has always been the type of thinking
conjoined to philosophy, for Heidegger, what you seem to be
suggesting is that the very discourse of which he [Heidegger] seems
to have been so wary-namely, science--can actually sustain this
relationship with philosophy that has always been treated as an
insubstantial relationship.

CM: Heidegger says that only poets can save us. Can we still agree
with this and have faith in such a promise? Can we consider that
such a thing has or will ever happen? I don't think we should talk
about an impotency in the current practice of poetry or literature.
These practices, though, cannot be invested with this mission of
salvation any longer.U

TW: At the same time, in your book, What Should We Do With Our
Brain?, you describe the plasticity of the brain as poetic. I believe the
word that you use is "dithyrambic." You have suggested that you
are not necessarily interested in neurology or neuroscience for its
own sake, which I take to mean that there is something exemplary
in neuroscience for your development of a philosophical concept of
plasticity. But, if the brain can be described as poetic or dithyrambic,
I wonder if poetry, then, (even if it is not taken in its textual sense,
in the same way Derrida does not mean by "literature" novels or
belles-lettres) can be as exemplary of this form/ self-formation / self­
regeneration as neuroscience in thinking this concept of plasticity?

CM: Heidegger is obviously privileging a kind of poetry over

another. And my poetic family, if I may say so, is not the same as

18
 Catherine Malabou & Tyler Williams

I h•idcgger's. My preferred trend in poetry is surrealism. When you

n•ad poets like Breton, Aragon, Eluard, Tzara, they are talking all the
llnw nbout the materiality of spirit: of the brain, of the unconscious
lwing something like a machine. Think of automatic writing. Breton
d.1ims a Hegelian intellectual bequest. Heidegger and Derrida are
11lit'll to that type of poetry and literature. The poets they read would
twtainly have been horrified with the development of neuroscience.
Surrl•alists, on the contrary, would have been extremely curious
11llllllt it.

TW: Still on the topic of literature, I remember you telling me a year

or two ago that you had always had an interest in writing something
11hout jack London. Can you say a little more about what it is about
l•ll'k London that interests you so much?

( 'M: I tried a first attempt at teaching Jack London in my seminar in

Mndison [Wisconsin] in March 2011. It was the first time I dared to
l11lk about literature in a philosophy class. I tried to analyze the motif
of h.1bit in the two "dog novels," White Fang and The Call of the Wild,
nnd it seemed to me that London has invented a way of speaking
tlw animal, in a way, that is neither a description-like an external
nrmator describing the dog-nor something like the dog's voice (as
you l'nn find in the French writer Colette, for example). In Colette,
llw .mimals talk. In London they don't. Ever. Since they have a voice.
II Ht'l'ms to me that, for the first time, plasticity was given its voice,
11H White Fang, for example, is its own transformation. Plasticity,
llw word itself, appears in the novel. The wild is this conceptual
hlrmkncss where the limit between the biological and symbolic is
not prL•-given but has to form itself. That is why and how White Fang
llnds his form between nature and culture, the biological and the
Nymbolic. The wild is the absence of any pre-given meaning, of any
'' t'riori, of anything, of even any distinction between the empirical
1111d till' transcendental, or even between the human and the animal.
1 .11,,. the erasure, the total effacement, of any predetermination. In
I h,,, totally blank space, life is presented as its self-formation and this
111 what gives voice to animality as such.

TW: You mention that this is also something that is happening in

this st•minar on Writing [in Buffalo]. So the wild as the site of self­
lonnation would also be that self-formation that form-ally precedes
writing and the trace?

19
theory@buffalo 16

CM: Yes. Because it seems to me-as I tried to present in the

seminar-that the trace is still too confident in the symbolic/
empirical distinction.

TW: The collapse between the symbolic and biologic would be

plasticity. So, the seminar you are giving in Buffalo right now is
trying to situate this a priori collapse of the distinction between the
symbolic and biologic as something that forms itself prior to the
trace and that leaves no scar in the wound of the tissue of the text.
Where do you see, as a project, this a priori plasicity
t before writing
going from here?

CM: I really want to write this book tentatively called One Life. "One
life" meaning no distinction between the symbolic and the biologic.
I would like to begin with a deconstruction of biopolitics, and then
by the means of an analysis of biological discoveries, try to elaborate
a new conception of meaning. I am sure I will keep something from
the symbolic, because it is impossible to just chase it out like that, to
evacuate it. But, my problem is: is it possible to think of a meaning
of life that does not.exclude life itself as a biological entity? At the
moment, I just wrote an introduction, and a first chapter that is
an analysis of The Beast and the Sovereign. And now I will tum to
Foucault, and the second part will be on biology, and the third part
will ask what is this new economy of meaning. This third part will
be a presentation of a new kind of materialism.
What is very difficult is to know whether the difference that
opens within life, the difference between the empirical and the
symbolic, can be elaborated in a new way that does not pertain to a
split of the two dimensions. Nietzsche is the philosopher for whom
there is only one life, in whom it is impossible to genuinely mark
the border between the biological and the spiritual, or what I call
the symbolic. Is it possible to do something out of this Nietzschean
economy? Something adapted to our time? This is the problem.

TW: It sounds very interesting.

CM: It is. Derrida says that if we want to really deconstruct Heidegger,

we have to show that life is more important than Being. And it is
clear that he is trying to go in that direction more and more in his
works. But it is true that every time he talks about life, he is trapped

20
 Catherine Malabou & Tyler Williams

wllhl11 tlw symbolical-biological separation again. A separation that

m11y ns well be that of Being and beings. If we cannot talk about
Ill'-' without invoking some kind of transcendental, or discursive, or
111 11 1 - biological paradigm, then Heidegger will very easily show that
WI' 11ft' dt•<�ling with the ontic-ontological difference again. I hope it
l11 poHsiblc to find a way out.

TW: A wny out without the looming specter of Heidegger?

t. 'M: {)rat least having something to object to, to answer. In The Beast
''"" 1/u· Sovereign, Derrida is struggling very hard with Heidegger.
In 1111' t•nd, though, we see that auto-immunity does not immunize
�h·nmsl ruction against Heideggerian ontology.

TW: II seems appropriate that we are here ending with answering

to l l t•idl'gger and Derrida as opposed to simply responding to them
"" 1111 lwir.

< 'M: Vl•ry true. Answering to them.

Notes
I Mnlnhou is here referring to one of the closing sessions of her Spring 2010 seminar,
"I h•�l'l: Contemporary Interpretations of Lordship and Bondage, Koj�ve, Bataille,
I lPrrhl.t, Butler."-Ed. (All subsequent notes are additions made by the editors.)

J. St•t• J.tt't]UCS Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth
lt11th'nlwrg (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007).

.t M•tl.thou's Spring 2011 seminar in Buffalo was titled, "Philosophy and Writing:
I ·.. ntlkt or Common Destiny? Prospects for the 21st Century" and focused on
n•n.tln�s of Plato, Rousseau, Niet.zsche, and Derrida.

� This lt'cture was published in Mosaic 40.2 (2007) and has been reprinted as a book
dutplt·r under the title, "The phoenix, the spider, and the salamander" (CD 67-89).

'\ �;,.,. l.uc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory
1'1111111 (London: Verso, 2005).

'' F11r t•xample, chapter 3 of this book is titled, "You Are Your Synapses" (WDB 55).

'1. For more information on Venter and his work, see Nicholas Wade's article,

Say They Created A 'Synthetic Cell," New York Times 20 May 2010 at
"Ht·st•.tr<'hl!rs
· hllp:/ /www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21 /science/21cell.html>.

H This t'ssay was originally published in English translation as "The End of Writing?
1 ;e.unrnatology and Plasticity," trans. Annjeanette Weise, The New European Legacy
1:'.·1 (2004): 27-37, but has been included in CD (41-66).

21
theory@buffalo 16

i The Beast and tire Sovereign, Derrida says, "This deconstruction is

9. For example, n
what is happening, as 1 often say, and what is happening today in the world-through
crises, wars, phenomena of so-called national and international terrorism, massacres
that are declared or not, the transformation of the global market and of international
law-what is happening is so many events that are affecting the classical concept of
sovereignty and making trouble for it. In this seminar, we are only beginning to reflect
on, and take into account, as consequentially as we can, what s i happening" (76).

10. See "Faith and Knowledge: Two Sources of "Religion" at the Limit of Reason
Alone." Acts ofReligion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002): 40-101.

11. On the topic of messianism, plasticity, and the humanities, see "FHU."

Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques. Tile Beast and the Sovereign, vol.1. Trans. Geoffrey
Bennington. Chicago: U Chicago P, 2010.
Malabou, Catherine. Changing Difference: The Feminine and the Question of
Philosophy. Trans. Carolyn Shread. New York: Polity, 2011. [CD)
---. "The Future of the Humanities." theory@buffalo 14 (2010): 8-16. l"FHU"]
--. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dalectic,
i Destruction, Deconstruction.
Trans. Carolyn Shread. New York: Columbia UP, 2009. [PDW]
---. What Should We Do With Our Brain? Trans. Sebastian Rand. New York:
Fordham UP, 2008. (WDB]
--- with Noelle Vahanian. "A Conversation with Catherine Malabou."
Journalfor Cultural and Religious Theory 9.1 (2008): 1-13. l"CCM"]
Rheinberger, Hans-Jorg. On Historicizing Epistemology: An Essay. Trans.
David Fernbach Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010.

22
 Daniel W. Smith

WHAT SHOULD WE Do WITH OuR BRAIN?

A REVIEW ESSAY

I.

Catherine Malabou's book can be contextualized in terms of

llw two broad questions that are indicated in her title.1
I. First, it would not be inaccurate to suggest that What Should
Wr I >o With Our Brain? is a book that, at its heart, is concerned
wllh the philosophical problem of freedom. As the title indicates,
II npproaches this question through a reflection on contemporary
lidt•am• <md, more specifically, on contemporary neuroscience. In
lhlH n·�ard, Malabou's project bears a certain resemblance to Kant's
nltkal project (although Kant's name does not appear in the book).
1\,mt's philosophy, famously, was grounded in a reflection on a
(;nllll•an and Newtonian universe that had become mathematized
nnd dl'tcrministic. Within this universe, Kant's three critiques asked
lhn•t• qucstions: What can weknow? What must we do? And what can
Wl' hope for? The second question-What must we do?-animated
"'"11's analyses, in the second critique, The Critique ofPractical Reason,
nl llw problematic status of freedom in a deterministic world.
In a sense, Malabou's short book-it is only 82 pages in
1r.11 1slation-takes the baton handed to her by Kant and once
''�·•in asks the question, "What Should We Do?" But the conditions
ol t his question have changed since Kant's time. It is no longer a
qut•stion of locating freedom within a deterministic universe. Quite
llw wntrary, we live in a world that seems to have been re-injected,

23
theory@buffalo 16

as it were, with certain degrees of freedom: physics has become

nondeterministic; genetics emphases the role of chance in biological
mutations; capitalism, for all its repressive recodings, is also, in
Deleuze's parlance, a vast enterprise of decoding (in neo-liberal
language, it is the "freedom to choose"); and neuroscience itself
emphases the fundamental "plasticity" or freedom of the synaptic
connectivity of the brain. Put schematically, one might say that the
question of freedom has been inverted since Kant. The question is no
longer, How can we consider ourselves to be free in a deterministic
world?, but rather, Why are we not free in a world in which science
itself seems to see indeterminacy, stochastic processes, chance, and
randomness at the most basic levels of physical, chemical, biological,
and neurological events? As Malabou puts it, echoing Rousseau's
famous phrase, Why is it, "given that the brain is plastic [and] free,"
·
that "we are still always and everywhere 'in chains"' (11)?
2. Second, this general problem raises the more specific question:
Why, then, did Malabou choose to link her analysis of freedom to
the status of contemporary neuroscience? The title of Malabou's
book is not simply Kant's "What should we do?" but rather: "What
should we do with our brain?" Why does Malabou link the question
of freedom with the structure of the brain? Malabou doesn't make
this explicit, but one can think of three interrelated reasons. First, in
Foucauldian terms, the relations between power and knowledge are
more evident in the so-called human sciences (linguistics, political
economy, psychiatry, and so on) than in the so-called 'hard sciences'
such as physics and chemistry. Insofar as it takes 'human beings'
as its object, neuroscience can be said to be a human science. Yet at
the same time, secondly, neuroscience also aspires (and indeed often
claims) to be a hard science: it deals with the biological organism;
the chemical communication that takes place within the brain; its
structure in physics. But, thirdly, neuroscience is also a 'science
of the mind,' insofar as it claims to tell us something about the
nature of human thought and behavior, the structure of thinking
itself, which is seen to be grounded in the neuronal and synaptic
structure of the brain. (As an example of the latter, Pascal Boyer's
book, Religion Explained, attempts to interpret religious phenomena
as corresponding to the innate structures of the brain, in a somewhat
Chomskyian manner.)2
Neuroscience, in short, seems to have a somewhat unique
position: it is a human science, but one that claims to be grounded
in tht• hard sciences, and for that reason, it claims to give us a

24
 Daniel W. Smith

Ht'il'ntific explanation of something that seems to elude science, or

of which science itself is an exemplification, namely, human thought
1tnd behavior. This is no doubt why evolutionary psychology,
tlltthropology, psychiatry, psychology, and so on, are increasingly
b.tst•d on results in neuroscience, and frequently appeal to it in their
111M Iyses-precisely because neuroscience forms the current scientific
ronccption of what one might call, simply, 'human nature.' In this
Ht•nst•, another form of Malabou's title question might therefore be:
I low should we use neuroscience? How should we make use of this
1ww science that seems to be becoming the ground of all the other
human sciences?

II.

Malabou's reflections on freedom and neuroscience are

tll')-:anized around the fundamental concept of plasticity. "Plasticity in
tlw nt•rvous system," we are told, "means an alteration in structure or
(unction brought about by development, experience, or injury" (5).
In lwr first chapter, entitled "Plasticity's Field's of Action," Malabou
1lllnlyzes three "fields of action" in the brain where plasticity plays a
fundamental role.
First, there is developmental plasticity. During the first six months
o( life, the brain becomes "progressively sculpted, stabilized, and
divided into different regions" and "to the extent that the volume
o( mnnections grows, the identity of an individual begins to outline
flst•lf" (20). Even though "all human brains resemble each other"
( IK), there is nonetheless "a certain plasticity in the execution of
tlw genetic program" (20): the "topographic network" of the infant
brain is established through the death of certain neuronal cells and
t lw l'limination of useless connections (20).
Second, there is modulational plasticity. Here, epigenetic
Ht'tlf pting gives way to "the modulation of synaptic efficiency" in
n•l.ttion to the brain's external environment (21). Malabou discusses
lwrt• the important notions of synaptic potentiation and depression.
In modulational plasticity, "the efficacy of the synapse (its capacity
to transmit signals from neuron to neuron) either rises, which is
l'.tflt•d 'long-term potentiation' (LTP) or diminishes, which is 'long­
h·rm depression"' (22). In other words, "synapses can see their
l'llkacy reinforced or weakened as a function of experience" (24).
Whill' learning to play the piano, for instance, "the mechanism for
dc• lm•ssing entry signals corresponding to incorrect movements

25
theory@buffalo 16

('mistakes') makes possible the acquisition of the correct movements"

through potentiation (23). Put simply, modulational plasticity is the
formation of new neuronal connections in a brain, in relation to its
external environment.
Third, there is reparative plasticity, which includes not only "the
brain's capacity to compensate for losses caused by lesions" (25),
but what is called "neuronal renewal" or "secondary neurogenesis"
(25), which means that "certain neurons in regions important to the
learning process renew themselves continuously" (25), such that it
"constitutes an additional mechanism of individuation" (27).
Malabou analyzes these three modes to show how plasticity
operates at every level of the brain, not only in the development of
new neuronal connections in the brain, and their constant repnir, but
also at the level of the execution of the genetic program itself. It is a
very enlightening analysis, especially for someone, like myself, who
is an amateur in neuroscience.
Alongside this analysis of the role of plasticity in neuroscience,
however, Malabou provides a slightly different conceptual analysis
of the notion of plastique, which anticipates her somewhat Hegelian
conclusion. On the one hand, the term plasticity-from the Greek
plassein, to mold-has two basic senses: "it means at once the cnpncity
to receive form (clay is called 'plastic/ for example) and the capacity
to give form (as in the plastic arts or in plastic surgery)" (5). On the
other hand, the French term plastique is "an explosive substance
made of nitroglycerine and nitrocellulose, capable of causing violent
explosions" (5). Thus, the analysis of the term plasticity itself reveals
that, in Hegelian fashion, the concept contains within itself two
somewhat contradictory extremes: "on the one side the sensible
image of taking form (sculpture or plastic objects), and on the other
side that of the annihilation of all form (explosion)" (5).
These two types of analyses run side by side throughout
Malabou's book: an analysis of way in which plasticity is used in
neuroscience, and then a conceptual or etymological analysis of the
term along Hegelian (or even Derridean) lines. ln my mind, it is not
always clear how these two types of analyses link up, or indeed if
they link up, although Malabou makes the attempt. At the end of
the book, for instance, Malabou suggests a Hegelian solution to the
problem of the relation between the neuronal and the mental (the
neuroscientific variant of the body I mind problem, that is, How can
neuronal connections produce thought?), but it is not dear to me
how the conceptual analysis solves the neuroscientific problem. I'll

26
 Daniel W. Smith

return to this in a moment.

The first chapter-with its analysis of plasticity-concludes by
posing the crucial question for Malabou: Is brain plasticity a model
offreedom, that is, the ability to form new neuronal connections, and
ultimately to bring about "transformative effects" on others (31)?
Or is it, rather, a biological justification of the manner in which the
brain is necessarily molded by the economic, political, and social
organization with which it interacts? In effect, Malabou is going
to argue that the potential for both is inherent the notion of brain
plasticity.
This question leads into the second chapter, which is entitled
"Central Power in Crisis." The term "central power" refers to the
way in which old models of the brain tended to be modeled on
technologies of command and control, that is, models that derive
their images from the State. Such models of what Malabou calls the
"machine brain" can be as diverse as Bergson's image of the brain
as a "central telephone exchange" (33), or more recent images of the
brain as kind of computer: the brain is the hardware, and thought
is its software. In all these models, the brain was understood to
be something like a central power in the body, issuing "governing
and command functions" (32) from above. The brain was seen as
"a machine that works from the top down, that orders movement,
controls behavior," and so forth (xi). "In an earlier day," Marc
Jeannerod writes in his foreword, "this centralizing and unifying
vision truly represented an ideal of governance: one sole leader, one
sole head commanding and organizing everything" (xi).
Now the concept of brain plasticity-with its related notions
of neural networks and connectionism-has completely shattered
this image of the brain as a central power, and no doubt that has
been a great step forward in our understanding of the brain. But
the strength of Malabou's analysis is to show how this shift in our
understanding of the brain was not simply a development that took
place in neuroscience. More importantly, it has co-occurred with a
radical modification of our economic and social environment, that
is, it has paralleled a similar shift in the management structure
of corporations, and the organization of the capitalist system in
general. What Malabou proposes in this chapter, then, is an analysis
of "a similarity of functioning between . . . economic organization
and neuronal organization" (41), and it is one of the richest and most
original aspects of the book. It charts the move away from what one
might call a "soviet" (xiii) vision of the brain-a top-down image

27
theory@buffalo 16

of the brain as "a rigid, predetermined, directing organ" (xiii)­

toward a more "liberal" or even "democratic" vision of the brain as
"a supple, adaptable, plastic organ" (xiii).
Malabou' s main point of reference here is the 1999 book by Luc
Boltanski and Eve Chiapello called The New Spirit ofCapitalism, which
stressed the growing role of "flexible networks" in the management
structure of corporations.3 The central command of the CEO has
become increasingly replaced by what Malabou likes to call "the
neuronal manager" (43), that is, the bureaucrat or executive who
"transmits, distributes, and modifies connections by potentiating
or depressing them according to circumstances and needs, without
being identifiable with or assigned to a fixed post" (44). According
to Boltakski and Chiapello, capitalism refers to neuronal functioning
both implicitly, and explicitly: implicitly, because capitalism, as they
say, in a somewhat Deleuzian vein, claims "to replace essentialist
ontologies with open spaces without borders, centers, or fixed
points, where entities are constituted by the relations they enter into
and alter in line with the flows, transfers, exchanges, permutations,
and displacements that are the relevant events in this space" (45).
But the appeal to neuronal models is also explicit, insofar as "today's
management literature preaches work in 'flexible, neural' teams, and
can claim that the manager 'is not [or is no longer] a (hierarchical)
boss, but an integrator, a facilitator, an inspiration, a unifier of
energies, an enhancer of life, meaning, and autonomy"' (43).
Similarly, at the level of workers (rather than management),
Malabou points out that employment has now become synonymous
with being adaptable and flexible. "Anyone who is not flexible,"
she writes, "deserves to disappear" (46). There is thus an almost
measurable link between social suffering (such as unemployment)
and psychical suffering (or depression)-in effect, unemployed
people suffer from "illnesses of flexibility" (47). They have become
unemployed because they were not flexible enough: when they lose
their job, they are not able to quickly adapt and modify themselves;
they lack the flexibility to retrain themselves for a new job. As a result,
the unemployed often become depressed and apathetic-an apathy
that is characterized in the literature by "a holding back, stiffening,
braking, and suspension of activity" (48, emphasis added). In other
words, lack of social flexibility literally becomes paralleled by a lack
of neuronal flexibility in the brain-and the relation between the two
is not simply one of analogy. In this sense, the workplace can be said
to have become "the antechamber of nervous depression" (49).

28
 Daniel W. Smith

Even more to the point, perhaps, Malabou suggests that it is

the Alzheimer's patient who, more than any other, represents "the
nemesis of connectionist society, the counter model of flexibility...:
errant, without memory, asocial, without recourse" (52). Malabou
is here drawing a parallel between illnesses of social disconnection,
such as the depression of the unemployed, and neurodegenerative
diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. Both involve disconnection from
the rest of the network: in the case of the unemployed, reconnection is
possible; in the case of the Alzheimer's patient, it is not. "This is how
dementia appears as the countermodel of plasticity: the irreparable
loss of connections at the core of the cerebral network entails a
definitive disconnection from the social network" (xiii). As Malabou
asks, "Is the difference really all that great between the picture we
have an unemployed person about to be kicked off the dole and the
picture we have of someone suffering from Alzheimer's?" (10).
Conversely, to be "healed" from this social depression
essentially means "to reintegrate, to restore flexibility" (51). Malabou
suggests that this is one reason why Prozac became such a popular
drug: it allowed one to obtain, at a low cost, the type of self or
individuality that today's "high-tech capitalism" endorses as its
condition of possibility-a form of capitalism in which "confidence,
flexibility, quickness, and energy . . . are at a premium" (51). Whence
the complex role of the psychopharmaceutical industry, whose
genuine importance Malabou insists upon, but which also tends to
operate in the service of the flexibility demanded by the capitalist
organization of our society-to a certain degree, this is what guides
their research and development programs. "Antidepressants," she
writes, "in their great diversity, all seek to stimulate neurochemical
transmission, with the avowed goal of 'restoring and protecting the
plastic capacities of the brain'" (48). "To survive today means to be
connected" (10, emphasis added).
Now in drawing this parallel between the neuronal and the
social, one might be tempted to pose epistemological questions
to Malabou concerning the exact relationship between the two
(questions concerning "social constructionism" and so forth). Is she
saying that the shift in our global capitalist economy generated a
conceptual shift that has altered, as if by contagion, our view of the
way the brain functions? Or is she saying that it is this new "neo­
liberal" connectionist brain that has imposed its model on our
socioeconomic system? Malabou does not really attempt to answer
these questions, apart from saying that "neuronal functioning and

29
theory@buffalo 16

social functioning interdetermine each other and mutually give each

other form" (9, emphasis added). (One might like to know how she
thinks this "mutual interdetermination" works.)
But if Malabou does not answer these questions, it is because
what she is doing-in this undeniably brilliant chapter-is not
epistemology or the philosophy of science, but rather a critique of
ideology, and more specifically, a critique of "neuronal ideology"
on that is, "an ideological critique of the fundamental concepts of
the neurosciences" (82). What does this mean? "Any vision of the
brain/' Malabou explains, "is necessarily political" (52). What this
implies is that neuroscience has what might be called a "naturalization
effect" (9). "We live in a 'connectionist world"'-with its "part-time
jobs, temporary contracts, the demand for absolute mobility and
adaptability, the demand for creativity" (10)-but what neuroscience
does, wittingly or unwittingly, is to bestow on our connectionist
economy "the coherence and immediacy of something natural" (9).
This is the form of all effective social legitimation: our social order is
legitimate because it is "only natural."
This, then, is the problem that lies at the heart of Malabou's
book. The brain, she says, provocatively, is "the essential thing, the
biological, sensible, and critical locus of our time, through which
pass, one way or another, the political evolutions and revolutions that
began in the eighties and opened the twenty-first century" (53). And
yet, she writes, "at bottom, neuronal man"-that is, we ourselves­
"has not known how to speak of himself" (53) or to produce "a
consciousness of the brain" (54). The reason: "neuroscientific
discourse" has "unwittingly produced criteria, models, and
categories for regulating social functioning and increasing daily the
legitimation of the demand for flexibility as a global norm" (53). In
other words, wittingly or unwittingly, "the scientific description of
brain plasticity produces . . . an extremely normalizing vision of
democracy, in that it accords an overly central role to the absence of
center, a too rigid prominence to flexibility; that is to say, to docility
and obedience" (53).
Thus, the political question posed by the many advances in
neuroscience is this: Can the plasticity of the brain resist theflexibility
demanded of it by capitalism? Can brain plasticity avoid simply
reproducing the flexibility of it required by capitalism? As Malabou
says, "our brain is . . . essentially what we do with it" (30), yet this
plasticity of the brain can move in one of two directions: either "brain
plasticity [can] constitute the biological justification of a type of

30
 Daniel W. Smith

economic, political, and social organizaiont in which all that matters

is the result of action as such: efficacy, adaptability-unfailing
flexibility" (31). Or "brain plasticity, taken as a model, [can] allow
us to think a multiplicity of interactions in which the participants
exercise transformative effects on one another through the demands
of recognition, of non-domination, and of liberty" (31).
This, then, is the substance of Malabou's critique of "neuronal
ideology" (11). Her claim is not that neuroscience, as a form of
knowledge, is simply a reflection of its social conditions. Her thesis is
much stronger: the discovery of the plasticity of the brain both reflects
the structure of capitalism and points the way for a conception of the
production of the new. In Deleuze's parlance, neuroscience is a vast
enterprise of recoding and decoding.

III.

This brings us to Malabou's third and final chapter, which is

entitled "You are Your Synapses." The problem she now needs to
address is: if we are our synapses, how do we prevent the plasticity
of the brain from falling back on the mere flexibility demanded of it
by capitalism?
Malabou begins to formulate a response to this problem by
tackling the traditional brain/ mind problem, and by putting into
question "the certainty that there exists a perfect continuity between
the neuronal and the mental" (55), that is, between the biological
structure of the brain and what one might call the noological structure
of thought. One can see why: Where, in this relation between the
brain and the mind, between the neuronal and mental, is there space
for what one might call . . freedom?
.

The presumption that there is a continuity between the

neuronal and the mental, as Malabou perceptively notes, "is at once
the strongest and the weakest point of neuroscientific discourse
in general" (56). Strongest, because it has indeed allowed us to
approach phenomena such as memory, perception, learning, and
even psychical and behavioral problems, more and more precisely
and objectively. But it is also the weakest point, she says, because
"the certainty of the continuity between the neuronal and the mental
can obviously never be a strictly scientific postulate. It necessarily
constitutes a philosophical or epistemological position . . . [that is]
not always dearly articulated" (56).

31
theory@buffalo 16

So, Malabou's strategy is to interrogate the transition from

the neuronal to the mental, and to challenge the idea that there is a
continuity from the biological to the cultural, from the natural base of
the mind to its historical, political, and social dimension. She wants
"to unsettle the very concept of continuity, and n
i so doing to perturb
flexibility" (56). "If we do not think through this transformation
[from the neuronal to the mental] or this plasticity," Malabou writes,
"we dodge the most important question, which is that of freedom"
(69, emphasis added).
Now, in undertaking this challenge, Malabou turns to the work
of the well-known neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, the author of
Descartes' Error and The Feeling of What Happens. In his own attempt
to see how we get from the neuronal to the mental, Damasio was
led to posit what he calls a "proto-self" (57). What Damasio means
by this term is that "the essence of who you are is stored as synaptic
interactions in and between the various subsystems of your brain"
(58), that is, the self, at its most basic level, is simply "a syntheses of
all the plastic processes at work n
i the brain" (58). Second question:
"Why don't the systems learn different things and pull our thoughts,
emotions, and motivations in different directions? What makes them
work together, rather than as an unruly mob?" (58). Answer: because
the proto-self indicates the way the brain represents the organism to
itself-"the state of the internal milieu, viscera, vestibular system,
and musculoskeletal frame" (59). Third question: Where does my
core consciousnessness come from, and even my autobiographical
consciousness? Damasio claims that they emerge from this proto­
self in a progressive manner, without rupture, through a modification
of the proto-self (59). Consciousness is, in effect, an extensive "re­
representation of the nonconsicous proto-self in the process of
being modified" (61). It is precisely this process-the movement
from the proto-self to the conscious self-that corresponds to the
translation of neuronal patterns into mental patterns (61), and this
re-representation of the proto-self takes place in what Damasio
calls "images" or "signs": "visual images, auditory images, tactile
images, and so forth" (61). Taken together, these images constitute
"the elementary life of the three domains of cognition, emotion, and
motivation" (61). Such, in essence, is Damasio's thesis on how we get
from the neuronal to the mental.
Yet, as Malabou points out, "no one today is in a position
to prove that all cognitive, emotional, or practical activities are
the reformulated and resystematized equivalents of neuronal

32
 Daniel W. Smith

configurations" (62). Why? Because not all of the neuronal patterns

become images or signs, not all dispositions become schemas
(64). "If we are from the start a nonconscious proto-self always 'in
process of being modified,' how is this modification effected?" (65).
It is precisely at this point, in the transition from the neuronal to the
mental, that the political, economic, and social questions reappear.
For example, one answer to this problem is the theory that has come
to be known as "mental Darwinism," which states that "only those
neuronal configurations capable of survival, thus those capable
of being the 'best,' the highest 'performing,' would be converted
into images. Only the most 'useful' synaptic connections would be
modulated or reinforced" ,.(65). What this would mean is that the
transition from the neuronal to the mental would "proceed solely by
natural selection .(or cultural selection, which amounts to the same
thing)" (6S.)..§r{e can easily see how such a "natural selection" of
neurons would ·easily lead back to the capitalist ideal of flexibility:
"there would seem to be at the heart of the [proto-] self a selection
oriented toward efficacy" (65).
But might there not be another answer to this question
(concerning the transition from the neuronal to the mental)? One
that would not have brain plasticity simply reproduced in capitalist
flexibility?If"personalityis [indeed] reformable" (68), thenMalabou's
suggestions is that it might be possible to envision a fourth type of
plasticity-in addition to the developmental, modulational, and
reparative plasticities analyzed in the first chapter-an intermediate
plasticity situated between the proto-self and the conscious self.
What would this "intermediate plasticity" be? Here, Malabou
performs a movement similar to Freud's later tum toward a meta­
psychology in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This is the text where
Freud, having posited the pleasure as the guiding principle of our
psychic life, notes that there are in fact numerous exceptions to this
principle-such as soldiers who constantly repeat painful wartime
traumas in their mind (repetition compulsion). To deal with this
problem, Freud had to turn to philosophical speculation: he posited
the "meta-psychological" existence of an unseen death instinct in the
unconscious, operating alongside the erotic drives toward pleasure.
For her part, Malabou, in her own speculative turn, instead of
speaking of a meta-psychology, instead proposes a kind of "meta­
neurobiology" (70) that in the end, for her, is fundamentally-and
perhaps not surprisingly-Hegelian and dialectical in nature.
(Malbou's earlier book was entitled The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,

33
theory@buffalo 16

Temporality and Dialectic.) To be sure, Hegel did not express himself

in the idiom of the neuronal and the mental, but he was nonetheless
preoccupied with the transformation of the mind's natural existence
(the brain, which he calls the "natural soul") into its historical and
speculative being. "But this transformation," as Malabou notes,

is the dialectic itself. If there can be a transition from nature

to thought, this is because the nature of thought contradicts
itself. Thus the transition from a purely biological entity into a
mental entity takes place in the struggle of the one against the
other, producing the truth of their relation. Thought is therefore
nothing but nature, but a negated nature, marked by its own
difference from itself. (81)

In this way, Malabou thinks she can avoid the alternative

between reductionism (the possibility of an absolute naturalization
of thought processes) and anti-reductionism (an assertion of the
transcendental character of thought, irreducible to biological
determinations). These are the two options represented, respectively,
by Changeaux and Ricoeur in their well-known and fascinating book,
What Makes Us Think?4 "A reasonable materialism," Malabou writes,
"would posit that the natural contradicts itself and that thought is
the fruit of this contradiction" (82).
But it is not clear to me that this "Hegelian reading of the
neurosciences" (as Zitek gleefully dubs it in his blurb on the back
of the book) is actually Malabou's ultimate position, which seems
closer to Foucault and Deleuze, both of whom make appearances in
the book, and in fact seem more suited to Malabou's purposes.
With regard to Foucault: Malabou herself writes that "the
transition form the neuronal to the _m e.nt�L �.,eoses negation
;e
[Hegel] and resistance [Foucault]� mphasis��eah,Foucault, of
course, talked about the difference between subjection, which is our
subjugation to forms of knowledge and power, and subjectivation,
which is self-affectivity, auto-constitution, and self-fashioning (71)­
something Damasio, in his own language, calls the "transition from
'homeostasis' to 'self-generation"' (74). Malabou herself describes
auto-affection, using Bergsonian language, as a kind of "ontological
explosion" (72), that is, a series of "creative bursts that progressively
transform nature into freedom" (74). So there seems to Foucauldian
tone to Malabou's characterization of the neuronal self as "structured
by the dialectical play of the emergence and annihilation of form"

34
 I >.mlt·l W. Smith

(72). Indeed, Malabou concludes her book by nnswcring the title

question in a Foucauldian vein: "Crcatin8 rcsista11cc to ncrmmal
ideology is what our brain wants, and what we want for it" (77).
With regard to Oeleuze: Malabou herself notes that Deleuze
was "one of the rare philosophers to have. taken an interest in
ncuroscientific research since the 1980s" (36), ahf:l indeed his entire
work on cinema was grounded in n�uroscie!}a l Bergson held the
interesting position that the brain was simply an interval or gap
opened up between stimulus and response, between perception
and acion.t In an amoeba, a stimulus produces an immediate
response; but in more mobile animals with nervous systems, the
brain introduces a gap between the two, which allows reflection
and memory to intervene in the response. Each element produces
in image in the brain, in almost exactly Damasio's sense: images of
my perception, images of possible responses, images of my being
affected, which in tum opens up temporal images of recollection and
memory. And indeed, these are the fundamental categories one finds
in Deleuze's cinema books: perception-images, action-images, affect­
images, time-images, recollection-images, and so on. In other words,
as Malabou herself notes, "the plasticity of the brain"-with its
various images-"is the real image of the world" (39). For Deleuze,
the circuits and connections in the brain-<>r rather their cuts and
interstices-are never given in advance, but must themselves be
traced out in it; and they constitute the condition for the production
of the new, the genesis of the heterogeneous, and the creation of
differences that resist the very flexibility demanded of us by the
capitalist organization. After reading Malabou, it is clear that it is
now time to reread Deleuze's cinema books, not from the viewpoint
of film studies or Bergson studies, but from the neurological problem
that Malabou has so brilliantly highlighted in this book.

IV.

So this, then, is Malabou's answer to the question, "What

should we do with our brain?": we should not allow the plasticity
of our brains to simply replicate the current economic demand for
flexibility-which is what she calls "neuronal ideology" ("a capacity
to self-modify at the whim of fluxes, transfers, and exchanges"
[78])-but rather should understand plasticity as the production of
the new. It is in this spirit that Malabou concludes by admonishing
her readers, in a Derridean vein, to "construct . . . a relation with

35
theory@buffalo 16

their brain as the image of a world to come" (82, emphasis added).

Malabou's problem with the neurological revolution is that
it has "revolutionized nothing for us" (68). "The only real view of
progress opened by the neurosciences," she suggests, "is that of an
improv� t in the 'quality of life' though a better treatment of
f
illness"(68),j>r an adaptation of the brain to the flexibility demanded
of it by_ our capitalist social formation. As yet, "the fascinating
discoveries of the neurosciences . . . are [as yet] incapable of
unleashing possibilities, of unleashing new ways of living" (67). And
this is what Malabou is calling for in this book, an "awakening of a
consciousness of the brain," that is, an awakening of a comprehension
that "the brain is our work and we do no know it" (66). And this work
done on the brain by the brain, the production and constitution of the
new, is nothing other than the movement of the problem that seems
to animate this entire book-namely, the problem offreedom.

Notes
1. AU textual citations in Smith's essay refer to Malabou's book, What Should We Do
With Our Brain?, trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham UP, 2008).-Ed.
2. See Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins ofReligious Thought
(New York: Basic, 2001).

3. See Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregor y
Elliott (New York: Verso, 2005).

4. See Jean-Pierre Changeaux and Paul Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist
and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain, trans. M.B. DeBevoise
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000).

36
 Lisa Hollenbach

AND SAY THE MACHINE RESPONDED?

In 2010, the scientist J. Craig Venter and his team successfully

created the first synthetic cell by designing and programming a new
genome sequence and transplanting it into an existing bacterium. The
new synthetic chromosome successfully transformed the phenotypic
expression of the bacterium and has replicated itself in future
generations, marking a breakthrough for the relatively new field
of synthetic biology and the possibiliies t of artificial life (Gibson).1
Synthetic biology distinguishes itself from genetic engineering by
going far beyond the manipulation of a few genes toward the design
and construction of genomes, the entire chromosomal genetic code
of a cell, and by focusing not on individual genes but "on whole
systems of genes and gene products" in order "to extend or modify
the behavior of organisms and engineer them to perform new
tasks" for practical use (Andrianantoandro). Drawing on systems
biology, engineering, and computer sciences, synthetic biology
has profound implications for how scientists understand "life"
and the boundary between "natural" life and technology, as well
as for the future possibilities and risks of biotechnology. Whereas
"artificial life" and "artificial intelligence" have previously referred
to research dedicated to developing machines that could imitate or
model living beings, "artificial life" in synthetic biology now refers
to scientific efforts to design or significantly alter cells or organisms
in the creation of "living machines" at once human-made and self­
organizing and self-producing (Deplazes 68).
It is tempting, in light of these new scientific developments, to

37
theory@buffalo 16

claim that dominant concepts of life and technology are entering a

new moment of crisis. This paradigm shift would concern not only
the increasingly extreme interpenetrations of technoscience and
biological life forms but the ontological confusion marked by the
phrases "living machine," "artificial life," and "synthetic biology."
What does life mean here? What does technology? And how should
philosophy respond?
But haven't philosophy and science always viewed life in
this way-as mechanism, automaton, computer program-from
Aristotle to Descartes to Darwin to Freud? Jacques Derrida, for
example, would be careful to show that any concept of life that
attempted to clearly delineate so-called natural or biological life
from the non-living or the machine would always be open to its
own deconstruction. In "Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of
'Religion' at the Limits of Reason Alone," a key late essay of Derrida's
to which I will return, Derrida shows that that which we attribute to
life and the living-spontaneit� mobilit� virilit� vitality-is always
already infected and invaded by the mechanism of iterability and
automaticity, by the "program" and therefore by death and the
dead-in-the-living. What we might call biological or, in Derrida's
terms, "bio-zoological" life and thus believe to be pure or organic,
untouched by the techniques of techne, would at one and the same
moment reveal itself as "the marionette, the dead machine yet more
than living, the spectral fantasy of the dead as the principle of life
and of sur-vival" or beyond-life ("Faith" 86-87). This is the general
logic of auto-immunity that makes the "promise" of life always
sacrificable to what is beyond-life-to the artificial, the supplement,
the "dead machine" as program.
If, then, we are to seek to articulate a new relationship between
"life" and "technology," we cannot rely on the existence of an
originary boundary between these terms that would only just now
be traversed by new microbiological, nanotechnological, or digital
sciences. Nor, however, in my view, should we assume that new
developments and understandings in these fields represent a mere
hyperbolization of what Derrida has already revealed about the
programmatic nature of "life." Instead, in this exploratory essay I
will consider how new understandings of life and technology might
productively put into question this Derridean mechanical logic
and its privileged figures of program, automaton, and virus. If, as I
argue, developments in synthetic biolog� robotics, and networked
computing have for several years now suggested that neither "the

38
 Lisa Hollenbach

living" nor "the machine" are deterministically programmed; if

a more plastic conception of both life and technology is emerging
as a dominant paradigm in general scientific understanding as
well as production; if these sciences, rather than reducing life to
mechanism increasingly see "the artificial" as capable of not only
writing or encoding but of forming and re-forming itself in relation to
other biological, synthetic, and non-biological forms, environments,
habits, and histories-then how should philosophy, and in particular
deconstruction, respond? To what extent does Derrida's thinking rely
upon certain specific conceptions of life, technology, and program
influenced by genetics and cybernetics that are being challenged or
changed? To what extent is deconstruction itself plastic?
In this line of questioning I follow Catherine Malabou, whose
recent work has initiated a profound investigation into the concept
of "plasticity" through a critical engagement with Hegel, Heidegger,
Derrida, and contemporary neuroscience and epigenetics. In What
Should We Do with Our Brain?, Malabou shows how contemporary
neuroscience has increasingly revealed the brain's fundamental
plasticity, its capacity to form, re-form, and de-form itself in relation
to environmental stimuli, habit, and injury in ways that render
obsolete older understandings of the brain as programmatically or
deterministically wired. The significance of epigenetic factors and
neuronal plasticity to new biological paradigms should, Malabou
argues elsewhere, change the way we think the relation between
figure and writing, graphicity and form, the trace, presence and
the event; "plasticity," Malabou asserts, "forms where DNA no longer
writes" (PDW 60). She describes her own work as"a single, continuous
attempt to situate the symbolic rupture between the plastic and the
graphic component of thought" in philosophy and science (PDW3).
This "rupture" between plasticity and graphicity announces
Malabou's departure from the dominant concept of writing in
Derrida's work and Derrida's critique of form as presence. In
Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, Malabou argues that "the semantic
enlargement of the concept of writing" in Derrida's work depends
upon a historically-specific paradigm that in her view has reached its
twilight, with plasticity now emerging "as the paradigmatic figure
for organization in general" (59). Considering the development of
cybernetics, geneics,
t and associated sciences alongside and in the
wake of structuralism and linguistics, she draws attention to the
emergence of writing as a "dominant formal motif of interpretation"
in mid- and late-twentieth-century science, philosophy, and popular

39
theory@buffalo 16

thought (57). Derrida's work emerges within and extends this

motif of graphicity, and Malabou credits Derrida with recognizing
the expansion of writing in his own work "not as an arbitrary
philosophical decision, but as an event, the appearance of a new order,
starting from the pregnancy of the motifs of program, information,
or code" (59). As contemporary readers of Derrida, then, we must
also consider these dominant motifs and concepts in his work not
as arbitrary but as contingent upon an epistemic order that may or
may not still structure our thinking. In other words, the dominant
concept of writing and "the motifs of program, information, or code"
(as well as automaton, virus, marionette, machine) in Derrida's
work are historically-situated in relation to technological and
scientific understandings of what "program" means that, I would
argue alongside Malabou, is reaching its twilight. This does not
mean that Derrida's thinking about life, auto-immunity, and "tele­
technoscience" is no longer relevant; on the contrary, Derrida's late
work in particular offers profound insights into some of the aporetic
logics that deconstruct contemporary technoscientific claims made
by scientists like Craig Venter. However, historicizing Derrida's
thought in relation to systems theory and genetics might help us
to better understand what isn't captured by the deconstructive
program.
In Of Grammatology Derrida explicates his expanded definition
of writing as "all that gives rise to an inscription in general" and
links it to other forms of inscription not necessarily linked to speech
or the phonetic alphabet in art, politics, the military, science, and
computing (9). This passage (which Malabou cites and Cary Wolfe
also draws upon to establish a link between deconstruction and
systems theory in What Is Posthumanism ?) makes clear the degree
to which Derrida's concepts of writing and program are in dialogue
with post-war biological and computing sciences:

we say 'writing' for all that gives rise to an inscription

in general, whether it is literal or not and even if what it
distributes in space is alien to the order of the voice . . . It is also
in this sense that the contemporary biologist speaks of writing
and pro-gram in relation to the most elementary processes of
information within the living cell. And, finally, whether it has
essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic
program will be the field of writing. If the theory of cybernetics
is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts-including the

40
 Lisa Hollenbach

concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory-which

until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must
conserve the notion of writing, trace, gramme [written mark),
or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is
also exposed. (Of Grammatology 9)

Here we see Derrida's extension of cybernetic conceptions

of information, program, and life into philosophy. In cybernetics,
information and the ability to process it emerged as the dominant
concept connecting life and technology (Riskin, "Introduction" 5).
The computer program thus became a dominant metaphor (as well
as a technique and a way of knowing) for thinking about life and the
possibilities of technological life. The implications and limits of this
thinking can be seen in the early development of nanotechnology,
where scientists and engineers worked to develop machines on
a molecular level that would be capable of simulating and even
surpassing the information-processing capabilities of living beings.
Early proponents of nanotechnology, like Eric Drexler, argued that
biological material, even at the micro-level, already works like a
predictable, programmed computing machine and can thus be both
accurately simulated and improved. In this model, the structure
of the living being is understood to be rigid, passive, mechanistic,
and inert-a new version of the automaton whose seemingly
"spontaneous" actions are highly determined, even at the quantum
level. Likewise, technological innovation itself is understood as
a kind of total mastery of the genetic code or the development of
increasingly complex algorithms (Bensaude-Vincent). Derrida
critiques this form of technoscientific mastery and calls upon
contemporary science to "conserve the notion of writing [and) trace"
as difference, deferral of presence, differance.2 Yet he also extends
these dominant motifs of program, inscription, and mechanism into
his own critique of metaphysics and the boundary that supposedly
separates "the machine from man" (Of Grammatology 9).
These figures and concepts reach their fullest articulation in
Derrida's late work and theory of auto-immunity. In the essay "Faith
and Knowledge," Derrida observes an automatic, mechanistic, and
programmaic t sacrificial logic that haunts all life and community,
that haunts the promise or faith that is the source of both knowledge
and religion. For Derrida, all technology is writing, and as such
traces itself into the heart of everything that would claim to be pure
and "immune" to technics, program, prosthesis, difference, and

41
theory@buffalo 16

absence-into life, presence, being, faith, and promise. But what is

the program here, exactly? What are its mechanics, so to speak?

What are the mechanics of this double postulation (respect of

life and sacrificiaJity)? I refer to it as a mechanics because it
reproduces, with the regularity of a technique, the instance of
the non-living or, if you prefer, of the dead in the living. It was
also the automaton according to the phallic effect of which we
spoke above. It was the marionette, the dead machine yet more
than living, the spectral fantasy of the dead as the principle
of life and of sur-vival [sur-vie]. This mechanical principle is
apparently very simple: life has absolute value only if it is worth
more than life. . . . This excess above and beyond the living, whose
life only has absolute value by being worth more than life, more
than itself-this, in short, is what opens the space of death that
is linked to the automaton (exemplarily 'phallic'), to technics,
the machine, the prosthesis: in a word, to the dimensions of
auto-immune and self-sacrificial supplementarily. (Derrida,
"Faith" 86-87)

"The mechanical principle" that infects life and the promise of

the living from within is defined as repetition, automaticity, and
supplementarily, as everything that resembles the machine, of which
the exemplary figure is the automaton. For Derrida the figure of the
automaton does not simulate life; life simulates the automaton-or
rather, everything that would define the machine as such is already
embedded into life. As a set of privileged figures in this discourse,
the marionette, the automaton, the specter, and the phallus (all of
which recall, quasi-automatically, psychoanalysis and the uncanny)
become linked with a set of biological figures: immunity and auto­
immunity, antibodies, and the virus (behind which the spectral
violence of AIDS lurks). This figural logic exposes for Derrida the
self-sacrificiality of an inert, passive, rigid, definitively non-plastic
"life" to the mechanics of the symbolic.
The virus in particular emerges as the new figure of the
automaton; with its double connotations in both computing and
biology, the virus as blind killing-machine programmed by a
computer hacker or genetically programmed by its DNA (itself open
to a form of genetic "hacking" by bioengineers) seems to finally
expose the logic of auto-immunity in the extreme. In the essay "The
Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)," Derrida considers

42
 Lisa Hollenbach

the figure of the animal in his own work alongside the double
valences of the virus:

This animal-machine has a family resemblance with the virus

that obsesses, not to say invades everything I write. Neither
animal nor nonanimal, organic or inorganic, Jiving or dead,
this potential invader is like a computer virus. It is lodged in a
processor of writing, reading and interpretation. (407)

The figure of the animal thus exposes for Derrida a logic of writing
and of repetition that Jinks biology and technology with each other
and with death and sacrifice, and that deconstructs the borders
between human, animal, and machine "life."
But what if the machine responded? What if the automaton, the
machine-animal, the virus even, no longer found itself "lodged in a
processor of writing/' of pure program, pure repetition? Would it be
possible to imagine a form of technology or technological life that did
not attempt to write and read life but instead opened itself to life's
plasticity-its capacity to change and explode form, to respond and
resist, to interpret, re-interpret, and alter its own program within itself?
Malabou intervenes in this notion of the living cell as pure program
through an engagement with new developments and paradigms
in neuroscience and epigenetics that increasingly demonstrate the
plasticity of the brain and the living being; in my view, the concept
of plasticity also has significant implications for how we think about
the mechanics of technology as well, for our concepts of program,
automaton, and technl more generally. Just as contemporary
biologists have increasingly called into question the deterministic
and programmatic view of life of early cybernetics and mid­
century genetics, some engineers, systems biologists, and computer
scientists have also begun to work with principles of emergence,
plasticity, and complexity. The field of developmental or epigenetics
robotics, for instance, has emerged as one of the most important sub­
fields in contemporary robotics and marks a disinct t departure from
previous mechanistic, AI, and cybernetic approaches (Jin and Meng).
Engineers in this field draw on cognitive and behavioral sciences
and emphasize the importance of form, embodiment, and emergence
in the development of intelligence and complexity-concepts that
have been disseminated and assimilated into mainstream popular
thought as well. Thus while it is hardly news at this point that
engineers are working to develop machines that can respond, learn,

43
theory@buffalo 16

and develop in relation to environment and social interaction, these

scientific developments and their societal legitimation suggest that
we have indeed, as Malabou suggests, entered a new epistemic
epoch in which motifs of plasticity arise where earlier motifs of
program, code, writing once dominated. Though some view this
divergence as a debate between "reducionism t and emergentism"
(Bensaude-Vincent 232), or mechanic and organic models of life,
new paradigms of plasticity should not simply return us to a "pure"
organic model of life uncontaminated by writing. Instead, these new
scientific developments should increasingly draw attention to the
relationality between code and formation, the graphic and the plastic.
Venter's synthetic bacterium, for example, would on the one
hand seem to be Derrida's virus fully realized and literalized: living
being as program: the mechanical and therefore the dead invading
the living. The meaning of the living being appears as always
already code, writing, program, merely hyperbolized in this case.
Computing, the digitization of the genomic code, and writing still
underlie these new developments; Venter himself has characterized
synthetic biology as "writing" what before we could only "read."
And yet, on the other hand, there is something about this new
field (and that of developmental robotics) that is not, I feel, fully
captured by the Derridean logic of auto-immunity or promise and
program. Venter's bacterium is not, after all, an automaton, but an
organism that forms, de-forms, and replicates itselfin relation to both
genetic alterations (technological and evolutionary mutations) and
environmental and epigenetic factors. Approaches to systems biology
that emphasize plasticity show that even in a single cell the genetic
code-"natural" or synthetic-does not deterministically define its
phenotypic expression, but ratherexists in dialectic relationship with
that expression, exposing a new fundamental capacity for change,
difference, and even, potentially, resistance within the structure of
the "living machine" itself.
When Malabou critiques the simplistic model of brain as
computing command center, arguing that "the cliche of a centered
and centralizing program . . . leaves no room for plasticity and
entertains no relation with alterity," she implicates not only
impoverished popular understandings of the brain but also equally
over-simplified concepts of computing technologies (WDB 37).
Instead, Malabou suggests, following Daniel Dennett, we should
think of "the computer as itself a plastic organization" or "an organ
with multiple and adaptable structures . . . a machine capable of

44
 Lisa Hollenbach

privileging events over laws" (WDB 37, 38).3 The implications of

this statement-that the machine, mechanism, automaton even,
might be capable of "privileging events over laws," plasticity over
iterability-for our understanding of technology cannot, I think, be
overstated. If plasticity indeed "designates nothing but the eventlike
dimension of the mechanical" (WDB 38), then the mechanism of the
Derridean program, the logic of auto-immunity, and the structure
of "the promise" must be called into question. The figure of the
automaton in Derrida's work substitutes for everything that is
mechanistic, automatic, uncanny: for the program as such. But if that
figure itself has shifted and transformed, if that figure comes to stand
for plasticity, embodiment, form, and emergence-for what forms
before and as it writes itself-how does the meaning of this metaphor
alter Derrida's concept of program? What if the machine could form
itself and its own code? What if faith, the promise, the originary
yes finds itself not (only) infected by the mechanical but within the
mechanism itself? It seems we can no longer draw a line between
an inert or transparent "bio-zoological life" and the mechanism of
automaticity and program to which it would always be sacrificed.
We must consider instead new ways of figuring and understanding
life and technology, promise and program, where program implies
not only writing and iterability but also a certain plasticity.

Notes
1. In order to distinguish their DNA sequence from "natural" sequences across
generations (and thus also to distinguish it as property), Venter's team encoded several
"watermarks" into the organism's DNA, thereby giving a name to their life form
not (only) with a species genus classification, but w ithin and on the structure of the
genetic material itself. And naming it literature, or modernism: "Venter's team coded
several famous quotes into their DNA, including one from James Joyce's A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man: 'To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life"'
(Ewalt). Ironically, given the intellectual property debates over Venter's aggressive
patenting of synthetic genes, the estate of James Joyce sent the team a cease and desist
letter for violation of copyright.

2. Cary Wolfe seeks to continue this "conservation" of writing that Derrida calls for
by usefully articulating how second-generation systems theory heeds Derrida's call
for self-exposure and positing that we should see "second-order systems theory as . .
. 'the reconstruction of deconstruction'" (8). Malabou's work, however, shows us how
new scientific developments increasingly put writing and graphicity into question
through new paradigms of plasticity. Her work demands not that we "conserve"
writing and the trace but that we rethink the "transformational relations betweenfigure
and writing," trace, form, and presence (PDW3).

45
theory@buffalo 16

3. Malabou leaves behind the issue of whether or not we actually have computers
capable of this kind of plasticity in order to emphasize our more general "conception"
of both machine and life (38), but new computer science fields of biomedia, DNA
computing, and "semantic web" suggest that this level of plasticity within the
computing machine may soon be realized.

Works Cited
Andrianantoandro, Ernesto, Subhayu Basu, David K. Karig, and Ron .
Weiss. "Synthetic Biology: New Engineering Rules for an Emerging
Discipline." Molecular Systems Biology 2.1 (16 May 2006): N. pag. Web.
26 March 2011.
Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette. "Nanobots and Nanotubes: Two Alternative
Biomimetic Paradigms of Nanotechnology." Riskin, Genesis Redux
221-36.
Derrida, Jacques. "And Say the Animal Responded?" Trans. David Wills.
Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Ed. Cary Wolfe. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota � 2003. 121-46.
---. "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)." Trans. David
Wills. Critical Inquiry 28.2 (Winter 2002): 369-418.
---. "Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of 'Religion' at the Limits of
Reason Alone." Trans. Samuel Weber. Acts ofReligion. Ed. Gil Anidjar.
New York: Routledge, 2002. 42-101.
---. OfGrammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins U� 1976.
Deplazes, Anna, Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra and Nikola Biller-Andorno. "The
,

Ethics of Synthetic Biology: Outlining the Agenda." Synthetic Biology.

Ed. Markus G. Schmidt. Dordrecht: Springer, 2009. 65-80.
Ewalt, David. "Craig Venter's Genetic Typo." Forbes 14 March 2011. Web.
26 March 2011.
Gibson, Daniel, John Glass, Carole Lartigue, et al. "Creation of a Bacterial
Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome." Science 2 July
2010: 52-56. Web. 26 March 2011.
Jin, Yaochu and Yan Meng, eds. Special Issue on Evolutionary and
Developmental Robotics. Spec. issue of IEEE Computational
Intelligence Magazine 5.3 (August 2010).
Malabou, Catherine. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction,
Deconstruction. Trans. Carolyn Shread. New York: Columbia U� 2010.
[PDW)
---. What Should We Do with Our Brain? Trans. Sebastian Rand. New York:
Fordham U� 2008. [WDB)
Riskin, Jessica, ed. Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of
Artificial Life. Chicago: U of Chicago � 2007.
---. "Introduction: The Sistine Gap." Genesis Redux 1-32.
Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: U of Minnesota � 2010.

46
 Arne De Boever

BRAIN CARE: MALABOU AFTER FOUCAULT

When Stephen Riggins asks Michel Foucault in an interview

titled "The Minimalist Self" whether, since the nineteenth century,
anything has replaced sex as "the secret of life," Foucault replies
that he does not think so: "I think that people still consider, and are
invited to consider, that sexual desire is able to reveal what is their
deep identity" (11). What if we were to ask this question again, today?
Might it be that the brain has replaced sex as the secret of life? And
if this is the case, then how might Foucault's analyses of sex apply
to the contemporary interest in the brain? In this article, I present
Catherine Malabou's What Should We Do With Our Brain? as a critical
continuation of Foucault's work on biopolitics, which focused on the
analysis of sex and race. However, to focus only on biopolitics in this
context would mean to miss the ways in which Malabou's theory of
the brain-summ�<i up by ��o "the brain is a work, and we
do not know it'( (WDB 1)
.... -also_s.ph tinues Foucault's late work on
the aesthetics of exlstenc ean<ithe care of the self. My ultimate aim
is thus to explore how Malabou's book, read in light of Foucault's
work on biopolitics, proposes a care of the brain that invites us to
rethink our conceptualizations of care-and specifically, the politics
of care-today.

I. RACE, Sex, AND THE BRAIN

In the last two chapters of his book Michel Foucault: Genealogy

as Critique, Rudi Visker demonstrates the importance of quotation

47
theory@buffalo 16

marks in Foucault's late w �\ 'T'he title of Foucault's 1975-1976

lecture course at the College�� ce-"Society Must Be Defended"
(excerpted in the Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, but without the
quotation marks)-will be my case in point: as the quotation marks
indicate, the course should not be read as a call for society to be
defended. As Foucault explains in his third lecture, the course title
refers instead to the motto of "State racism" (62).
In order to understand where Foucault is coming from, it is
worth recalling that his lecture course from the previous year,
Abnormal, included a brief reference to Pierre Clastres' Society
�
Against the State, h appeared in 1974 (13, 26 n.22). In "Society
ic
Must Be Defend ' ��7,
·
title that w� can now understand in part as a
reference to Clastre-s-
-Foucault wntes:

At this point [in the early nineteenth century], the discourse

whose history I would like to trace abandons the initial basic
formulation, which was "We have to defend ourselves against
our enemies because the State apparatuses, the law, and the
power structures not on!y do not defend us against our enemies;
they are the instruments our enemies are using to pursue and
subjugate us." That discourse now disappears. It is no longer:
"We have to defend ourselves against society," but "We have
to defend society against all the biological threats posed by the
other race, the subrace, the counterrace that we are, despite
ourselves, bringing into existence." (61-62)

"At this point," Foucault continues, "we see the appearance of a

State racism: a racism that society will direct against itself, against
its own elements and its own products. This is the internal racism of
permanent purification" (62).
Given that Clastres' title is not in quotation marks, the
intertextuality with Clastres' book is complex, and deserves an article
in its own right-I will not address it here. Instead, I want to jump to
the last lecture of the course, where Foucault talks about state racism
again, and links it to biopolitics. In this lecture, Foucault describes
what he refers to as "one of the basic phenomena of the nineteenth
century," namely "power's hold over life" (239). In the nineteenth
century, "the biological came under State control," and Foucault
sees in this development "one of the greatest transformations" that
political right underwent at that time:

48
 Arne De Boever

I wouldn't say exactly that sovereignty's old right-to take life

or let live-was replaced, but it came to be complemented by
a new right which does not erase the old right but which does
penetrate it, permeate it. This is the right, or rather precisely
the opposite right. It is the power to "make" live and "let" die.
The right of the sovereignty was the right to take life or let live.
And then this new right s i established: the right to make live
and to let die. (241)

Distinguishing this new right from disciplinary power, "which

is addressed to bodies," Foucault goes on to note that this "new
nondisciplinary power is applied not to man-as-body but to the
living man, to man-as-living-being; ultimately, if you like, to man­
as-species" (242). It is a power that targets the people as population.
As such, he describes it as a "'biopolitics' of the human race" (243).
This analysis, which in the lecture course revolves around
state racism, is repeated in the fifth part of The History of Sexuality:
An Introduction-the only place in Foucault's authorized published
works where he discusses biopolitics. In this instance, however, the
discussion revolves around sex. Titled "Right of Death and Power
over Life," this part of the book fleshes out the historico-political
analysis that was already developed in "Society Must Be Defended."
"Since the classical age," Foucault writes, "the West has undergone
a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of power"
(History 136). There has been a shift in the history of power "or at
least a tendency [of power] to align itself with the exigencies of a
life-administering power and to define itself accordingly. This death
that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as
simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain,
or develop its life" (136). Today, we are dealing with a power that

exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer,

optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and
comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the
name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged
on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are
mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name
of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers
of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes
have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to
be killed. (137)

49
theory@buffalo 16

Here, too, Foucault distinguishes such a politics from disciplinary

power-from what he calls "an anatomo-politics of the human body"
(139j_J._�e new power is described in this text as "a biopolitics of the
populatioii>r-(139).
Although racism is still mentioned as an important site of
biopolitical analysis-contrary to what Giorgio Agamben claims
in the introduction to Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (4),
Foucault does dwell here (albeit very briefly) on the question of
Nazism and the camps (History 149-50)-most of Foucault's analysis
revolves around sex. At the crossroads of the disciplines of the body
(anatomo-politics) and the regulation of populations (biopolitics),
sex assumes unprecedented importance "as a political issue" (145).

It fitted in both categories at once, giving rise to infinitesimal

surveillances, permanent controls, extremely meticulous
orderings of space, indeterminate medical or psychological
examinations, to an entire micro-power concerned with· the
body. But it gave rise as well to comprehensive measures,
statistical assessments, and interventions aimed at the entire
social body or at groups taken as a whole. Sex was a means of
access both to the life of the body and the life of the species. It
was employed as a stand � the disciplines and as a basis
�
for regulations. (Foucault, \{lis 145-46)

These analyses-of a biopolitics of race and sex-have proved

extremely productive, and most recentlynot so much in terms of what
they can contribute to the study of race and sex but in terms of the
general theoretical framework they provide to study contemporary
techniques of power. Although the biopolitical component of this
framework appears to be more or less accepted across the board,
scholars have argued over just about everything else that comes with it:
biopolitics' historical origins; the meaning of the "life" that it targets;
its dissociation from sovereignty; the meaning of the "politics" that
it names; and so forth.
Part of this is no doubt due to the fact that Foucault never
properly completed his work on biopolitics. Although he announces
at the beginning of both his 1977-1978 lecture course Security, Territory,
Population and his 1978-1979 lecture course The Birth ofBiopolitics that
this year, he would study what he had "somewhat vaguely" referred
to as "bio-power," he would never tackle the issue of biopolitics head

50
 Arne De Boever

on. Instead, the 1977-1978 lecture course focused on the pastorate

and governmentality; the year after that, the course focused on neo­
liberalism. It is ultimately left up to Foucault's audience to figure out
how these topics relate to the issue of biopolitics.
If Foucault were alive today, he would undoubtedly point out
the ne�e ate his analyses of biopolitics-dating from the mid
to late i response to contemporary times. Several scholars
have in ee tr ied to do so: building on Wendy Brown's work on
governmentality, Judith Butler has challenged Foucault's analytical
disinction
t between sovereignty and governmentality and his call for
us t " t-off th--e-he�d of the king" in political thought and analysis
=
(Fg_ t, _History 89h If the post-September 11th era has shown us
anythin irts-tnaf"Sovereignty is not dead yet. In order to analyze a
political phenomenon such as the Guantanamo Bay detention center,
one needs to think sovereignty and governmentality together.2 From
a different perspective, Michael Dillon and Luis Lobo-Guerrero
have looked at how the scientific redefinition of life since the 1970s
has challenged Foucault's notion of biopolitics. Given the new
understandings of life today-and given that power has morphed
in response to these developments-surely one's understanding of
biopolitics ought to transform as welP
I lay out this mini-history of Foucauldian biopolitics for a very
specific reason: I would like to suggest that Catherine Malabou's
What Should We Do With Our Brain? is a contemporary rewriting
of Foucault's The History of Sexuality-not only of its first volume
(which Malabou herself has recently begun to discuss in public
lectures4), but also of its third volume on The Care of the Self.
Throughout The History of Sexuality, and especially in the
book's closing pages, Foucault makes a simple but powerful point:
if one wants to understand the politics of sex, one should look not
for the reasons for which sexuality was "being repressed," but for
the reasons for which it "was constantly aroused" (148). He urges
his readers to analyze what one could call a sex-"effect" (148), that
is, the ways in which sex does not pre-exist sexuality as a biological
category that would be outside of power but is rather "a complex idea
that was formed inside the deployment of sexuality" (152). His point
is not that "sex did not exist" (151); he is not speaking of sexuality as
ifthere were no sex. His point is, rather, that there is no true sex. Instead,
"sex is the most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element
in the deployment of sexuality organized by power in its grip on
bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations, and

51
theory@buffalo 16

pleasures" (155). Through a historical reversal, "we have arrived at

the point where we expect our intelligibility to come from what was
for many centuries thought of as madness; the plenitude of our body
from what was long considered its stigma and likened to a wound;
our � fro¥1 what was perceived as an obscure and nameless
urg,e" (156)-:::n
:::i short: from sex. Nothing could be more ridiculou�
m uSt.oot"think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power'( (157),)
he writes. ..
\.
_�
__.....

[O]n the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out by the
general deployment of sexuality. It is the agency of sex that we
must break away from, if we aim-through a tactical reversal
of the various mechanisms of sexuality-to counter the grips of
power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, n i
their multiplicities and their possibility of resistance. (157)

Fast-forward to the so-called neurological turn in the sciences, the

social sciences, and the humanities today: the brain appears to have taken
the place of sex as the site where human beings will discover their
true selves (which may very well be posthuman, but so be it; that
too, was part of Foucault's ·philosophy [Order 386-87]).5 However,
do we truly need a true brain, as Foucault already asked (about sex)
in his introduction to the memoirs of the nineteenth-century French
hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin (Herculine vii)? And is it true that
"our 'liberation'" is somehow "in the balance" in all this brain talk
(which can be sexy, too!) (Foucault, History 159)? Foucault's answer
to all these questions would likely be "no." But this "no" needs to
be supplemented-as philosophers such as Bernard Stiegler have
argued-with the more affirmative tone of Foucault's later work in
The Care of the Self (Stiegler is partly following Felix uattari and his
work on ethico-aesthetic paradigms for existen e).6 I what follows,
I show that Catherine Malabou accomplishe s ch a balance­
between biopolitics and the care of the self-in What Should We Do
With Our Brain?

II. TAKE CARE OF YouR BRAIN

How can the practices of care-the techniques of taking

care of oneself-that Foucault discusses in The Care of the Self be
disentangled (to echo Foucault's "What is Enlightenment?"7) from
the intensification of power relations that he analyzed earlier in his

52
 Arne De Boever

work on biopolitics? How can one be pro-care, but remain critical of

biopolitics? Clearly, everything will depend on the kind of care one
practices. Malabou's What Should We Do With Our Brain? can be read
as a meditation-and a highly provocative one, as I will show-on
such practices of care.
Let me cut straight to the passage of Malabou's book that
interests me, and in which this section of my article will culminate.
"It is time to remember," Malabou writes in her closing chapter,

that some explosions are not in fact terrorist-explosions of

rage, for example. Perhaps we ought to relearn how to enrage
ourselves, to explode against a certain culture of docility, of
amenity, of the effacement of all conflict even as we live in a state
of permanent war. It is not because the struggle has changed
form, it is not because it is no longer really possible to fight a
boss, owner, or father, that there is no struggle to wage against
exploitation. To ask "What should we do with our brain?" is
above all to visualize the possibility of saying no to an afflicting
economic, political, and mediatic culture that celebrates only
the triumph of flexibility, blessing obedient individuals who
have no greater merit than that of knowing how to bow their
heads with a smile. (WDB 79)

Clearly, for Malabou, care is not simply a practice that is complicit

with biopolitics; it is not simply a technique of "bowing one's head
with a smile." Instead, it is explosive: it rages; it struggles; it says no.
In a word: in Malabou's vision, care is plastic. This relation between
care and plasticity deserves to be explored in more detail.
Malabou's association with care arrives through art, specifically
through a work titled Take Care ofYourselfby the French artist Sophie
Calle. This work, which was originally mounted in the French
pavilion of the 2007 Venice Biennale but has since been shown in
galleries around the world, developed from a simple premise: when
Calle received a break-up letter that ended with the sentence "Take
care of yourself," she started wondering what that imperative might
mean. And so she decided to ask over a hundred women to interpret
the letter according to their professional activities. Take Care of
Yourselfwas constituted by the many replies that Calle received. One
of the women she wrote to was Catherine Malabou. The philosopher
responded with a letter in which she develops a theory-inspired by
Seren Kierkegaard's Repetition, which was also written after a break-

53
theory@buffalo 16

up-of how Calle's lover lacks "being somebody," and feels he must
lose Calle in order to "be somebody." Like Calle's project, the letter is
a little cruel: it mercilessly lays bare the psyche of Calle's lover-and
for everyone to see!8
At this point in time, Malabou's book on the brain had already
appeared. While I am unaware of Calle's exact reasons for contacting
Malabou, it is not difficult to read Malabou's book on the brain as a
manifesto on care. Its Leitmotiv, which Malabou borrows from Karl
Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, calls for a careful
kind of brainwork, a brain care: "The brain is a work," the book
begins, "and we do not know it" (WDB 1). The first task of the book
will be to awaken what Malabou calls a consciousness of the brain,
more precisely a consciousness of how the brain, which is always
in part genetically determined, is always also a work-in-progress.
As such, it implicates anyone who has a brain in its development.
What Should We Do With Our Brain? thus aims to make human
beings responsible for their brain in the sense that Marx wrote at the
beginning of the Eighteenth Brumaire: "Humans make their own
history, but they do not know that they make it" (WDB 1).
That is the sentence that Malabou supposedly quotes from
Marx (she does not give a reference) in the opening paragraph of
her book. It is worth noting, however, that Marx's sentence reads
slightly differently: "Men make their own history," he writes, "but
they do not make it just as they please. They do not make it under
circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances
directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The
tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the
brain of the living" (15). One can see why, given Marx's insistence on
the brain, Malabou would have been interested in this passage. In
Malabou's adaptation of the sentence, Marx's "history" morphs into
the "brain;" "they do not make history just as they please" becomes
"they do not know that the brain is a work" (emphases added).
The differences are illuminating: the first is a substitution that
Malabou immediately justifies. She argues in the first and second
paragraphs of her book for a deep "structural bond" between the
brain and history (WDB 1). "It's not just that the brain has a history
. . . but that it is a history" (WDB. 1). To say so means to insist, as she
does in the second part of her motto, that the brain is a work: "Today
. . . there exists a constitutive historicity of the brain. The aim of this
book is precisely to awaken a consciousness of this historicity" (WDB
2). This leaves the reader with one major question, namely whether

54
 Arne De Boever

"a consciousness of this historicity" is the same as "making history"

(emphases added). This question boils down to the substitution­
and identification?-of verbs in the second half of Malabou's motto:
is "to know" the same as "to make"? Certainly, "knowing" is a form
of "making" and "making" a form of "knowing;" but in terms of
this book and the emancipatory project it adopts, it is surely worth
asking whether "knowing" can fully answer Malabou's promise of
liberation, or whether the reader is ultimately left wanting for more
"making."
Malabou's central argument is that we need to become
conscious of the brain's plasticity. For as long as we can remember,
we have believed in a genetically determined brain. However, this
rigid vision of the brain is only part of the truth. Recent research
on the brain has shown that it in fact contradicts rigidity-that it
is plastic. In her much earlier book, The Future of Hegel, Malabou
already lists the three meanings she gives to this term: plasticity
names the capacity to receive form; to give form; and, last but
not least, to explode form. Plasticity is thus not just "the sensible
image of taking form;" it also refers to "the annihilation of all form
(explosion)" (WDB 5). Although it is true that the brain is always
in part genetically determined, it is not the case that "the brain is
already made" (WDB 7). For this reason, Malabou can speak of a
"plastic organic art" of the brain (WDB 7). What should we do with
this bioart of the brain, "with this potential within us? What should
we do with this genetically free field" (WDB 7)? This is the question
that "the idea of a truly living brain" puts before us (WDB 7), and
one of the reasons why Malabou's work on the brain resonates with
Foucault's work on biopolitics and the question of actualization that
fascinated Foucault.9
"We are living at the hour of neuronal liberation," Malabou
writes, "and we do not know it" (WDB 8). Given how often this line
is repeated throughout the book, it is hard to reach the book's closing
sentence without knowing that the brain is indeed a work, which
leaves the reader with the question: what now? What to do with this
knowledge? As Malabou explains, the knowledge that the brain is a
work "implicate[s]" us (WDB 11); it "seeks to give birth in everyone
to the feeling of a new responsibility" (WDB 14). Although chapter
one-on plasticity's fields of action: developmental, modulational,
and reparative-moves towards answering this question, one still
does not really feel at the end of this chapter (when Malabou states
that "our brain is . . . what we do with it" [WDB 30]) that much

55
theory@buffalo 16

guidance has been provided in terms of what to do with one's brain.

It may be that this is simply not the philosopher's project-that the
philosopher ultimately leaves it up to her readers to make the leap
into action for which the book has prepared them.
On the other hand-and the book insists on this-knowledge
is action. When Malabou writes that "any vision of the brain is
necessarily political" (WDB 52), one understands that there is politics
in the vision of the brain that is being laid out here. The brain as
Malabou sees it-the plastic brain-is opposed to the image of the
brain as a "central telephone exchange" and a "computer" (WDB
33). It is not a central controlling organ as power would like us to
believe. As Malabou points out, power has a stake in the production
of such brain images, in the generation of such brain effects: referencing
Fouca � work on governmentality and biopolitics, she notes that
"powe� . . hasn't been united in a long time" (WDB 40); to think of
the brain as the central controlling organ keeps a certain ideology of
power intact.
Malabou's vision of the plastic, living brain resists such neuro­
political ideology. Indeed, "resistance" appears to be what is ultimately
at stake in her book. With reference to Friedrich Nietzsche, she writes
that, "[w]hat we are lacking is life, which is to say: resistance. Resistance
is what we want. Resistance to flexibility, to this ideological norm
advanced consciously or otherwise by a reductionist discourse that
models and naturalizes the neuronal process in order to legitimate a
certain social and political functioning" (WDB 68). Malabou's use of
the word "flexibility" reveals that with her book on the brain, she is
also struggling against "the spirit of capitalism" (WDB 12)-another
point of connection with Foucault's work on biopoliics. t Indeed,
with the concept of plasticity, she tries to recover from the global
dominance of capital a true transformational power that is covered
over by plasticity's "mistaken cognate, flexibility" (WDB 12).

The difference between these two terms appears insignificant.

Nevertheless, flexibility is the ideological avatar of plasticity-
at once its mask, its diversion, and its confiscaion. t We are
�
entirely ignorant of plasticity but not at all of flexibili ·· : . :--.
t
To be flexible is to receive a form or impression, to be abre to
fold oneself, to take the fold, not to give it. To be docile, to
not explode. Indeed, what flexibility lacks is the resource of
giving form, the power to create, to invent or even to erase an
impression, the power to style. Flexibility is plasticity minus its
genius. (WDB 12)10
56
 Arne De Boever

By proposing a vision of the brain as plastic-as givin& receiving,

and exploding form-Malabou thus resists capitalist flexibility. The
passage I just quoted reveals that "[p]lastic material . . . resists endless
polymorphism" and "designates solidity as much as suppleness"
(WDB 15). Plasticity is, Malabou insists, explosive: it can blow up; it
is not eternally flexible.
Ultimately, it is this realization to which Malabou's book leads.
Clarifying that "[d]espite the explosive resonance of the meanings
of plasticity, this vision of things obviously does not correspond to
a terrorist conception of the constitution of identity" (WDB 74)­
"[t]he explosions in question are clearly understood as energetic
discharges, creative bursts that progressively transform nature into
freedom" (WDB 74)-she nevertheless closes the book with a plea
for anger. Indeed, "rage" ultimately works its way into Malabou's
plea for a care of the brain. Moreover, plasticity's genius-the point
at which it is perhaps most crucially different from flexibility-may
precisely lie in this rage, in this care for rage. It is only when rage will
have completely disappeared that flexibility's hegemonic struggle
will be complete.
Might rage-"menis," the first word of Homer's Illiad­
perhaps also be the origin of Calle's work on the care of the self?11
In a recent article on Kazuo lshiguro's e e ever Let Me Go-a
biopolitical novel of care if there ever was o e12-r erary critic Bruce
Robbins makes a very similar point. He es-provocatively,
as always-that the novel develops a critique of the care-taking
practices of the welfare state. The latter is cast in the novel as

the institution that bribes us with minor restitutions and

supplements so as to divert us from deep and systematic
injustice, which is to sa�m our legitimate causes for anger.
'
. . . Logically speaking' . . . f.the novel thus makes] a case for
the expressing of ang�r-w�ich is to say, a case in favor of the
cruelty that the free expreSsion of anger can cause. (297)

Of course, & elty is bad," Robbins concludes his article.

All things considered, "civility" would be preferable. But here

[that is, in the novel] at least cruelty and incivility also seem to
be a part of a more expansive and counter-intuitive political

57
theory@buffalo 16

vision, one that allows us to consider . . . the welfare state as a

distanced, anger-bearing project in which anger is a necessary
part of a genuine concern for the people's welfare. (301)

In Malabou's words, "we ought to relearn how to enrage ourselves"

(WDB 79).13 That too-that in particular-is part of the care of the self,
a not-so-obvious type of plastic care that prevents care from being
entirely appropriated by biopolitics.

III. BIOART OF RESISTANCE

Do we truly need a true brain, as I asked earlier? Does Malabou

present plasticity as the truth of the brain? I adapt these questions
from Foucault's introduction to the memoirs of the nineteenth­
century French hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin. The problem with
this introduction, as Judith Butler in Gender Trouble has shown, is
that whereas Foucault in the History of Sexuality argues that there is
no sex outside of power, in his introduction to Herculine's memoirs,
he "fails to recognize the concrete relations of power that both
construct and condemn H�li(.le's sexuality" (Butler 120). Indeed,
he appears to romanticizeh/er )world of pleasures as the "happy
limbo of a non-identity" (xiii),· a world that exceeds the categories of
sex and identity" (Butler 120). Foucault thus sentimentally indulges
"in the very emancipatory discourse his analysis in the History of
Sexuality was meant to displace" (Butler 123). And so she sets out
"to read Foucault against himself" (124) by asking, with respect to
Herculine's text, "[w]hat social practices and conventions produce
sexuality in this form?" (125).

In pursuing the question, we have, I think, the opportunity

to understand something about (a) the productive capacity of
power-that is, the way in which regulative strategies produce
the subjects they come to subjugate; and (b) the specific
mechanism by which power produces sexuality in the context
of this autobiographical narrative. (Butler 125)

It is by looking at "the concrete narrative structures and political and

cultural conventions that produce and regulate the tender kisses,
the diffuse pleasures, and th rfu w<�rted and transgressive thrills
!�
of Herculine's sexual world'\0 5)�in short: by dose-reading­
that Butler will conclude that Herculine's "narrative takes place

58
 Arne De Soever

within an established set of literary conventions" (126). Herculine's

sexuality is thus "'inside' a discourse which produces sexuality and
then conceals that production through a configuring of a courageous
and rebellious sexuality 'outside' of the text itself" (126). But this
hardly qualifies, of course, as effective resistance. In Butler's book,
it is ultimately performance that will enable the displacement of the
norms by which this "inside" is governed.
Butler's critical questions could be applied to Malabou's book
as well. On the one hand, the book clearly shows that there is no brain
outside of power: power has a stake in our images of the brain; the
brain does not exist as a biological a priori outside of power but
is produced as an effect within a neuro-discourse. That does not
mean, of course, that there is no brain; it simply means that there
is no true brain. And yet, when Malabou proposes the hypothesis
that the brain is plastic-a qualifier that comes close to Foucault's
description of Herculine's sexuality as a "happy limbo of non­
identity"-she appears to "[fail] to recognize," as Butler puts it with
respect to Foucault, "the concrete relations of power" that may have
produced this hypothesis (120).
At this point, however, and against the point about the plastic
brain as a "happy limbo of non-identity," one can immediately object
that, for Malabou, the plastic brain is just as much about solidity as it
is about suppleness: in other words, the plastic brain is not a happy
limbo of non-identity that can be perpetually molded into whatever.
Instead, its plasticity resists; it is not polymorphous and eternally
flexible.14 Secondly, at the very end of Malabou's book it appears
that Malabou's "sketching an ideological critique of the fundamental
concepts of the neurosciences . . . also involves an ideological critique
of plasticity" itself: "Indeed, so long as we do not grasp the political,
economic, social, and cultural implications of the knowledge of
cerebral plasticity available today, we cannot do anything with it''
(WDB 82). As Marc Jeannerod asks in his introduction to Malabou's
book: "Might we have a neo-liberal brain that would impose its
model on our socioeconomic organization? Or, inversely, might
the global economy's upheaval generate a conceptual change that
would affect, by contagion, our view of the way the brain functions"
(xii)? In other words: how do Malabou and Malabou's theory of the
brain relate to the power they criticize? The closing lines of the book
appear to suggest that Malabou very much situates her book within
the long history of thinking about the brain, since she is presenting
the brain, in the final sentence of the book, "as the image of a world

59
theory@buffalo 16

to come" (WDB 82). Given that the world, as she argues earlier in the
book, shapes the brain, this means that she ultimately presents the
brain, too, as to come. Indeed, this might very well ultimately be the
key feature of plasticity.
Following Foucault, I would argue that our liberation is not in
the balance with all this brain talk. As Foucault argues with respect
to sex, it is not by talking about sex that we will discover the truth
about ourselves, and become free. Our liberation is in the balance,
however, in the realization of sex's biopolitical production-in the
knowledge that sex is a work, to project Malabou's statement about
the brain back into Foucault. Sex is a work, but we do not know it. (We
are all sex workers, but we do not know it. . .) If this was the "truth"
that Foucault brought home to us (a peculiar truth, since it states
that there is no truth at the bottom of sex), Malabou accomplishes
something similar. Foucault claims that "it is the agency of sex that
we must break away from, if we aim-through a tactical reversal
of the various mechanisms of sexuality-to counter the grips of
power with the claims of the bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in
their multiplicities and their possibility of resistance" (History 157).
Malabou claims something similar about the brain. One should
therefore take very seriously her insistence in the introduction to her
book on a "plastic organic art'' of the brain (WDB 7): it is indeed
in the realm of art, and specifically of bioart-conceived here in
the broadest possible way, as including for example Sophie Calle's
project on the care of the self-that (in my view) the possibilities for
life and resistance lie.
Here, too, Malabou's work resonates with that of Foucault,
who in his late work on the care of the self developed a plea for
precisely such an" art of existence" (Care 43): a "cura sui," a " techne tou
biou" (45)-in short, a bio-technic. Today, when care has once again
emerged as a site around which what Nietzsche calls the "will to
power" is played out, it is crucial to explore such an art of existence,
and to practice the aesthetic education15 that seeks to inspire it.

Notes
1. Visker is interested in the quotation marks in the context of a discussion of
scientificity, which is not the track I pursue here.
2. See Butler, Judith. "Indefinite Detention." Precarious Life: The Powers ofMourning and
Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), 50-100.
3. One of their papers is available at: http:/ Ieprints.lancs.ac.uk/26979 I 1 I Biopolitics_
of_security_in_the_21st_century.pdf.

60
 Arne De Boever

4. For example, Malabou spoke about Foucault's discussion of biopolitics in the first
volume of The History ofSexuality in a lecture she gave at the West Hollywood public
library on Tuesday, April 3 at the invitation of the California Institute of the Arts' MA
Program in Aesthetics and Politics.
5. We should likely go even further, and discuss how in the information age, the mind
may have taken the place of the brain as such a site. To think through the implications
of Foucault's reflections on biopolitics today means to move from biopolitics to
noopolitics, as others have suggested. I am thinking of Maurizio Lazzarato's work,
as well as of the writings of other thinkers associated with the study of so-called
"cognitive capitalism." For an overview of the central issues as well as the key thinkers
associated with this important work, sec: Hauptmann, Deborah and Warren Neidich,
eds. Cognitive Arcl1itecture. From Biopolitics to Noopolitics: Archilecll�re and Mind in the
Age ofCommunication and Information. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2010.
6. See Stiegler, Bernard. Taking Cnre of Youth and the Generations, trans. Stephen Barker
(Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010).
7. See Michel Foucault. The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e), 2007), 116.
8. See Sophie Calle, Take Care of Yourself, trans. Charles Penwarden et al (Aries: Actes
Sud, 2007).
9. See my "The Allegory of the Cage: Foucault, Agamben, and the Enlightenment,"
Foucault Studies 10 (2010): 7-22.
10. This quote arguably also reveals interesting affinities between Malabou's thought
on the brain and the work of Gilbert Simondon. I do not have time to explore this
here in full, but I have discussed the question of genius in relation to Simondon's pre­
individual in "Agamben et Simondon: Ontologie, technologie, et politique," trans.
Jean-Hugues BarthtH�my, Cahiers Simondon 2 (2010): 117-128. An extended, English
vesion
r of this article is forthcoming in Appareil.
11. Two years after the French original of Malabou's book on the brain was published,
the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk published a study titled Rage and Time,
which develops a discussion of the centrality of anger in Western civilization.
Sloterdijk appears to largely reject the idea that rage can be a positive force and
reads expressions of anger as instances of a ressentiment we ought to move beyond.
Incapable of thinking plasticity as anything but terrorist, Sloterdijk would probably
have little sympathy for Malabou's project. By thinking rage in relation to care, I aim
to complicate the in my view reductive theory of anger that Sloterdijk develops.
12. Ishiguro's novel is one of the case-studies in my book, Narrative Cnre: Biopolitics and
the Novel, which will be published by Continuum in April 2013.
13. See Chapter 17 of Werner Herzog, dir. Grizzly Man, Lions Gate Films, 2005, in
which Timothy Treadwell attacks "the individuals (of the Park Service] with whom
he worked for thirteen years" (as Herzog explains in the voice over). The scene s i
exemplary in this respect (the scene is available at: http:/ /www.youtube.com/
watch?v=LWeb64EIE4M). Treadwell, who has been taking care of the coastly grizzly
bears in Katmai National Park in Alaska, rages in this scene at the government,
specifically the Park Service, which he considers to have misrepresented his protective,
peaceful, and loving-in short: care-taking-presence in the park. In this grotesque
scene of cursing, which Herzog all too easily reads as a mad performance ("the actor
in the film has taken over from the filmmaker; I have seen this madness before-on the

61
theory@buffalo 16

film set"), Treadwell's care-taking expresses itself as rage. As Herzog explains, this is
a line he refuses to cross, but one wonders whether we might not have to cross it, if we
do not want to end up in a society of "obedient individuals who have no greater merit
than that of knowing how to bow their heads with a smile" (WDB 79). In an article
titled "Losing Face: Francis Bacon's 25th Hour" (forthcoming in Fi/m-PhiloscpiJy), I
have argued something similar about the famous chapter titled "Reflection" in Spike
Lee, dir. 25111 Hour, 25th Hour Productions, 2002 (the scene is available at: http:/ I
www.youtube.com/ watch?v=5Za2k5wA3sk). It would be all too easy, I think. to read
"Reflection" as a scene of racism, reminiscent of the racist monologue in Tony Kaye,
dir. American History X, New Line Cinema, 1998, that "Reflection" references. Instead,
I argue that the politically n
i correct anger that is expressed in "Reflection"-an anger
that the film also associates with madness, given the personality disorder that the
scene evokes-is in fact a practice ofcare, in the sense that it draws out how identity
has become a vehicle of power in the post-September 11 •h era. As I argued there, Spike
Lee's more recent Inside Man plays out a similar problem. Racism s i very much at
the heart of each of these films, but the position that the films take up with respect to
this problem is much more complicated than a simple celebration of any identitarian
category can account for.
14. Thus, Malabou goes beyond the opposition of determininism and freedom­
with biology being always associated with determinism-that she has uncovered
n
i Foucault's theory of biopolitics. in a recent lecture that I referred to above (n.4),
Malabou was able to bring both determinism and freedom together in a single notion
of the biological through a discussion of epigenetics-cells transferring information to
daughter cells through non-DNA. Thus, biology can become the model for a politics
that would resist biopolitics.
15. Unsurprisingly, education is one of the fields-in addition to environment and
experience-that Malabou mentioned in a recent lecture (see n.4) as "epigenetic
factors that play a major role" in the "fashioning of individual entitites."

Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion ofIdentity. New
York: Routledge, 1999.
Clastres, Pierre. Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology.
Trans. Robert Hurley and Abe Stein. New York: Zone Books, 1989.
Foucault, Michel. Les Anormaux: Cours au College de France 1974-1975. Ed.
Fran�ois Ewald, Alessandro Fontano, et al. Paris: Gallimard, 1999.
---. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978-1979. Trans.
Graham Burchell. Ed. Arnold I. Davidson. New York: Picador, 2008.
- -. The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality Vol. 3. Trans. Robert Hurley.
New York: Vintage, 1988.
---. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: New Press,
2006.

62
 Arne De Boever

---. The History ofSexuality: An Introduction. Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley.

New York: Vintage, 1990.
--. The Order of Things: An Archeology ofthe Human Sciences. Trans. New
York: Vintage, 1973.
---. "Society Must Be Defended." Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976.
Trans. David Macey. Ed. Arnold I. Davidson. New York: Picador,
2001.
--- and Lawrence D. Kritzman. "The Minimalist Self." Politics, Philosophy,
Culture: Interviews and Otlrer Writings, 1977-1984. New York:
Routledge, 1990.
Malabou, Catherine. What Should We Do With Our Brain? Trans. Sebastian
Rand. New York: Fordham UP, 2008. [WDB]
Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Trans. Daniel De
Leon. New York: International Publishers, 1998.
Robbins, Bruce. "Cruelty is Bad: Banality and Proximity in Never Let Me
Go." Novel 40:3 (2007).
Visker, Rudi. Michel Foucault: Genealogy as Critique. New York: Verso, 1995.

63
 Lenora Hanson

CAN BIOPOLITICS BE THOUGHT PLASTICALLY?

SAMUEL TAYLOR CoLERIDGE, PLANT LIFE, & PoLITICAL RESISTANCE

Biopolitical discourse has been characterized by what might be

called a telescoped surveillance of the human as its privileged subject.
As exemplified by Giorgio Agamben's claim that the concentration
camp is the new paradigmatic model of sovereign power, biopolitics
also emphasizes an expansion ofcontrol and regulation of that subject
during the twentieth century. Nikolas Rose describes biopower
differently, however, writing that, "what is at issue [in biopower]
is vitality at the level of the organism, where the very meaning of
limits and of life itself are subject to political contestation. Perhaps
one can even speak of a new vitalism" (Politics of Life Itself 5). For
contemporary scholars of Romanticism, the mention of vitalism here
should immediately pique their attention. And yet that Rose devotes
a scant few paragraphs to the origins of biopower over the course
of the eighteenth and nineteenth century also comes as no surprise,
given the absence of biopolitical thought in "long" nineteenth
century studies and in Romantic criticism in particular. Because of
the intense debate over vitalism during the Romantic period, that
absence is increasingly becoming a lamentable lacuna, one that
prevents a more robust investigation into the productive power of
biopolitics for both literary criticism and continental philosophy.
Agamben's definition of biopolitics is most interested in the
depletion of subject formation that he has elsewhere labeled the
"desubjectifying" process ofbiopower. In contrast, here I would like to
investigate the capacity of biopolitical subjectivity through Catherine
Malabou's notion of plasticity and a similar one found in Samuel

64
 Lenora Hanson

Taylor Coleridge. Malabou's placement of biopolitical resistance to

domination on a material level resonates with Coleridge's definiion
t
of the symbol in groundbreaking, but as-of-yet uninvestigated,
ways. Antonio Negri's and Michael Hardt's version is probably most
familiar and controversial for its emphas ��the immense creativity
�t while Negri, Hardt,
and possibility of biopolitical subjectivit
and others often become enmeshed in ontological debates that
marginalize aesthetics and perception, Malabou approaches the bios
of biopolitics as a matter first and foremost of form. Her stake in
form is inseparable from, and thus invaluable for, literary studies,
and allows for a new articulation of the symbolic and the material
through biopolitics and aesthetics.2 Thus, while Michel Foucault's
refusal to consider bios and biological life in favor of a metaphysical
Power and a focus on the technology of biopower reinforces a
symbolic order, Malabou's assertion of an aesthetic plasticity insists
on embodiment. Malabou's critique of biopolitical ontology as
paradoxically dependent on a symbolic economy of Power and Life
thus serves as a shared starting-point for rethinking both biopolitical
thought and literary criticism.
Through this notion of plasticity, I will consider Coleridge's
symbol as an attempt to understand life and language as immanent
to the botanical body. Read through the concept of plasticity, the
symbol opens up an aesthetic event in which material and intellectual

Thus,
�
life become co-constitutive of "form-giv · n " and "form-receiving."
through its artistic connotatio s,3 alabou's theory of
plasticity deconstructs the assumed diff ce b
etween nineteenth­
century political subjectivity as individuated consciousness and
contemporary biopolitical subjectivity as massified alienation.4
The theory of biopolitics moves literary criticism beyond the
representation of nature as an endless array of agentic selves and
others, towards an analysis that functions on the level of populations
marked not by self and other, but by capacity and resistance.
My approach locates vitalism as a biopolitical "style of thought,"
which Coleridge can help us understand in previously unremarked
upon ways.5 Despite a lack of attention to biopolitics' origins in the
Romantic period, Coleridge's vision of life as vitalistic, infinitely
productive, and founded on a unifying homogeneity attests to a form
of life that could not be managed by the dense, mechanical forms
of sovereign power and control.6lf this is the case, then one could
say that his science of vitalism is, essentially, a biopoliical
t theory.
Coleridge's writing demonstrates the extent to which biopolitics is a

65
theory@buffalo 16

Foucaultian dispositifthat also determines language, poetry, religion,

ethics, and governance as a spectrum of docility and possibility
that simply were not conceivable in the mechanical theories of his
time. But what is surprising and particular to Coleridge's work is
the extent to which plant life, as opposed to human, becomes the
definitive biopolitical subject that is characterized by attempts
to enhance, modi� and contour its vast and seemingly infinite
potential. But rather than endorsing only the regulatory nature of
biopolitics, I would like to ask, following Malabou, whether the
subject of biopolitics has a future that can be traced through an
unexpected trajectory located in Romantic thought?

1: VITALISM AND BtOPOLITICS

As I have just indicated, vital life in Coleridge's work should

be considered as biopolitical. And while I do not want to suggest
that vitalism and biopolitics are interchangeable or synonymous,
they overlap historically and conceptually in ways that demand
comparison and a short defense.7 Beginning with Foucault's
introduction in the collected lecture series, Society Must Be Defended,
the term biopower has come to designate an analysis of power's
investment in and enhancement of a surprisingly ambiguous term:
life. It is the expansion of power over the entire span and scope of
life, rather than the momentary, mortal decision of sovereign power
that is always "tipped in favor of death" (240). Foucault was most
interested in a new application of power that resulted from medical
research and diagnosis, the state, and new apparatuses of calculation
and control.8 Biopolitics, as it has come to be developed by writers
like Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, and Michael Hardt, is seen as
the modern mode of power that replaced an antiquated structure of
punishment and the taking of life, in favor of the ability to augment
and extend life on a collective level. Further, biopolitical thinkers
often take life not as an a priori or trans-historical concept that is
merely a product of power dynamics, but rather as a force itself
that is capable of redefining entire economic, social, and political
orders.9 In favor of sovereign power's interest in the singular body
and its disciplining, what can be thought of as arithmetical and
individuated, I am most interested here in Foucault's articulation of
biopower as a manipulation of life on a geometric, exponential, and
global scale (Foucault, Society 240-42).
. . . -· -·-··-·-·-·
c_

66
 Lenora Hanson

Two features of Coleridge's vitalism resonate in uncanny ways

with the above account of biopower. The first is Coleridge's insistence
on the lightness and "multeity" of Life as a vital force, which is not "a
thing-a self-subsistent hypostasis-but an act and a process" (Theory
of Life 94). As he argues against the heavy, necrotic connotations of
mechanical life, vital life becomes characterized as elastic, latent, and
immanent to matter. Life as such becomes a complex synthesis of
plural forces that inheres to matter in an essential way, as seen in the
following description:

for, as nature herself instances in the magnetic serpentine,

each of these forces supposes the other and every particle of a
serpentine magnetic detached from the mass becomes attractive
at one end and repulsive at the other. The magnet, in short, is
composed of an infinity of magnets, so as to demonstrate that
the two forces are so strictly one that neither can exist without
producing the other. ("Life" 1027)

While he will build on this analogy to argue for superior forms of

conscious life, this passage asserts that no organic life can be said
to exist without the primary, universal capacity for Productivity. In
challenging his opponents, Coleridge goes so far as to ask, "What
is Life? Were such a question proposed, we should be tempted to
answer, what is not Life that really is?" (Theory of Life 38).10 Here,
Life becomes sheer capacity, and a capacity that is omnipresent, not
merely confined within a complex and dense machinery or an alien
presence housed inside a material shell, as it was conceived of in
certain mechanistic theories of the time (Wheeler 19-23). Coleridge's
definition of life as an expansive force anticipates Foucault's theory
of Power as force disseminated through a widely dispersed "subtle
network of discourses, special knowledges, pleasures, and powers"
(History 72) rather than through rigid institutions or structures
(History 93).
The overlap between Coleridge's Life and Foucault's Power
becomes explicitly a matter of governance when, in his appendix
to The Statesman's Manual, Coleridge suggests a new model for
the integration of the political subject into the political state. He
criticizes the Jacobin government's style of "force and brute matter"
which resulted from the blind, base, and dumb Will animating it,
and he writes that "in its zeal for the increase of food [it] habitually
overlooked the qualities and sensations of those that were to feed

67
theory@buffalo 16

on if (� oleridge insists that the synthesis of subject and

gove'rnrrr
ent requires a "lighter" form of Power, phrased as Reason,
that could unify the mind of the political subject with the form of
governance, both of which must be malleable and permeable enough
for such an interchange to take place.12
The second correspondence between vital life and biopower
that we find in Coleridge is in vitalism's fundamentally productive,
rather than restrictive or negating, capacity. Foucault distinguishes
this productive power, one that is bent on"generating forces, making
them grow, and ordering them" (History 136), from the "deductive
method" of sovereign power. Coleridge's distinction between the
two dominant philosophies of life at the time, mechanism and
vitalism, demonstrates the productivity of the latter in the following
description:

[mechanical philosophy] knows only of distance and nearness,

composition. . . . and decomposition, in short the relations of
unproductive particles to each other; so that in every instance
the result is the exact sum of the component qualities. . . . This
is the philosophy of death, and only of a dead nature can it
hold good. In life, much more than in spirit, and in a living
and spiritual philosophy, the two component counter-powers
actually interpenetrate each other, and generate a higher third.
("Appendix C" 89)

By deploying a strange version of dialectical logic to defend vitalism,

Coleridge distinguishes between mechanical and vital philosophies
based on the generative capacity of the latter. Mechanical structures
do not create; they can at best mediate. Vital life does create, albeit in
a mysteriously immanent and unalienating way here. Like sovereign
power, mechanical explanations of life can only make recourse to
death; like biopolitical power, vital explanations of life are staked
on producing new potentiality and forms of it. Life is posited in a
language of degree and capacity, initiating the first move towards
opening it up to infinite extension, modification, and manipulation.
As Rose suggests, contemporary medicine's enhancement and
optimization of life is only possible if we conceive of the body or
of biology from the perspective of vitalism, where modifications
and changes are thought of in terms of power rather than in terms
of mechanical parts. In other words, the body cannot be composed
simply of parts that work aggregately to complete a function, but
 Lenora Hanson

must rather be seen as an entity with a range of capacities that can

be shaped, augmented, and transformed. More importantly, when
Coleridge defines vital life in this way, he is not referring solely to
human life; rather, he extends it to a much broader idea of life as a
power spread out across organisms, distributed in "different degrees
and modifications" (Theory of Life 505). It is to that broad definition
of life that I would like to now turn in order to uncover an as yet
unexamined correlation between biopolitical power and plant life.

II: THE BtOPOLITICS OF PLANT LIFE

In Theory of Life, Coleridge emphasizes the reproductive

power of plant life, writing that it is "so languid [in] the power of
individuation, so boundless [in] that of reproduction" (72). But what
vegetable life lacks in autonomy it makes up for in an almost viral
capacity to map itself onto other surfaces, due to these incredible
reproductive powers.13 Echoing Goethe and Hegel, from whom he
heavily drew, Coleridge's notion of boundless productivity results
from the undifferentiated totality or "wholeness" of plant organisms,
which lack the ability to develop independently functioning parts.
Goethe's and Hegel's scientific writings frame both the
historical debate over vital life and the question of where I want
to (re)locate plant resistance.14 Both were interested in whether or
not plant life could be said to be internally motivated, self-directed,
and capable of " ·�tself as at once subject and predicate of

its '� <m�E.. H 1 Jhe two certainly split on the question

.:..2Q7
...

of Spirit's superiority to matter, but they are crucial in this discussion

of the symbol because they resist collapsing nature and spirit into
one category as other contemporary Naturphilosophie thinkers did
(Kelley). Because they maintain both mechanical and spiritual
forces at work in plants, they reject the reductive linguisic t relation
of analogy between human anatomy and plant structure. Hegel in
particular distinguishes man from plant through man's capacity for
intentional movement and action of a body, mobilized by the most
radically differentiated part-the mind and its Will. This relative lack
of individuation means that the "parts" of plant life are essenially t
indistinct from one another, and that plant life has not alienated
itself from or negated its relationship to its environment. Plant
life is subordinate based on its inability to gather together all the
parts of its organism and assert its difference from the surrounding
environment as externalized other.15 Plant life cannot make such

69
theory@buffalo 16

subjective decisions; instead, by instinct and inescapable drive it

continues to produce an essential sameness-of-self either through
growth or spreading.
I have been arguing here in part that the relevance of
Coleridge's thinking of plant life for biopolitics has to do with both
its potentiality and productivity; in other words, its capacity for
expansion. The tendency within biopolitical discourse, beginning
with Foucault, is to understand such potentiality as an endless
source of material for domination. However, Hegel's own assertion
of plant life's indifference of internal parts and lack of will can and
does assume (bio)political potency. After all, it is a life shared in
common that he ascribes to plant life; as a biopolitical population it
is also a life defined by resistance and a tendency towards freedom.
Through Hegel himself, then, the building block of life becomes one
of common, creative struggle that cannot be excised from matter and
has no outside.16 And as Malabou has pointed out, it is in fact through
the interplay between structure and nebulae, substance and accident
to which there is no other or outside that a space is opened up for
creation in the first place ("FH" 208). That space becomes the concept
of the symbol in Coleridge, where non-human life is invested with
the "power which can fashion its own content" ("FH" 201) based
not on will or intent, but on its internal plasticity. That plasticity
demands that we see in the most basic forms of life, as Malabou has
described, "not only the creator of and receiver of form but also an
agency of disobedience to every constituted form, a refusal to submit
to a model" (WDB 6).
Coleridge describes symbols as the foundation of all true
knowledge and Being: "not a metaphor or allegory or any other
figure of speech or form of fancy, but an actual and essential part of
that, the whole of which it represents" ("Appendix C" 79). As such
parts of a "body" they are neither strictly "dead" signified matter, and
thus devoid of life themselves, nor strictly metaphysical referents,
and thus separated from material life; instead they are vitalistic in
the sense that they construct language and matter as immanent to
one another. And, if we recall Coleridge's discussion of mechanical
philosophy, we remember that the dialectics of productive life is not
a process of alienation and detachment, but of interpenetration and
synthesis.
This feature, which results specifically from a conflation of life
and language, exposes the duality of biopower, where management
and autonomy share the same paradoxical source in plasticity (WDB

70
 Lenora Hanson

40-46). As we will see in a moment, Coleridge'ssymbols use that source

to redistribute and decentralize sensory and cognitive experience,
producing a synaesthetic encounter with one's environment through
the imagistic or visual component of language. This aspect is most
visible in the lyrical outbursts that erupt throughout Coleridge's
Theory of Life where the relationship between plants and human
consciousness in nature is best characterized as an ambient one that
cannot be constrained by the analytic taxonomies that characterized
the "Classical Age" for Foucault.17 In describing this enraptured
experience as "more than a mere simile" and thus irreducible to a
simple signifier-signified relation, he writes:

I feel it alike, whether I contemplate a single tree or flower,

or meditate on vegetation throughout the world, as one of
the great organs of the life of nature. Lo!-with the rising sun
commences its outward life and enters into open communion
with all the elements, at once assimilating them to itself and to
each other. At the same time it strikes its roots and unfolds its
leaves, absorbs and respires, steams forth its cooling vapour
and finer fragrance, and breathes a repairing spirit, at once
the food and tone of the atmosphere, into the atmosphere that
feeds it. Lo!-at the touch of light how it returns an air akin to
light, and yet with the same pulse effectuates its own secret
growth, still contracting to fix what expanding it had refined.
Lo!-how upholding the ceaseless plastic motion of the parts
in the profoundest rest of the whole it becomes the visible
organismus of the whole silent or elementary life of nature
and, therefore, in incorporating the one extreme becomes the
symbol of the other. (72)

In no uncertain terms, Coleridge lays out in poetic brilliance the

nature of organic vitalism. Demonstrating the impossible restriction
of the symbol to the linguistic relation of metaphor and analogy,
here the symbol enacts an assemblage of sensory experience, plant
life, and cognitive perception. Rather than presenting material life as
distinct from spirit and the real, Coleridge describes the symbol as
the site of interplay by both, in an almost Spinozean relation. Thus,
he also renders a hierarchical, analytic, or physiological vision of
life inconceivable. Coleridge's concept of the symbol demonstrates
what Malabou describes as the possibility of "an 'eye at the edge
of discourse.' This eye is the optical arrangement that language, in

71
theory@buffalo 16

its structure, shows on its edge, so that to speak is to give birth to

the visibility of that about which I am speaking" (PDW 56). Rather
than the panoptical eye that gave way to biopower in Foucault, here
Malabou and Coleridge remind us that the novel overlap of visibility,
knowledge, and life also opens up unterritorialized and unregulated
forms of life.18 It is on the level of the symbol that we can see an
"outside" or alternative to the discipline and norming function of
biopower.
If read in this plastic, synaesthetic manner, the symbol bursts
open the apparent Hegelian limitations to plant life as well as the
negative ontology of bare life often found in biopolitical discussions.
Rather than make of biopolitics a science or a metaphysics, it
demands that we locate it on the level of the material, here the
botanical, redefined as a materiality of pliable, aesthetic perception.
If biopower is, as has been suggested, a logic of capture that seeks
exponentially larger targets, then the plasticity of the symbol
reminds us of the inevitable failure of that project due to the escape
mechanisms built n i to life itself. From this perspective, symbols
allow for us to conceive of life through two features that Malabou
offers through the concept of plasticity:

According to [the] first limit or semantic extreme, plasticity,

though not altogether assimilable to rigidity, marks a certain
determination of form and imposes a (very strict) restriction
on the capacity for deformation, re-formation, or explosion. .
. . According to [aJ second limit, plasticity designates a much
more transformative ability . . . a possibility of displacing or
transforming the mark or theimprint, of changing determination.
(WDB 15-16)

Coleridge's celebration of the interrelation of plant life and the human

mind through the symbol similarly recommends, "what the plant is,
by an act not its own and unconsciously-that must thou make thyself
to become!" ("Appendix C" 71). This new subjectivity is fashioned by
the plant both in its submission to a light and disembodied force,
but also in its unconscious process of self-making. In this moment,
plant life and its relationship to light become exemplary of the new
relationship between life and power where physical form can only
be permeable and flexible, rather than brittle and impenetrable. In
Coleridge, the symbol becomes a unit of life that both opens itself
up to power and nature, while at the same time reserving its own

72
 Lenora Hanson

power to shape its form in that nexus. Coleridge is able to assert

such resistance, I would argue, precisely because of his concomitant
insistence upon the plasticity and the materiality of the symbol.
Life, then, is not merely a concept of massified homogeneity that
refers us always to the symbolic logic of domination, but is rather
a contingency that is built into its various forms. The relationship
between plant life and the symbol that Coleridge offers is indicative
of life's resistance to biopower, while it remains independent from
the agentic connotations of resistance based on consciousness and
subjectivity. In order to understand this, we must read Coleridge
heretically, or perhaps "plastically," against even his own desire to
read the relation between Power and human form through what
could be the supreme dictate of a biopolitical age: "The perfect frame
of a man is the perfect frame of a state" ("Appendix C" 62).

Notes
1. See Hardt's and Negri's Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). For
an analysis particularly of the resistant subjectivity created by biopower, see the
third book in that series, Commonwealth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010)
and for a more historical analysis, see Labor of Dionysus (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1994) and "Twenty Theses on Marx" (Negri) found in Marxism
Beyond Marxism (New York: Routledge, 1996: 149-80).
2. For more on biopolitical implications for aesthetics and literature in particular, see
Sara Guyer's forthcoming essay, "Biopoetics," a contribution to the first sustained
consideration of its kind, "Romanticism and Biopolitics" in Romantic Circles Praxis
Series, eds. Alastair Hunt and Matthias Rudolf.
3. See Catherine Malabou' discussion of Hegel's thinking on art and plasticity in FH,
204.
4. Rose describes that subjectivity as one that we would today call "biological
citizenship," but that had its origins in the eighteenth century when the notion of
the citizen became conflated and intertwined with "vital characteristics of the human
being" in medicine (Rose 24).
5. In a modification of Foucault's concept of the episteme or discursivity, Rose cites
Ludqick Fleck's concept of the style of thought as, "not just about a certain form of
explanation, about what it is to explain, it is also about what there is to explain. That
is to say, it shapes and establishes the very object of explanation, the set of problems,
issues, phenomena that an explanation is trying to account for" (Rose 12).
6. See Foucault in Society Must Be Defended, 249.
7. While theories of vitalism run a broad gamut, I am relying on an iteration most dearly
associated with the nineteenth century debates in which Coleridge was involved. This
version has been described by Monica Greco as a "claim that the explanation of living
phenomena is not compatible with, or exhausted by, the principles of basic science
like physics or chemistry" (16). She goes on to divide vitalism between animistic and

73
theory@buffalo 16

naturalistic varieties, of whlch the secondary is most applicable to Coleridge as it

posits "organic natura.! laws that transgress the range of physica.l explanations" (17).
Of chief concern in that debate was whether or not certain material forms could be
categorized as having life or not having life, if an orderly and generative force could
be said to inhere in matter rather than be imposed from the outside, and if somethlng
like a spirit and I or purpose was immanent to physical form. For an account of these
debates, see Timothy J. Corrigan, "Biographla Literaria and the Language of Science";
Theresa M. Kelley, "Restless Romantic Plants: Goethe Meets Hegel."
8. The difference in scale between biopolitical theory and other theoretical perspectives
is where many innovations of the former lie. According to Foucault, biooplitics looks
at the "comprehensive measures, statistical assessments, and interventions aimed at
the entire social body" (History 146) into which singular relations fit. This shift in
the object of study immediately proposes a break with much literary criticism, which
takes the nineteenth century to be the formative construction site of the bourgeois
individual and the self, and possibly explains the lack of attention to biopolitical
discourse. For the exception to this rule, look for the forthcoming Romantic Circles
Praxis Series mentioned above.
9. The interchangeability of the terms biopolitics and biopower remains contested.
Hardt and Negri, for instance, use the former to indicate the liberatory resistance to
biopower's domination. For the purposes of this paper, however, I will be using them
in similar ways, often deploying biopolitics in relation to subjectivity and biopower in
relation to the broader system.
10. Foucault's now classical insistence in History of Sexuality: Volume I that "Power
is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from
everywhere" (93) is worth comparing to Coleridge's statement here, as well as his
commentary on the omnipresent nature of life throughout the Theory ofLife.
11. See Society Must Be Defended, p. 249, for a description of the obstacles to a more
precise but also global application of power that was one of the central limitations of
sovereign power that was overcome by biopower.
12. In detailing Coleridge's project to unify scientific and poetic language and
method, Timothy ]. Corrigan cites a passage from "On Poesy or Art" that presents
a clear affinity between Coleridge's approach to language and to governance (408).
In that section, Coleridge writes that the "artist must imitate that whlch is withln the
thing, that whlch is active through form and figure, and discourse to us by symbols­
the Natur-geist, . . . for so only can he hope to produce any work truly natural in the
object and truly human n i the effect" (BL, 259, 262). While Corrigan interprets this
moment as an indication of the evolutionary hope that Coleridge had in increasingly
differentiating disciplines, it also suggests the synthesis between governance and
subjectivity that he desires politically as well.
13. Coleridge's description of the corallighine slime denotes an almost insidious
and unstoppable character to plant reproductivity, describing that "if separated and
detached from theearthly pipe, [it) forms the commencement of a new coral. It grows,
and still as it grows deposits carbonate of lime, even as gristle becomes bone,-and
thus we may truly say, lives by dying. This power of deposing a matter not (in the same
form at least) pre-existent . . . we distinguish by the term Productivity" (1030). The
resonances between the extending potential and vira.l nature of plant reproductivity
and what Hardt and Negri have coined as the postmodern network of power in
Empire are almost uncanny in these moments. This network metaphor applies also
to Coleridge's hope for an epistemology of a "universal science" that would "(break)

74
 Lenora Hanson

down the rigid divisions between science and other areas of human knowledge and
endeavor, in a way that s strikingly appropriate now to modem studies of the nature
i

or human consciousness, of the global eco-systell\ and of the origin of the universe"
(Roe 14).
14. For a broader discussion of Geothe's and Hegel's innovations on thinking about
plant life, essence, and resilience, see Theresa Kelley's forthcoming book, Clandestine
Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture, forthcoming from Johns Hopkins UP.
15. See Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, trans. A.V. Miller., Philosophy of Nature. Trans.
(Cambridge: Oxford UP, 2004): 302-3.
16. Ibid., 308.
17. Rose writes that "Foucault was focusing on the ways in which the natural history
of what he termed the 'Classical Age exemplified a certain epistemological structure,
'

in which to know was to classify, to locate that which was to be known in a table or
a grid. To know a plant of an animal was to place it in a taxonomy, identifying it by
allocating it to its proper genus and species" (42).
18. Coleridge articulates a similar form of undeterminable life through a fascinating
language of dispossession and commonality elsewhere, writing that these moments
of intense symbolic exposure to and experience of nature results in a kind of Reason
that, "with the silence of light . . . describes itself, and dwells in us only insofar as
we dwell in it. It cannot in strict language be called a faculty, much less a personal
property, of any human mind! He, with whom it is present, can as little appropriate it,
whether totally or by partition, as he can claim ownership in the breathing air or make
an inclosure in the cope of heaven" ("Appendix C" 70). The language of tarrying
alongside or companionship with nature here incapacitates the utilization either of
nature or human life solely in the service of regulation and control, and opens up an
entirely new kind of thinkng of population and multiplicity of bodies unaccounted
i

for in such versions of biopower .

Works Cited
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. "Appendix C." The Collected Works of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge: Lay Sermons. Ed. R.J. White. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1972. 59-93.
---. "Life." The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Shorter Works
and Fragments. Eds. H.J. Jackson and J.R. de J. Jackson. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1995. 1027-1032.
---. Hints Toward the Formation ofa More Comprehensive Theory ofLife. Ed.
Seth B. Watson. London: John Churchill, 1848.
Corrigan, Timothy J. "Biographia Literaria and the Language of Science."
Journal ofthe History of Ideas 41.3 (1980): 399-419.
Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality: Volume I. Second edition. Trans.
Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1990.
---. "Subject and Power." The Esse11tial Foucault: selectionsfrom essential works
ofFoucault, 1954-1984. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: New Press, 2003.
--. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College De France: 1975-1976.
New York: Picador, 2003.

75
theory@buffalo 16

Greco, Monica. "Vitalism of Vitality." Theory, Culture, and Society 22.1

(2005): 15-27.
Hunt, Alastor and Matthias Rudolf. "Introduction: The Romantic Rhetoric
of Life." Biopolitics, Romanticism, and Literature. Romantic Circles/Praxis
Series. Ed. Alastair Hunt and Matthias Rudolf. Forthcoming.
Kelley, Theresa M. Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, Forthcoming.
---. "Restless Romantic Plants." European Romantic Review 20.2 (2009): 187-
95.
Malabou, Catherine. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction,
Deconstruction. Trans. Carolyn Shread. New York: Columbia UP, 2005
[POW].
--. "The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectic." Hypatia. Trans.
Lisabeth During. 15:4 (Fall 2000). 196-220. ["FH"]
---. What Should We Do with Our Brain? Trans. Sebastion Rand. New York:
Fordham UP, 2008. [WDB)
Roe, Nicholas. "Introduction." Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of
Life. Ed. Nicholas Roe. Cambridge: Oxford UP, 2001.
Rose, Nikolas. The Politics ofLife Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in
the Twenty-First Century. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007.
Wheeler, L. Richmond. Vitalism: Its History and Validity. London: H.F. & G.
Witherby LTD., 1939.

76
 Carolyn Shread

THE HORROR OF TRANSLATION

Having translated three of Catherine Malabou's books from

French into English, it might seem that a more fitting title for this
article would be the pleasures of translation, for plenty could be said
about the joys of reading closely, discussing, and collaborating in
the dissemination of the thinking of one of France's most innovative
thinkers. Malabou is a translator's ideal interlocutor: always
meticulous and quick to respond, generous and wry in her exchanges
regarding her texts, she manages to be both a participant and
respectful of the translator's vocation. This shared practice allows
translation to be what it is-an encounter and a transformation that
Malabou, perhaps more than anyone, understands both intellectually
and intuiively.
t So why the horror? It is not that Malabou is horribly
difficult to translate, far from it. Her clarity is contagious and my
own writing has been altered by dwelling in her texts. But we are not
talking about linguistic or hermeneutic challenges and influences
here. This article builds on the reflections that have punctuated
my three translations, each of which has identified the relevance of
Malabou's philosophic thought to the field of translation studies.
After laying out the ways in which Malabou's work provides an
alternative path for accessing some of the core distinctions that
structure debates in translation studies, I shall explain how a new
understanding of the generalized horror that translation provokes is
the key insight I gleaned from my most recent translation, Ontology
of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, and how this may
prove to be Malabou's most significant contribution to translation
studies.

77
theory@buffalo 16

Ever since Walter Benjamin's signature essay, writers have been

discussing the task of translaion,
t with a constant stream of theorists
and practitioners returning to the sphinx to present solutions that
range from the self-effacing to the strident, from a modest service
model to statements staking a claim for the translation as originaL•
In the wake of the emergence and formal recognition of translation
studies as a valid area of intellectual inquiry in the 1970s, many
thinkers, not least of whom is Gayatri Spivak, drew attention to the
politics of translation, that is, to all those frameworks and pressures
that define and constrain this protean task.2 Postcolonial, feminist,
and queer translation theorists added their recognition of the
manipulative nature of the task, consciously using it to forward a
variety of agendas, while also warning against the potential violence
of translation. And thenothers, notably Lawrence Venuti, have spoken
out about the scandals of translation, specifically in the context of the
United States where translations represent a meager three percent
of annual publishing and despite heroic efforts from many to draw
attention to the critical importance of fostering a translation culture;-3
translation remains minor, marginalized, and most importantly for
our present purposes, rnisunderstood.4 The aim of this intervention
is thus to reconsider the causes of this pitiful three percent on the
grounds not of the pervasive xenophobia that Venuti identifies as a
key factor, nor in a response to the business models that so readily
throw out translation as an unprofitable concern,5 but rather in terms
of the ontology of translation that appears to be so unsettling, the
fact that translation seems to provoke such visceral horror.
Whereas in previous articles my purpose has been to widen
an appreciation of what translation does, to alter paradigms by
which we assess and read translations, or to imagine alternative
translation practices as a means of regenerating the field} stubborn
misperceptions surrounding this area of creative endeavor now invite
a different, more direct approach, an approach whose sole aim is to
explain the status of translation, as a precondition for any attempt to
change perceptions of the art. Against the assumptions I have sought
to counterpoint, in the end the best strategy might be to admit, at
least temporarily, to the horror of translation, if only to bury it. This
article thus seeks to contribute to translation studies by returning to
the root of a recurrent difficulty through an exploration of the way in
which, at least in the Anglophone United States, translation suffers
from a culturally pervasive and persistent stigma.
But, the reader asks again: the horror? I do not think the

78
 Carolyn Shread

word is too strong, but for the sake of argument we could settle
on distaste, scorn, or mere disinterest for the time being. Beyond
Venuti's figures, we could begin by acknowledging that in the
United States publishers generally prefer not to signal translations
qua translations, since it is generally agreed that translations do
not selF Consequently, translators' names, the original language,
title, and publication date are often effaced from book covers and
hidden away in the small print, if they appear at all. To cite an
example close to home, when Polity Press sent me the proofs of the
otherwise superb cover to Changing Difference: The Feminine and the
Question of Philosophy, I objected that there was nothing to counter a
logical assumption that Malabou was an English author, for she is
titled Professor of Philosophy at Kingston University London and
the review quotations were by professors from Kingston University
London and the University at Buffalo. Nowhere on the outside cover
was there an indication of this book's life in French. To Polity's credit,
when I pointed this out at a very late stage in the printing process,
they added the line I requested "Translated from the French by
Carolyn Shread" on the back cover and the next time, when it came
to the publication of Ontology of the Accident, "Translated by Carolyn
Shread" appeared clearly on the front. Here then is an example that
counters norms, in which a press was willing to listen and respond to
the concerns of the translator to sign the text as translation, not from
narcissistic motives, but rather to reflect an ethic of translation that
does not shy away from itself. But, even almost twenty years after
Venuti named this tendency to translational erasure in his n
i fluential
The Translator's Invisibility,8 such acknowledgement is rare.
Likewise, and partly as a consequence of this market prejudice,
within the realm of academia, translations do not count. As 2009
President of the Modern Language Association, Catherine Porter
drew attention to this prevalent silencing of the fact and labor of
translation, making the argument that contrary to current practices
translation should be considered scholarly activity and that
translations should thus count towards hiring, promotion, and
tenure.9 Asking "Is the exclusion of translation a defensible practice
or, rather, the effect of a lingering bias that can be overcome?" Porter
presented multiple arguments for recognizing "Translation as
Scholarship" (9-10). Presently, translations are more often a liability,
a suspect occupation to be wiped off the curriculum vitae, along
with too many other feminized tasks, including academic service10
and childcare, all of which, it must be noted, share a structure of

79
theory@buffalo 16

collaboration and inter-dependency. As much as t o endorse the

claim that translation is closely bound to a horror of those on the
other side of the binary of masculine autonomy and an ideology
of self-generation. Hence the close alliances of feminist and queer
critiques such as Malabou's for translation studies. It will take
a cultural revolution to recognize, as Michael Cronin suggests,
that in fact translation "reveals our multiple dependencies and
the connectedness underlying the consoling fictions of absolute
autonomy. It may be the sum of our debts that constitutes our wealth
as peoples" (40). Clearly, for translations to count, we will have to
learn to count differently.
However, theory@buffalo 1 6 is not on the topic of translation,
but rather on the work of Catherine Malabou. Moreover, while she
is translated-into English, Spanish, Japanese, German, Italian,
and Dutch for the moment, and no doubt there will be more­
Malabou has never written directly on translation, so we could very
well begin again by asking what is the connection of her work to
translation? Certainly her mentor Jacques Derrida wrote extensively
on translation and his interventions are still being absorbed by the
field, but the topic of translation has not been articulated explicitly
in Malabou's works so far. ·Nevertheless, an article in Le Monde
will help explain why we might claim that, in fact, Malabou has
written about nothing but translation. Recounting an interview with
Malabou, journalist Stephane Legrand describes the philosopher's
own encounter with the use of the term plasticity in neuroscience:

Elle raconte en souriarzt que cette orientation decisive de son travail

s'est dessinee initialement par hasard. «]'etais tombee sur un numero
de Ia revue La Recherche qui parfait sur la memoire, et dont l'un des
articles evoquait la plasticite neuronale. ]e me suis rendue compte
que c'etait exactement cela que je travaiilais chez Hegel . . .» Ce
qui l'a interessee dans cette rencontre fortuite, c'etait d'y trouver
«Ia traduction d'un concept dans les chases memes,» ['incarnation
.- imprevl.J.(_d'un pur objet de pensee dans un probleme concret.
�
(Legrand}

For Malabou, neuroscience offered a concrete manifestation of

her concept of plasticity; as her translator, I was struck by Malabou's
comment in this interview in as much as I had a similar experience
when I began to translate her work. As I translated Plasticity at the
Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, it became

80
 Carolyn Shread

increasingly clear to me that in many ways the plasticity Malabou

described corresponded exactly to what her text was undergoing
in translation, and, moreover, that translation offered a concrete
manifestation of her philosophical concept, that translation itself
offered "Ia traduction d'un concept dans les choses memes" (Legrand).
What Malabou offers translation is a means of grappling with
its ontology in a novel way. Reconsideration of the ontology of
translation has the power to unseat the paradigms through which
it is usually defined, and on the grounds of which it is invariably
found lacking. Indeed, my initial postulate is that translation is
defined in terms of lack precisely because of a failure to grasp the
plasticity of its ontology. This article retraces the evolution of my
thought on translation and plasticity as it progressed through three
translations of Malabou's texts. It is worth noting that parts of the
argument first appeared as the plastic translation manifestos inserted
in the guise of translator prefaces-that traditionally sacrosanct
space for admissions of loss in translation. However, in these cases,
the preface served to harbor the germs of the argument developed
in the current context. I'll start therefore by rehearsing the ways
in which Malabou's plasticity allows translation theory to speak
on its own terms, rather than within the normative framework of
source texts which are widely perceived as being largely identical to
themselves, even granted the possibility of deconstructive readings.
I conclude that the ontology of translation is at the root of the
combined fascination and horror that translation has always evoked
as a practice that parallels, but never conforms to writing. What
translation reveals in all its nakedness are the plastic movements of
dialectic, deconstruction and destruction at work in any text. It is
in this sense that my primary purpose is to expound on the ways
in which an ontological understanding of translation explains the
horror.
I have stated that translation evokes horror, and for some
this may still seem somewhat inflated, until we consider the single
omnipresent symptom that signals this underlying affect: the
discourse of loss that, try as it might, translation cannot shrug off­
translation as the castrated text. In reaction, I admit, my own personal
horror lies precisely in the overuse of the instantly recognizable trope.
It is with a heartfelt cheer that I echo Luise von Flotow who writes
that it is high time we were done with that most "tedious old saying"
'lost in translation' (Translating Women 9). For to premise translation
on a metaphysics of loss is already to mistake the ontology of the art,

81
theory@buffalo 16

and it is this that we need to reclaim.

Malabou's proposal of plasticity as schema helps us rethink
the ontology of translation in as much as both are concerned with
describing modalities of change. With plasticity, Malabou identifies
change as the giving and receiving of form, but also the regeneration
of form and the annihilation or exploding of form. Sculpting in both
hard and soft materials, the renewals and regeneration brought
about by stem cells, the interventions of plastic surgery and the
violent shock of the bomb12 are all forms of change that Malabou
offers as examples in her mining of plasticity. On these grounds,
Malabou claims that plasticity is the motor scheme of our era. All
of these types of metamorphosis can also contribute to a deeper
and wider understanding of the processes at work in translation.
Malabou's ongoing meditation on change, from The Heidegger
Change: On The Fantastic in Philosophy to Changing Difference: The
Feminine and the Question of Philosophy, invites us to bring translation
into the discussion-especially at the point when that discussion
begins to take place in the Anglophone world thanks largely to the
increasing number of translations of Malabou's thought that have
become available in the last few years.
So Malabou writes about change and through her translations
we in Anglophone North America can rethink paradigms such as
translation. But I will add a caveat here regarding the transmission
of Malabou's thought, one that I shall build on further in closing. Let
us not forget when reading Malabou in English, or in Spanish, or in
Dutch, that we read her in translation and that a translation is not a
source text. This attention to the fact of translation will avoid patent
misreadings such as Pete Mandik's review of What �hould We Do with
Our Brain? in which he writes:

I must confess that I find a bit hard to swallow the suggestion

that neuroscientific discourse is infected by a poetic association
between "brain plasticity" and "plastic explosives." The
"plastic" in "brain plasticity" doesn't mean "explosive." Not
even the "plastic" in "plastic explosive" means "explosive." It's
the "explosive" in "plastic explosive" that means "explosive."

A closer reading of Malabou's translated text, a more attentive

awareness to its status as a translation, would have revealed the
close association in French between plastique (plastic) and plastiquer
(to explode), with nothing but an r between the concept and its

82
 Carolyn Shread

explosive connotations. So here we find ourselves already tied up in

the horrors of translation, the terror of error and ridicule, and above
all the fear of loss that comes from not recognizing that a translation
is just that-a translation. The question then might be: what should we
do with our translations?
I suggest we start by adopting and promoting a view of
translation that assumes opacity. Rather than hoping that the
translator's "black box," that mysterious synaptic genius that
produces the leap between languages, will produce a transparent
window onto the source text, an understanding of translation
as complex linguistic and cultural mediation will better prepare
readers to deal with the change that is translation. The ontology of
translation is integral to the note translator Sebastian Rand adds
precisely to avoid the type of misreading quoted above. The passage
from Malabou's What Should We Do with Our Brain? reads as follows:

But it must be remarked that plasticity is also the capacity

to annihilate the very form it si able to receive or create. We
should not forget that plastique, from which we get the words
plastiquage and plastiquer, is an explosive substance made of
nitroglycerine and nitrocellulose, capable of causing violent
explosions. (WDB 5)

Rand's translator's note adds this essential information:

Malabou here refers to a set of related words not available in

English, which I have therefore left in French in the main text.
As we use in English the French form plastique to signify plastic
explosive material, the French use the English form plastic
{which otherwise does not occur in French). French also has {at
least) two associated terms: the noun plastiquage, meaning the
act or event of blowing something up using plastic explosives,
and the corresponding verb plastiquer. (WDB 84-85)

We need a translation ontology that unapologetically allows

for the need for such supplements-not on the grounds of a lack, but
on the basis of a recognition of the inherent plasticity of translation.
As mentioned above, I have built on my concept of translation as a
plastic art through the three books I have translated. In what follows
I outline some of the main stages in this reframing of translation
through Malabou's promotion of plasticity as schema.

83
theory@buffalo 16

Translating Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, it seemed to me that

the most immediate contribution of Malabou's thought to translation
theory is the distinction she makes between plasticity and elasticity.
As she points out, elasticity is premised on the ability to return to
an original state, while plasticity reflects her conviction that it is the
nature of being to change. Hence, my terms elastic translation, as
opposed to plastic translation. In this simple, but critical distinction,
we have two entirely different conceptions of translation. One, still
the dominant model in most discourses on translation, privileges the
original starting point over change; the other plastic model I propose
is our antidote to horror in that it accepts change as a given from
the outset. There may be, and indeed there most certainly are, any
number of debates on the degree of stretch that is desirable, allowable
and possible within a paradigm of elasticity that must always be
measured against and return to the same. This single question has
dominated the field of translation studies for decades, almost to the
exclusion of any other issue, or any other paradigm. Elasticity in
translation underlies all the debates on equivalence, and the moment
the elastic breaks, or stretches too thin, we enter the discourse of loss.
Elasticity and loss go hand in hand to kneel before the original that
alone defines the condition of possibility of translation.
It is worth mentioning that Malabou is quick to point out
the socio-political and materialist implications of her analysis of
change with respect to flexible and plastic paradigms. Her critique
of the flexibility ideology associated with elasticity is pertinent
to translators, as one of so many groups in the new league of the
contingent workforce. As a traditionally derided and poorly paid
practice, translation is a part of the flexible ecoryomy. Malabou's
What Should We Do with Our Brain? is in many ways a political
tract seeking to counter the working terms and conditions that are
also partly responsible for, and partly a reflection of, the horror of
translation. As Marc Jeanneod comments in his introduction to this
text: "Let us not forget that plasticity is a mechanism for adapting,
while flexibility is a mechanism for submitting" (WDB xiv). In other
words, there are liberatory consequences in refusing flexibility as
the dominant schema. Moreover, to limit the change of translation
to exchange-as equivalence based translation theories inevitably
do-is to be limited by a capitalist economy of profit and loss. The
horror I suggest haunts translation thus resurfaces in the economies
and models of circulation in which translation partakes, and through
which it is assumed to operate.

84
 Carolyn Shread

What then does Malabou's plasticity schema bring translation

paradigms? It allows them to breathe, to live, to die, to make the
change that is translation. Plasticity recognizes translation as what it
is: not the being of the original in disguise, but being the original as
change. Malabou's description of articulated masks in the opening
to Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing offers us another image to hold
onto as we try to grasp these elusive processes and to give up the
doxa of equivalence as the only possible mechanism of translation.
In this image we replace the horror of imitation with an articulation
of masks as the progression of a text in translation and retranslation.
Derrida described the relation of a text to its translation in
terms of survival, in terms of an afterlife, and in doing so he moved
towards an alternative translation ontology:

the task of the translator is precisely to respond to this demand

for survival which is the very structure of the original text. . . .
Translation augments and modifies the original, which, insofar
as it is living on, never ceases to be transformed and to grow.
It modifies the original even as it also modifies the translating
language. (Ear of the Other 122)

Derrida's heresy, in making the text dependent on the

translation, by inverting the ideology of the derivative translation,
itself provoked considerable horror. However, this deconstructive
strategy only takes us so far towards a refutation of the horror of
translation. With Malabou we can go further by returning to the a
priori question of translation's ontological status.
Translating Changing Difference: The Feminine and the Question
of Philosophy, allowed me to extend the analysis of flexible and
plastic translation that emerged from Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing
through the concept of regenerative plasticity, that clearly speaks
to the becoming and serial nature of translation as a practice that
constantly transforms and renews itself.13 A further intersection
suggested by this text is the status of translation as a feminized
profession and activity, as translation studies critics since Lori
Chamberlain's landmark 1988 article "Gender and the Metaphorics
of Translation" have observed.14 In the essay "Woman's Possiblitity,
Philosophy's Impossibility," Malabou's poignant description of
Derrida's comment on a photograph of young American women
rabbis wearing the traditionally exclusively male religious regalia as
an indictment of Malabou's status as a woman philosopher is just

85
theory@buffalo 16

too close to the perception of the translation as a failed or false source

text. She writes:

So feminine authority looks like a mime. While the photograph

creates the event of feminine authority, in doing so it
immediately devalues it by marking this event with the seal
of pastiche. . . . When I, "the woman philosopher," read these
lines I felt like these women rabbis, exactly the way they are
seen by Derrida, donning my concepts as if they were their
cloths, shawls, or straps. (CD 106)

Moreover, the question of violence-both towards translation and in

what Venuti described as an unavoidably ethnocentric practice, was
also a key aspect of Malabou's discussion of plasticity in this text.
Malabou's later claim that: "we must take destructive brain plasticity
into account as a hermeneutic tool to understand the contemporary
faces of violence" (OAc 28) speaks to both her concerns regarding the
difference of the feminine and the violence it suffers, and my own
interests in the difference of translation as text.
As I undertook my third translation, Malabou's Ontology of
the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, I again found that her
work in philosophy speaks as much to translation, as the translation
allows her to speak. Given her striking articulation of, in this instance,
the negative side of plasticity, I could not help but reflect on how the
plastic vision of ontology she proposes could dramatically impact
our understanding of a translational ontology.
In contrast to an overly optimistic approach, then-the
misreading that would see in Malabou's concept of plasticity only
a voluntaristic view of change as improvement-it is useful to look
at the negative potentiality of plasticity, and to how it plays out in
our understanding of translation. I reiterate that instead of railing
against prejudice, denouncing the inequality and misrecognition of
translation, we do well now to look at what it is in translation that
inspires what I have termed the horror of translation. Why the fear?
Why the history of distrust? What is it that is inherent to translation
that might prompt, or even justify, at least in the Western tradition,
such discomfort and such distancing from what is clearly a necessary,
age-old and global practice?
We must start by insisting, as Malabou does in the term
plastiquer and throughout Ontology of the Accident, on the fact that
plasticity is not an inherently positive process, even though this is

86
 Carolyn Shread

the overwhelmingly dominant connotation of the term displayed in

the current passion for neuroscience. Indeed, Malabou comments on
the fact that these destructive aspects are not generally recognized in
the scientific field:

In neurology, deformations of neuronal connections, breaches

in cerebral contacts, are not considered instances of plasticity.
Plasticity is only evoked when there is a change in the volume
or form of neuronal connections that impacts the construction
of personality . . . neurobiolo�� ot develop the notion of
destructive plasticity as such
� 3)

By insisting on the fact that plasiticity implicates explosions,

annihiliation and destruction as much as it offers a hope of countering
the degradation of aging, for instance, Malabou counters common
discourses. She reminds us of the delicate if destructive sculpting of
plasticity through the process of apoptosis:

the idea of sculpting the self assumes cellular annihilation or

apoptosis, the phenomena of programmed cellular suicide. In
order for fingers to form, a separation between the fingers must
also form. It is apoptosis that produces the interstitial vo�d-l\
t at
enables fingers to detach themselves from one anoth�,..@_ �
'-- - -
-·- -
We begin to see a parallel process here in translation, for without
apoptosis, the translation cannot separate from the text. Castration
is not, therefore, the model through which translation should
be viewed. But Malabou is sanguine in recognizing the horror
destructive events cause: "It's an entirely different matter when it
comes to the possibility of explosion, the annihilation of equilibrium,
the destruction of this capacity, this form, this force, this general
identity. Terrorism versus apoptosis. As I said, in these instances
no one calls it plasticity any more" (OAc 6). So Malabou's project
in Ontology of the Accident is to reclaim the explosive in plasticity­
precisely the terrifying possibility that Mandik refused to see in her
text, and the force that aligns translation and horror.
Within the desolation that destructive plasticity represents,
Malabou does, nevertheless, manage, through her language and
trembling insight, to evoke a certain beauty. It is a sad beauty, the
beauty that translations must aspire to as they take leave from
the text-not just to ensure its survival and afterlife, but to fonn

87
theory@buffalo 16

themselves. Ontology ofthe Accident opens as follows:

In the usual order of things, lives run their course like rivers.
The changes and metamorphoses of a life due to vagaries and
difficulties, or simply the natural unfolding of circumstance,
appear as the marks and wrinkles of a continuous, almost
logical, process of fulfillment that l_eads ultimately to death. In
time, one eventually becomes who one is; one becomes only
who one is. Bodily and psychic transformations do nothing but
reinforce the permanence of identity, caricaturing or fixing it,
but never contradicting it. It does not disrupt it.
This gradual existential and biological incline, which can
only ever transform the subject into itself, does not, however,
obviate the powers of plasticity of this same identity that houses
itself beneath an apparently smooth surface like a reserve of
dynamite hidden under the peachy skin of being for death. As
a result of serious trauma, or sometimes for no reason at all,
the path splits and a new, unprecedented persona comes to live
with the former person, and eventually takes up all the room.
An unrecognizable persona whose present comes from no past,
whose future harbors nothing to come, an absolute existential
improvisation. A form born of the accident, born by accident, a
kind of accident. (OAc 1)

So change never disrupts identity, except when it explodes it. A

text is only deconstructed until the accident of translation diverts
it from its course definitively. And how does Malabou's ontological
perspective on the accident inflect our understanding of translations?
We see the caesura that initiates a plastic view of translation, rather
than the graphic continuity Derrida insisted on with the trace. And
the caesura is horrible because it might be unrecognizable. Malabou
deploys several literary references to illustrate destructive plasticity,
including Proust's nightmare: The unrecognizably aged guests at
the Guermantes' mansion. As a counterpoint, we might imagine a
party at which Malabou's texts meet their translations, in all their
linguistic and cultural guises, always slipping between the authentic
and its plastic reformulations. For it is not that a translation is simply
a change of form, a slipping out of the French little black dress to don
American sports gear. As I have argued elsewhere, n i a commentary
on the paratexts of the otherwise excellent project of the MLA Texts
in Translation, a translation is more than a formal metamorphosis.15

IH!
 Carolyn Shread

It also brings substantive change. Consequently, the cover designs of

the MLA Texts in Translation, which simply invert the color pairings
of the text and the translation border art (for instance tan on green
for the text and green on tan for the translation), while retaining
an identical cover image, convey a purely phantasmatic image of
translation. An ideal view in which a translation carries intact and
identical every detail and brushstroke in the source text, and this
despite the evidence that translations patently do rework the picture.
Malabou addresses the anguishing question whose horror so
many myths and tales of metamorphosis do not confront:

In the usual order of things, in classical metamorphoses

transformation intervenes in place of flight. For example, when
Daphne, chased by Phoebus, is unable to run fast enough, she
turns into a tree. But metamorphosis by destruction is not the
same as flight; rather, this is the form of the impossibility of
fleeing. The impossibility of flight where flight presents the
only possible solution. (OAc 9)

Can we think of translation as the text's survival not in terms of a

glorious Derridean afterlife, but when a trauma inhibits any other
possibility of flight? What situations might give rise to such a
translation? The drama of minor languages comes to mind, in those
instances where translation is the only means of communicating
for a repressed tongue. But there are so many other situations
where translation is a matter of urgency and constraint. And taking
destructive plasticity still further, might we find in this pathology a
new means for translation evaluation and assessment? Assessment
not according to criteria of equivalence and the dogma of loss, but on
the grounds of survivor translation? These are all producive t lines of
investigation opened up by Malabou's courageous determination to
face the destructive possibility of the plastic.
But let us confront directly the core psychoanalytic connotations
of horror that until now I have only implied, for the fantastic and
the uncanny are never far from Malabou's analyses and may have
something to bring to our new conception of translation as plastic
manifestation. For Freud the uncanny, Unheimlich, is the return
of repressed familiarity or homeliness; it is the troubling stranger
found within. As often as not, this stranger might speak another
tongue, to say something familiar. The translation is thus the text's
intimate stranger, the plastic face that reveals the uncanny within.

89
theory®buffalo 16

As Malabou explains in The Heidegger Change: "the fantastic 'in

philosophy' designates at once a kind of approach to change and the
very strangeness of what changes and is going to change . . . describes
the foreigner on the inside" (HC 13). So not only does translation
itself produce a response of horror, but the process it involves is
a manifestation of the ontology of plastic change that is itself so
uncanny. As Malabou explains further: "the fantastic here designates
the phenomenality of ontico-ontological transformations-those of
man, god, language, etc.-which unveil the originary mutability of
being while revealing at the same time that being is perhaps nothing
. . . but its mutability'' (HC 11). If translation evokes horror, is it quite
simply that it is too close to the destructive possibility alive in every
moment, threatening to take the strange fork in the river of our lives?
If translations are blamed for being destructive, s
i it not so much
because they change a text as the fact that they cannot but wear their
possibility on their sleeve?
And how have we traditionally responded to the threat that
translation bears too boldly? One of the most predominant models
is the normative ideal of the neutral translator, the impossible task
of the translator who will change, without meddling in the text.
The translator who effaces herself so as to produce an illusion that
only the form has changed, and who is careful to avoid any overt
indication of agency. This is certainly what is widely demanded and
expected of interpreters-those outrageous translators who perform
in person, in the present. The mantra for most official agencies is that
the interpreter must be the transparent vehicles of transformation,
an affectless and non-interventionist service provider. But what
does Malabou unearth in her study of destructive plasticity? That
it is precisely a lack of affectivity that may be most destructive,
as she explains in the horror stories of mass murderers-and the
psychiatric patients in a hospital who "were watching the television
(on which Dupuy placed the severed head before fleeing). Some
of them therefore witnessed the crime without saying a word. It is
difficult to know what is worse: the murders, or the indifference of the
spectators who saw everything and did not react" (OAc 22). In other
words, I am suggesting that the dominant model for translator and
interpreter training and business practices, the model that advocates
distance and a lack of affective involvement, is detrimental to the
translation itself and that contrary to protecting against the horror of
change, may in fact import a horror of dispassionate disengagement
from a communicative interaction.

90
 Carolyn Shread

To return again to The Heidegger Change, Malabou also brings up

the possibility that the horror associated with translation is a result
of the fact that there are only a minority of transformers, that the task
of the translator is unusual in that it grapples with the ontological
challenge of life:

Why does philosophy, Heidegger asks in An Introduction to

Metaphysics, remain unable to initiate an immediate mutation
of the condition of the world? "Because philosophy is the
direct concern of the few. Which few? The ones who transform
[metamorphose] creatively, who unsettle things [die schaffend
Verwandelnden, die Umsetzenden]." (HC 275)

This rarity of those involved in transformation is certainly

borne out by the facts of our translation culture in the United States
in which Ontology of the Accident is a rare bird, one of less than 500
books translated annually from French into English.16 Given that
translations are so few and far between, I am strongly aware, as
Malabou's translator, of a tradition of translating "French theory"
for the American market. As Claire Goldberg Moses' article, "Made
in America: 'French Feminism' in Academia," argues cogently, in
the 1970s the translation of French theory had a tremendous impact
on exactly what kind of feminism, which French feminism was
introduced into North America.17 How will the receiving culture
in this translational exchange affect the way Malabou is read in the
United States? What does her thought offer an American market,
and which needs does she fill? These are some of the questions this
issue of theory@buffalo seeks to address and to shape, for the process
of transmission ofMalabou's translations is far from complete. What
horrors will her work awake or quiet?
To conclude, let us acknowledge that translation bears the
signature of change and that change is sometimes horrifyingly
different. To translate is to ask "The prohibited question that is
negatively possible that shelters in the heart of any story, any
translation, any genesis. Not what is going to be, but what could
have been" (OAc 62). Translation bears the horror, the possibility of
the accident of the text, not within an economy of gains or losses, but
as its ontological condition.

91
theory@buffalo 16

Notes
1. See Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator'' ll/uminations, trans. Harry Zohn.
(London: Fontana, 1923), 70-82. Retranslated: "The Translator's Task," trans. Steven
Rendall. Traduction, Terminologie, Rtdaction, 10.2 (1997): 151-165.

2. See Gayatri Spivak, "The Politics of Translation," Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary

Feminist Debates, ed. Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips. (Stanford: Stanford Uf� 1992),
177-200.
3. See Lawrence Venuti, "Towards a Translation Culture," The Iowa Review Forum on
Literature and Translation, www.iowareview.org. It is important to emphasize that
many countries begin from the assumption of a translation culture, either due to
the demands of bilingualism or multilingualism, or because of power differentials
that oblige them to recognize the production of other cultures. Within the context
of the United States, the website (http:/ /www.rochester.edu/College/translation/
threepercent/ v) offers a venue for a sustained critique of the Three Percent problem.

4. $(.-c Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference

(London: Routledge, 1998).
5. See To beTranslated or Not to Be: PENIIRL Report 011 the Internatio11al Situation ofLiterary
Tra11slation, ed. Esther Allen (2007), (http:/ /www.pen.org/downloads/documents/
TranslationReport.pdf). This offers an overview of the situation of Hterary translation
ac.ross international publishing norms.

6. See Carolyn Shread, "Metamorphosis or Metramorphosis? Towa.rds a Feminist

Ethics of Difference in TransJation,".Traduction, terminologie, redaction, 20.2 (2008): 213-
242; "Transformations of Violence in Translation: Metramorphic Gains and Plastic
Regeneration in Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Les Rapaces," Re-engendering Translation:
Transcultural Practice, Sexuality a11d the Politics of Alterity, ed. Christopher Larkosh,
(Manchester: St. Jerome, 2011); and "Catherine Malabou's Plasticity in Translation,"
Traduction, terminologie, redaction (forthcoming).
7. To give just one other example of a commentator critiquing this practice, in Richard
Watts' PackagingPost/Coloniality: The Ma11ufacture of Literary
Identity in the Francophone
World (Maryland: Lexington Books, 2005) he notes: "the name of the translator or
even the mere indication that the text is a translation appears nowhere on the front or
back covers of Texaco, Creole Folktales, or Solibo Magnificent. This is not surprising
since all three novels were published by large commercial presses, and it is common
practice among trade publishers to obscure the fact that a work is a translation,
and this for strictly commercial reasons. Evidence of translation on the cover of a
work, typically indicated by the name of the translator, is the unambiguous mark
of the book's foreignness, which would render the slight chance of a translation's
commercial success even more remote" (165-166).

8. See Lawrence Venuti, The Translator's Invisibility (London: Routledge, 1995).

9. See Catherine Porter, "Translation as Scholarship,'' ADFL Bulletin, 14.2 (2009): 7-13.
10. See Michelle Mass� and Katie J. Hogan, Over Tm Million Served: Ce11dered Service i11
Lm1guage and Literature Workplaces (Albany: SUNY P, 2010).
11. "She recounts, with a smile, how this decisive tum in her work initially occurred
by chance. 'I happe11ed to read an issue of the journal Research on the topic of memory, in

92
 Carolyn Shread

which one of the articles discussed neuronal plasticity. I realized that this was exactly what I
was working on in Hegel. . .'What interested her in this chance encounter was that in it she

found 'the translation ofa concept in matter itself,' the unexpected incarnation of a pure
object of thought n
i a concrete problem" (my translation).

12. In French, plastiquage is a bomb attack. Plastiquer is to carry out a bomb attack.

13. See Carolyn Shread, "On Becoming in Translation: Articulating Feminisms in the
Translation of Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Les Rapaces," Women and Translation: Returning
to Feminist Theory in Translation, ed. Luise von Flotow (Ottawa: U Ottawa P, 2011 ),
283-303.

14. See Lori Chamberlain, "Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation," Signs 13,
(1988): 454-472.
15. See, for instance, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Sarah, trans. Deborah Jenson and
Doris Y. Kadish (New York: MLA, 2008). Review by Carolyn Shread, in Metamorphoses:
The Journal ofthe Five College Seminar on Literary Translation 17.2, 183-186. The paratexts
of the text and translation series can be viewed at: http:/ Iwww.mla.orgl store ICJD43.

16. See Gis�le Sapiro, ed., Trans/alia: Le marclu! de Ia traduction en France ii /'heure de Ia
mondialisation, (Paris: CNRS, 2008).
17. See Claire Goldberg Moses, "Made in America: "French Feminism" in Academia."
In Roger C�Iestin, Eliane DaiMolin, Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. Beyond French
Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1981-2001. (New York,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 261-284.

Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. "The Task of the Translator." Illuminations. 1923. Trans.
Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, 1968. 70-82.
---. "The Translator's Task." Traduction, terminologie, redaction 10.2 (1997):
151-165. Trans. Steven Randall.
Chamberlain, Lori. "Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation." Signs 13
(1988): 454-472.
Cronin, Michael. Translation and Globalization. London: Routledge, 2003.
Derrida, Jacques. The Ear ofthe Other: Otobiography, Trartsference, Translation:
Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Ed.
Claude Levesque and Christie MacDonald. Lincoln: U Nebraska P,
1982.
Goldberg Moses, Claire. "Made in America: 'French Feminism' in
Academia." Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and
Culture in France 1981-2001. Ed. Roger Celesin,
t Eliane Dal Molin,
Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 261-
284.
Legrand, Stephane. "Catherine Malabou: La Philosophie a orchestre
l'impossibilite de Ia femme comme sujet." Le Monde. 18 February
2009.

93
theory@buffalo 16

Malabou, Catherine. Changer de difference: Lefeminin et Ia question

philosophique. Paris: GaliMe, 2009.
---. Changing Difference: The Feminine and the Question ofPhilosophy. Trans.
Carolyn Shread. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2011. [CD]
---. LA plasticite au soir de l'ecriture: Dialectique, destruction, deconstruction.
Paris: Leo Scheer, 2005.
---. Le Change de Heidegger, du fantastique en philosophie. Paris: Leo Scheer,
2004. [LCH]
---. The Heidegger Change: On the Question of the Fantastic in Philosophy. Trans.
Peter Skafish. Albany: SUNY P, 2011. [HC]
---. Ontologie de I'accident: Essai sur Ia plasticite destructrice. Paris: Leo Scheer,
2009. [OA]
--. Ontology ofthe Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity. Trans. Carolyn
Shread. Cambridge: Polity (2012). [OAc]
---. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destructio11, Deco11struction.
Trans. Carolyn Shread. New York: Columbia UP, 2009. [PDW]
---. Quefaire de notre cerveau? Paris: Bayard, 2004.
---. What Should We Do With Our Brain? Trans. Sebastian Rand. New York:
Fordham UP, 2008. [WDB]
Mandik, Pete. Review of What Should We Do With Our Brain? Notre Dame
Philosophical Reviews. 27 April 2009. Web. 28 October 2011.
Porter, Catherine. "Translation as Scholarship." ADFL Bulletin 41.2 (2009):
.

7-13.
To Be Translated or Not to Be: PEN/IRL Report on the International Situation of
Literary Translation. Ed. Esther Allen. Barcelona: Institut Ramon Llull,
July 2007.
Sapiro, Gisele, ed. Translatio: Le marche de Ia traduction en Fra11ce a l'heure de
la mondilisation. Paris: CNRS, 2008.
Shread, Carolyn. "Catherine Malabou's Plasticity in Translation."
Traduction, terminologie, redaction, Special issue on Philosophy and
Translation (forthcoming).
---. "Metamorphosis or Metramorphosis? Towards a Feminist Ethics of
Difference in Translation." Traduction, terminologie, redaction 20.2
(2008): 213-242.
---. "Transformations of Violence in Translation: Metamorphic Gains and
Plastic Regeneration in Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Les Rapaces." Re­
engenderillg Translation: Transcultural Practice, Sexuality, and the Politics
ofAlterity. Ed. Christopher Larkosh. Manchester: Saint Jerome P,
2011.
Spivak, Gayatri. "The Politics of Translation." Destabilizing Theory:
Contemporary Feminist Debates. Ed. Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992. 177-200.
Venuti, Lawrence. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference.
London: Routledge, 1998.
---. The Translator's Invisibility. London: Routledge, 1995.

94
 Carolyn Shread

--. 'Towards a Translation Culture." The Iowa Review Forum on Literature

and Translation. www.theiowareview.org. 6 October 2011. Web. 15
October 2011.
Von Flotow, Luise. Translating Women. Ottawa: U Ottawa P, 2011.
Watts, Richard. Packaging Post/Coloniality: Tile Manufacture ofLiterary
Identity in the Francophone World. Lanham: Lexington, 2005.

95
 Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

PLASTICITY AND METAMORPHOSIS: ON THE ENCOUNTER

BETWEEN DECONSTRUCTION ;.\ND fEMINISM FROM THE OTHER SIDE

With the publication of (lumerous books and the growing

number of English translations, including, among others, Plasticity
and the Dusk oJWriting, The Fut_ure ofHegel, and What Should We Do with
Our Brain?, among others, Catherine Malabou is widely considered
one of the most important and i(tnovative continental philosophers
to emerge in France in the aftermath of deconstruction. Yet, as
Changing Difference makes abundantly clear, Malabou's proximity
to deconstruction does not mea(t that she is a faithful guardian of
Jacques Derrida's legacy. On the contrary, throwing her freedom "on
the page the way you fling a coat over your shoulder . . . [a] freedom
dearly acquired" (CD 3), MalaboU is a kind of naughty daughter of
deconstruction, or perhaps its JllOSt inventive practitioner. In fact,
she boldly proclaims that we no longer live in the epoch of writing,
that for deconstruction to have � future, the project of writing and
grammatology calls for its own supplement, which, for historical
and philosophical reasons displt�ces the primacy of ecriture. Thus,
for Malabou the future of decon�truction does not lie in repetition,
commentary, or even disseminatjon of Derrida's "methodology" to
new areas of inquiry, but rather in an inventive recovery of what
exceeds the boundaries of the jJlitial project. To put it otherwise,
the continuation of deconstruction entails a certain dissidence from
within: "when it is a question today of measuring the legacy of
Derrida, of recovering what he left to share with the future, it is not
about repeating him . . . It is a qtJestion of inventing deconstruction

96
 Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

from the place of an internal dissidence" (CD 72).

As Derrida himself taught us, to be faithful to the letter
of deconstruction is to be unfaithful to it; to be grateful for the
other's generosity is to be ungrateful. Only under these condiions
t
is the asymmetry of the encounter and the alterity of the other
not assimilated to the discourse of the same. Malabou faithfully
responds to this impossible predicament of fidelity and dissidence by
following Derrida's own speculations about the future of difference
as rigorously as possible. In Margins of Philosophy, Derrida points out
that "differance may very well, indeed must, one day be superseded,
lending itself if not to its own replacement, at least to enmeshing
itself in a chain that in truth it never will have governed" (7). This
means that writing itself is open to its own substitution, that it can
give way to other, as yet unforeseeable supplements, emerging from
the historicity of philosophy and thought. Malabou's deconstructive
response to deconstruction takes a form of such a supplement, which
she calls the supplement of plasticity. Understood as a temporary
supplement, open to its own replacements, the notion of plasticity
"attempt[s] to displace the concept of writing, to alter the trajectory
of deconstruction, to plasticize difference and differance" (CD 3).
The concept of plasticity is a key term in Malabou's work,
the main thread in the diverse areas of her philosophical inquiry.
It emerged in her study of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and has
accompanied her in the difficult task of thinking philosophically
about the advances of neurobiology and neuroscience. When she
introduced her concept of plasticity in The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,
Temporality and Dialectic, she stressed its double connotation as "a
capacity to receive form and a capacity to produce form" (FH 9).
The crucial implication of this uncanny or "dialectical" adjective
is that it avoids both amorphousness (the lack of from) and the
violent impositions of form from without: "'Plastic' thus designates
those things that lend themselves to being formed while resisting
deformation" (FH 9), even though at its most extreme, plastic can
also mean an explosive destruction. What is important for my
own engagement with Malabou's thought is that even in its first
appearance, plasticity is related both to unforseen historicity (an
"excess of time over time" [FH 6]) and to sensibility, "accounting for
the incarnation" (FH 18) of spirit. Thus plasticity cannot be reduced
to the problematic of form alone, as Derrida's "Preface" to The Future
ofHegel suggests, but from the outset implies reciprocal interrelations
between form and matter. This point will be crucial for Malabou's

97
theory@buffalo 16

engagement with gender theory, as it will allow her to challenge the

dogma of anti-essentialism in feminism.
In Changing Difference, Malabou tests the plasticity of
deconstruction and French continental philosophy more generally,
to address and to respond to the concerns of feminist philosophy and
the "precarious," to use Judith Butler's term, situation of a woman
philosopher. Although references to the feminine or sexual difference
appear frequently in Derrida's and Emmanuel Levinas's texts-one
can refer, for example, to feminine hospitality in Levinas's Totality
and Infinity-there is a paucity of any serious engagement with the
actual work of feminist philosophers, or feminist theories. Does
"writing like a woman" without reading women's texts enable or
preclude (or even appropriate in advance) the possibility of a feminist
philosophy? Still, despite this appropriative gesture, Derrida's work
has been very influential for feminist theory in America, including
my own work, even if feminist debt to, critiques and revisions of,
deconstruction have often proceeded in unforeseeable, playful, and
surprising directions, finding resources in Derrida's work in order to
overcome the limits of that work.
Although Cha� Difference has to be considered within this
f
larger field femini ��.deconstruction debatep � t e boek proposes
�
a new encounter '"' ween American gend�r I ue�r I
.
t;)n
sgender
studies and French poststructuralist philosop· y, an encounter that
is based this time on the French philosophical response to new
American theoretical developments in the field of sexuality and queer
theory, in particular to the work of Judith Butler. Malabou argues that
the shift from a feminism based on sexual difference to a feminism
based on a multiplicity of differences has not yet been accounted
for philosophically. Although perhaps it is not the case that queer
theory has never been confronted with deconstruction, as Malabou
suggests, since Butler's work implicitly or explicitly engages Derrida
(for instance his notion of iterability), it is nonetheless true that "[t]he
idea of 'gender' has never been taken back to its ontological source"
(CD 1-2). Indeed, the complex exchanges between deconstruction,
gender theory, and feminist philosophy in America have taken place
primarily in the arena of discourse and ethics and less so in the context
of the post-Heideggerian ontological tradition. Malabou "seeks to
engage this dialogue" (CD 2). To address the discursive, ontological,
and-do we dare to use this term?-"biological" dimensions of
gender differences, Malabou returns to the model of plasticity and
its conflicting links with deconstruction and neurobiology she

98
 Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

developed in her previous work. Ultimately, she claims that after the
mimicry of philosophy proposed by Luce Irigaray and the critical
performativity developed by Butler, the model of plasticity can open
new horizons of transformation, plurality, and freedom for feminism.
In the first part of her argument, Malabou eloquently analyzes
both the debt of feminism to deconstruction and the limits, if not
impossibilities, that deconstruction presents for feminism. More
specifically, she examines the relation between two different
developments: the pluralization of ontological differences and the
role of the feminine in the work of Levinas and Derrida on the
one hand, and the pluralization of gender differences in American
feminist theory on the other. Her readings of Levinas, Derrida, and
Irigaray are often breathtaking in and of themselves. Yet, it is the
theoretical and political implications of these interpretations that
articulate a new, urgent problem for feminism. We can formulate
this problem in the following way: how can feminist philosophy
overcome the impasse created by the tension between the plurality
of differences within feminism, which might tend toward neutrality,
on the one hand, and the specificity of sexual difference, which might
tend toward gender identity, if not to so called essentialism, on the
other? As Malabou puts it:

To speak of the "feminine" would thus lead, one way or another,

to a reinforcement of traditional divisions and a reduction in
the breadth of difference. However, and this is the point I now
wish to anal , e c igue of feminine specificity also leads
·

to a dead e a.�
This is why one orThe main tasks of her work is to account for the
plurality of differences in terms of the plasiticity of gender while
avoiding the neutrality and erasure of the "feminine."
Like Luce Irigaray, Malabou argues that the neutrality of
discourse is intertwined with the theoretical and political violence
against women. She worries that the impossibility of women's self
definition means that they are defined by violence directed against
them:

I explore a new resistance by woman to the constant violence­

theoretical and Real-to which she is subjected all over the
' I seek recognition for a certain feminine
world every day. . :')
space that s e s--(mpossible, yet is also very dangerous to
effi

99
theory@buffalo 16

try to deny. It may be that woman is only defined negatively

with respect to the violence that is done to her . . . but this
negative definition nonetheless constitutes the resist t stock
�
�
that distinguishes the feminine from all other t en>f fr ility,
from overexposure to exploitation and brutalit . (CD 2)
-- � .,..,

Although the question of violence against women has world­

wide implications, Malabou addresses it from the personal and
institutional context she is most familiar with: from the position of a
feminist continental philosopher or, to be more specific, of a feminist
continental philosopher in France, where the recent importation
of gender theory, queer theory, race theory, and American
multiculturalism is viewed with suspicion, if not resistance. One
might argue that this is a privileged position, but even such a
privilege comes at a price. Malabou diagnoses two main stages of
the institutional formation of the woman philosopher, each with its
own possibilities, shortcomings, and dangers. The first stage is the
prerequisite stage of training, of acquiring "mastery," of learning
how to speak in the monolingual neutral voice of philosophy,
which excludes sexual difference, and, on the basis of this exclusion,
implicitly or explicitly associates neutrality and universality with
masculinity. Many women philosophers do not move beyond this
relation to philosophy, which is required from them institutionally.
Yet, acquiring such disciplinary mastery, though not without its
pleasures and satisfactions, occurs at the price of a violence that is
both institutional and self-inflicted. As Malabou puts it: "if I'm a
philosopher it is at the price of a tremendous violence, the violence
that philosophy constantly does to me and the violence I inflict on it
in return" (CD 140-41).
The awareness of such violence is what attracted Malabou
to the deconstruction of philosophical mastery in the first place.
Thus, after mastering classical metaphysics, she "masters" the
deconstruction of mastery. And she credits Derrida for being a
philosopher who is more aware than others of the aporetic absence
of femininity in the discourse of philosophy and who attempts to
inscribe such an absence as one of the privileged tropes of the critique
of metaphysics, presence, and phallogocentrism. For deconstruction,
"women's speech was another's speech, one that could both offer
and challenge metaphysics with a radical outside, the chance for a
new way of being and writing" (CD 107). But, like other feminist
readers of Derrida, Malabou underscores a profound ambiguity that

100
 Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

the Derridean posture of speaking as a woman presents for women

philosophers. According to Malabou, "Derrida's feminist speech
. . . liberates the feminine while depriving it of the authority of its
own emancipation" (CD 109). Yet, even though numerous feminist
thinkers have redeployed aspects of deconstruction toward their
own thinking, and even though there have been many provocative
alliances between feminism and deconstruction, especially in the
United States-for example, Derrida owes the English translation of
OJGrammatolo� a woman, a remarkable theorist in her own right,
r> Gayatri Spiv 4-,'Mjtlabou rightly points out that it is difficult to
' imagine a fem ftnsrmvention or reinvention of deconstruction itself.
Hence Malabou proposes a necessary supplement of deconstruction
by feminism, a supplement mediated by gender studies and feminist
philosophy in the United States.
It is one of the ironies in her own formation as a philosopher
that Malabou discovers so-called French feminism, the work of
Monique Wittig, Julia Kristeva, and Irigaray, while teaching and
lecturing in the United States. This encounter, in particular with the
work of Luce Irigaray, but also with American queer and gender
theory, especially with the work of Judith Butler, allows Malabou
to assess the possibilities and limitations of the feminist mimicry of
the masculine, heteronormative discourse. Malabou calls this stage
in her own thinking in terms of the shift from "of acting as if" to
the parodic acting together, thinking with, and sometimes writing
and collaborating with other women philosophers and critics.
For example, Malabou was instrumental in the translation and
introduction of Butler's work to French philosophy. The collaboration
with Butler has lead to the joined investigation of the question of
the body in the Hegelian master-slave dialectic. Thinking with
other women puts into question the still prevailing philosophical
triad of Man, God, Philosopher, which Malabou already examines
in The Future of Hegel. Fragmenting each of these terms, this trans­
subjective engagement among women allows us, as Irigaray puts it,
"to interrogate these terms as particularities" which suppress sexual
difference and the interrelations with others more generally, within
the (masculine) universal (I Love To You 36) .
Thinking with other women-who, from their own
theoretical perspectives, diagnose and rework the gender trouble
in philosophy-creates, according to Malabou, a space for
women's philosophical thought but also impedes and transforms
the discipline of philosophy as such: "a trans-philosophical space,

101
theory@buffalo 16

one in which women are allowed to transform their impossibility

of being into a specific power . . . this space can no longer be the
space of philosophy; it must be philosophy impeded" (CD 111).
This supplementary impediment created by thinking with other
women transforms "[t]he impossibility of being a woman" into
"the impossibility of philosophy" (CD 111). The methodological
question that Malabou raises is how such a "trans" space-trans­
philosophical, trans-subjective, trans-gender-is to be constructed
within philosophical discourse. The two most established feminist
methodological approaches that present themselves are Irigarayan
mimicry and Butlerian performativity of hegemonic discourse. Even
though both of these approaches can be interpreted as "supplements"
questioning the primacy of origins, Malabou argues that neither
mimicry nor performativity are sufficient. She worries that one
can be stuck in repetition, even if it is repetition with a difference.
Certainly she is not the only one to articulate the limitations of
mimicry. lrigaray herself, let us recall, argues that such parodic
mimicry of philosophical discourse not only exposes the invisible
place of the exploitation of the feminine but also reveals a possibility
of the feminine "operation" in language {I Love To You 127). Such a
feminine operation in Irigaray's later work moves beyond mimicry
into multiple inscriptions of the plural feminine subjectivities into
the neutral homosocial discourse of philosophy and politics.
I had the opportunity to experience first hand such a pleasure
of collaboration, of thinking with Catherine Malabou, in our joined
project focused on lrigaray's reading of Hegel, which is one of the
main frameworks of her political philosophy in her later texts. For
both of us it was a new departure: Malabou worked on Hegel in
her book The Future of Hegel in the context of her philosophy of
plasticity and on Irigaray in the context of deconstruction, but has
not yet interrogated Irigaray's own relationship to Hegel. I worked
on Irigaray's ethics of sexual difference in the context of my theory
of feminist ethics of dissensus, but I focused primarily on Irigaray's
engagements with Lacan and Levinas. So for both of us it was an
opportunity to expand our previous interpretations of lrigaray and
to "think with" each other. This collaboration resulted in a "trans"­
subjectively structured essay, "Negativity, Unhappiness or Felicity:
On Irigaray's Culture of Sexual Difference" (forthcoming in Esprit
Createur). During our conversations and writing, what emerged
as the key problem in Irigaray's work is the relationship between
negativity and felicity in politics, history, as well as in philosophy

102
 Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

and personal life (in erotic relations, for example). We began our
interrogation with Irigaray's critique and re-elaboration of the
Hegelian concept of negativity in terms of cultivation and becoming.
It is from the perspective of such a becoming that Irigaray rethinks
the relationship between nature and culture, gender and the polis.
Yet, while the notion of negativity in Irigaray's work is more
readily apparent, her idea of happiness is less so, at least it is less
frequently elaborated philosophically. Thus, we focused on Hegel's
abandonment of his early ideas of love and happiness as the motors
of dialectics, and Irigaray's return to these "abandoned threads." As
we argued, Hegel failed to think through the dialectical relations
between felicity, negativity, and becoming_ despite his provocative
articulation of love as labor. Irigaray's concept of felicity is thus
an implicit critique of Hegel's treachery against his own thought;
without this critical engagement with Hegel, it would seem naive
and deprived of any philosophical interest and tradition. Why do
we continue to reenact this Hegelian failure to address felicity as a
crucial problem of politics, including feminist politics today, without
an awareness that it might indeed be a failure? Thinking negativity
and felicity together as the two sides of the process of becoming still
seems to be an impossible task but after all, Irigaray presents herself
as "militant for the impossible, which is not to say a utopian. Rather
I want what is yet to be as the only possibility of a future" (I Love To
You 10). Our question was whether the relationship between felicity
and negativity could open such a future for feminist philosophy and
for dialectics itself.
Herself a "militant for the impossible," Catherine Malabou is
ultimately a thinker of the transformation of the impossible into the
possibility of a future, the possibility of invention. We hear such a
"militant" undertone in her description of her own relationship to
philosophy in terms of a constant battle (CD 141). The task of such
transformation is intertwined for her with the third dimension of
her work, or what she calls "thinking without." Moving beyond
the established coordinates and protocols, "thinking without" is an
inventive leap, transforming the impossibility of being a woman
into the impossibility of philosophy itself. Malabou performs
another surprising trans-philosophical move by asking us to
reconsider whether it is possible to give up the schema of woman
altogether without addressing the violent consequences of such an
erasure. Is there a remainder of woman beyond the power of the
negative, beyond the "feminine" figuration of the impediments,

103
theory@buffalo 16

limits, or impossibility of philosophy? Consequently after her

diagnosis of the impossibility of philosoph� which would also
include the impossibility of feminist philosophy, Malabou proposes
the transgression of the limits of philosophy by feminism. That is
why "thinking with" other women and "thinking without'' are
not mutually exclusive or successive stages; on the contrary, it is
perhaps only in the trans-philosophical space, opened by thinking
with, that one can begin to m
i agine the remainder of woman
otherwise than as the figuration of philosophical impossibility. What
motivates Malabou to risk this impossible possibility of woman is
the complicity between the philosophical, the political, and even the
anti-essentialist violence, all of which "empty woman" out of herself
(CD 139). In order to oppose such violence, Malabou argues that "it
is necessary to imagine the possibility of woman starting from the
structural impossibility she experiences of not being violated, in
herself and outside, everywhere" (CD 140).
Yet, if anti-essentialist dogma stands accused of violence,
then does Malabou's attempt to imagine the possibility of woman
in the aftermath of gender multiplicity risk essentialism? What
about the violence of essentialism itself, diagnosed by so many
feminist thinkers? How do we move beyond the essentialism/ anti­
essentialism binary? Like Irigaray before her, yet in a different mode,
Malabou returns to post-Heideggerian ontology, in particular to the
ontic-ontological difference, in order to address these questions head
on and to deconstruct, if you will, the anti-essentialism/ essentialism
opposition in feminist theory. Malabou's critical rethinking of
post-Heideggerian ontology challenges, first of all, the ordinary
understanding of essence in feminist theory, usually conceived as
presence, truth, or the unchanging biological determination of gender
identity. By contrast, Heidegger offers Malabou the possibility of
transformation, which operates not only on the cultural/historical
(ontic) level but also on the ontological level of the temporality of
being. As she argues "there has always been a misunderstanding
of this term ['essence'] which, as Heidegger shows (and I have
emphasized this point), has only ever designated, under the skin of
metaphysics and despite ontological dogma, the transformability of
beings, never their substantial stability" (CD 136). Thus, if there is a
remainder of essence in feminist theory, then such essence does not
designate biological determinism of gender but opens the possibility
of becoming and transformation. It is this transformability of beings
that Malabou calls ontological plasticity or, "transvestism of being."

104
 Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

Parenthetically, I would like to suggest that Malabou's

ontological plasticity opens a new methodological perspective
of re-reading lrigaray's proposal to reinterpret sexual difference
from the perspective the ontico-ontological difference. To be sure,
as Malabou consistently argues, there is no reason why we should
name or limit the exchange between the ontic and the ontological
registers of becoming to "the feminine" alone. On the contrary, the
feminine is just one of the many points of such an exchange, and
at her best moments, Irigaray stresses this multiplicity of relations,
which include the world itself. Thus, reading Irigaray's own critical
return to Heidegger against the grain, so to speak, we can argue that
it is not the case that the ontico-ontological difference is limited to
sexual difference but, rather, that the ontico-ontological exchange,
or the plasticity of being, provides a broader horizon for thinking
sexual difference, which preserves the remainder of the feminine.
But how do ontological plasticity, temporality, and
transformation allow us to rethink the old divide between biology
and the cultural construction of gender? Again Malabou turns the
question on its head and asks why malleability of gender, or any
"identity" for that matter, should be limited to culture and politics.
Isn't it time to rethink biology itself to show that there is no natural
identity, no biological determinism, and that the plasticity of
being operates already on the biological level? Malabou insists on
"deconstructing the idea of biological rigidity and showing, once
again, that there are no grounds for a concept of essence, conceived
of as substance, be it ontological or natural. Transformability is at
work from the start, it trumps all determination" (CD 139). The
plasticity of the biological is the most original and most important
insight that emerges from Malabou's research in neurobiology. I
would argue that her most crucial contribution to gender theory
and deconstruction itself is not just the elaboration of the concept
of the plasticity of gender but the extension of its frame of reference
from writing, culture, and politics into biology itself. As Malabou
writes, "[t]o construct one's identity is a process that can only
be a development of an original biological malleability, a first
transformability. If sex were not plastic there would be no gender.
If something were not offered for transformation in the natural and
anatomical determination of sex, then identity construction would
not be possible" (CD 138). For Malabou "[e]verything starts with
metamorphosis" (CD 139). The philosophical elaboration of this
claim sums up the consistency and the complexity of Malabou's

105
theory@buffalo 16

project, as it unfolds from her engagements with Hegel, Derrida,

neurobiology, and gender studies.

Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U
Chicago P, 1985.
Jrigaray, Luce. I Love to You: Sketch ofa Possible Felicity in History. New York:
Routledge, 1995.
Malabou, Catherine. Changing Difference. Trans. Carolyn Shread.
Cambridge: Polity, 2011. [CD]
---. The Future ofHegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic. Trans. Lisbeth
During. New York: Routledge, 2005. [FH]

106
 John D. Caputo

VorR VENIR: How FAR PLASTICITY CAN BE STRETCHED

Does the Absolute have a chance? Is there the chance of an event in

Hegel? Does Hegel still have a chance? Is there is a true future [avenir],
something to come, a venir, in the Absolute, in Hegel's Absolute, in
Hegel?
In The Future of Hegel, Catherine Malabou offers an engaging
argument for the possibility of the event in Hegel. She disputes
Heidegger's contention that in Hegel the eyes of the Spirit are turned
toward the past, that the Spirit has no future, and that absolute
knowledge is the end of time. She worries that, having been convinced
by Heidegger that Hegel bids adieu to time, contemporary philosophers
have bid adieu to Hegel (FH 4). Under her signature concept of
"plasticity," Malabou tries to reverse that trend by showing that, for
Hegel, Spirit admits of the event [evenement] (FH 103), that Hegel
respects the contingency of the event as something radically to come
[a venir] (FH 162). The Spirit, Hegel's Spirit, and Hegel-the name
of thinker is the name of a matter to be thought-do indeed have a
future [avenir]. Her reading is organized around a central trope, voir
venir, an expression she has adopted from Derrida, which wavers
undecidably between foreseeability, fore-seeing what is coming, and
unforeseeability, as when we say in English let's "see what comes" of
doing this or that. For when it comes to the event, in Derrida, we are
calling for the coming of something that we can't see coming, preparing
for something for which we cannot be prepared. So Malabou sets out to
show there is the chance of an event in Hegel.

107
theory@buffalo 16

I. HEGEL AND THE DEATH oF Goo

In an adroit comparison of Hegel and Aristotle, Malabou

shows the way in which Hftgeltakes �p the self-thinking thought of
Aristotle and sets it forth Yvor-stellen!J h history, translating it into the
progressive stages ofJhe education of the Spirit. The Spirit moves
through time along ,.a )� er· s of auto-transformations of its stored
up virtual energies {he xis] s it makes its way on its long journey
home through the W. . A school of American theologians say
Hegel invented "process theology," because he "dynamizes" the
Aristotelian theos (FH 52-53). Nonetheless, by setting God in time and
time in God, by putting the virtual into God (FH 45) Hegel earned
the wrath of traditional theologians, who accuse him of reducing
God to something needy and imperfect (FH 91ff). They object that
Hegel robs God of transcendence, and thereby robs God of his free
gift-giving generosity and his future. If God is reduced to a needy
and necessitarian process, where everything that happens in God is
prescribed by the essential laws inscribed in the Logic, then nothing
can really "happen" in Hegel's God. There can be no "event" of
God's free self-giving advent.
Malabou defends Hegel against this charge by arguing that
God's activity is not a lack but a "plasticity." God is not a pure
and static actus but a dynamic actio [Tiitigkeit] with a real future as
opposed to dwelling in a distant heaven absorbed in an isolating self­
thinking thought. Malabou reproduces almost exactly the argument
that has been going on for decades, between American process
philosophers and traditional Thomists, about the relative superiority
of temporal action versus a timeless pure act.1 In an impressive
account of the "death of God," she argues that Hegel describes a
"double kenosis:" God is "presented" at a "distance" [vor-gestellt] by
man only because God himself presents himself to man at a distance
(FH 112). The image of the distant God in religious representation
[Vorstellung] is not the result of a human limitation but the issue of
God representing himself, something going on in God himself. Just
so, Heidegger maintained that the various metaphysical epochs are
not constituted by the "theories" of "metaphysicians" but by the way
Being has granted itself to their thinking. Religion is not a figure of
our imagination but the way God figures divine being in the world,
gives divinity form in space and time, God's plasticity. Christianity is
the pivot of history in which this double kenosis (Phil. 2:7)-literally
"emptying" but importantly translated by Luther as Entausserung,

108
 John Caputo

externalization or alienation-is overcome with a single blow, a coup

de grace, in which God rises to a knowledge of himself in the same
act in which man rises to a knowledge of God when each rises to a
knowledge of their unity with the other. As Meister Eckhart said-in
a text that caught Hegel's eye-the eye in which I see God is the
same eye in which God sees me.2
Christ then is not merely a Greek "plastic individual"-in
English, we would say a "role model"-the "becoming essential of
the accidental," but an ontological event in the history of the Geist,
the "becoming accidental of the essential." For Hegel, Christ is not
the model of an ideal life, a gifted and charismatic man, a genius,
a spell-binding preacher, a magnetic personality, like Pericles or
Socrates. That is pure paganism. Christ is the Vor-stellung of the
Absolute, God's self-presentation in time and space, who presents
himself not as an aristocratic Aristotelian phronimos but in the form
of a servant. Christ was not a great man; he was the God-man, the
"monstrous compound"(Hegel, Lectures 457? the becoming subject
of substance, expressed artistically not in the stone-blind figures of
sculpture but in painting, which can alone capture the heartbreak
in his eyes (FH 117). Christ is the way God sees himself coming
(FH 118), a temporal intuition of the Absolute (FH 121), the way the
Absolute is "schematized" in time. God is dead-Long live God.
The death of (the distant) God is the birth of (the immanent) God,
of God's authentic and unalienated life in time. It is like the king's
two bodies, except that it has to do with incarnation itself, with being
embodied in the first place.

II. SPECULATIVE HERMENEUTICS

The only "end of time" in Hegel, therefore, is the end of the

time of alienation (127-28), but that end is the beginning of the
time of plasticity, of the auto-transforming life of the Absolute in
time. The future is only beginning. That future is comprehended
in philosophy, which is "absolute knowledge," the "speculative"
process. Malabou calls this "speculative hermeneutics," meaning
the speculative art of interpreting historical forms of life as forms of
the life of the Spirit, seeing how the outlines of the Absolute emerge
from the materials of multiplicity and contingency. The speculative
hermeneut reads the book of the Absolute; the Absolute opens like
a book to the hermeneut (FH 167). Where Heidegger's hermeneutics
of "facticity" means there are only interpretations, not absolutes (no

109
theory@buffalo 16

"absolute knowledge"), Malabou's speculative hermeneutics refers

to the power to discern the form of the essential (absolute) in the
figures of the accidental (contingency) and the ability to locate the
figures of accidental within the form of the essential. Speculative
hermeneutics unites the becoming essential of the accidental (the
Greek) and the becoming accidental of the essential (the Christian).
The hermeneutic eye of the speculative philosopher can see the ways
that Spirit condenses itself into a succession of historical forms into
which its previous forms have vanished only to be recapitulated and
contained there virtualiter. Each figure of the spirit is a hexis of the
Spirit, ready to be deployed in a new context.
The speculative hermeneut can discern the same self­
transforming Spirit; can stay in play with the play between its
necessity and contingency (FH 161). That, says Malabou, allows
for the event, for the "fundamental truth of Hegelianism," which
is the mutual support the necessary and the aleatory lend each
other (FH 163). Her speculative hermeneutics is a hermeneutics
of "absolute" facticity, of what she calls the "absolute fact:" it
"assumes as an absolute fact the emergence of the random in the
very bosom of necessity and the fact that the random, the aleatory,
becomes necessary" (FH 163). Absolute knowledge thus "cancels all
tendency to question whether a wholly different origin might have
been possible, whether there could have been a wholly different
destination from the one that actually came to pass" (FH 163), all of
which would be so much alienation, the idleness of having too much
empty time (Kantian time) on one's hands.
Thought overcomes alienation by seeing the necessity in the
contingent, by saying with the later Heidegger that we cannot inquire
into the possibility of another way of Being, other than the one we
received. This reminds of the Heidegger of Being and Time who says
in § 74 that authentic resoluteness drives out all accidentality from
the tradition by choosing what we have inherited which gives it the
sense of a fate (435). Heidegger, Malabou comments, could not have
said such things without Hegel-unless perhaps Malabou could not
have said such a thing about Hegel without Heidegger. Necessity is
the felt or experienced necessity of the contingent once it is actually
given, after which it seems it could not have been otherwise. In that
way, the event of the future and the tradition are put back into play
(FH 190).

1 10
 John Caputo

III. HEGEL's TELESCOPE

Malabou provides a welcome relief from what Zizek calls

the "scarecrow image of Hegel" (Monstrosity of Christ 26), from the
caricatures of Hegel that have proliferated from the searing stylus
and scorching wit of Kierkegaard's pseudonyms all the way up
to humorless Levinasianisms about totality. What is a criticism
of Hegel for others-the seeming arbitrariness of the transitions
in the Phenomenology of the Spirit, which occur almost by a wave
of the phenomenological wand-is for Malabou the strength of
the dialectic, an exhibition of Hegel's high tolerance for the play
of the accidental. The transitions from epoch to epoch are not
programmable, rule-governed, and predictable, but are precisely
spiritual, that is, plastic. If they were predictable or programmable,
they would be mathematical, formal, and dead. The Spirit cannot see
what is coming. Its movements are events.
We owe a great deal to Malabou for this analysis. The problem
arises when we consider that, then again, we know that the Spirit
can see what is coming-after it has come, at dusk. This may seem
like a small consolation, like someone who proudly announces the
power to predict the past, but there is more to it than that. Things
come as a surprise and we cannot see them coming. But once they
have occurred, afterwards, when the dust has settled at dusk, we can
see how they came. They are certainly not the only things that could
have happened, and we could not have predicted them, because
they are contingent events. But once they have happened, we can see
then how they could have been foreseen; we can pick up the implicit
logic, detect the movement of the Spirit, and feel their necessity. So
the unforeseeable and contingent events of world history have a
kind of counter-factual foreseeability and this because of the element
of necessity in the life of the Spirit. If we knew beforehand (which we
did not and could not) what we would know afterwards, we would
have seen them coming. So what we do know in advance, what we
can say we saw coming, is that whatever happens, whatever will have
happened, and there are innumerable contingent possibilities, none
of which we could see coming, it would sooner or later, over the
short haul or the long, by the time its gets to be dusk, eventually be
possible to see how and why they were coming.
The philosophical point is this: nothing is going to happen
that does not fulfill the destination of the Spirit. We would later on
be able to see and feel the necessity embedded in any contingency.

Ill
theory@buffalo 16

Eventually, given enough time, the Spirit can afterwards see these
unforeseeables coming. Husser! spoke of an a priori history: even
without doing empirical research, we know certain things must
have been. Hegel offers a kind of deferred a priori: after they have
happened, we can see not how these things in particular must have
been but how they implement what must be always going on in
whatever is or has been. However unaccountable the contingent
is, we can count on that much necessity. However unaccountable
Hegel's "perhaps," we know in advance that "perhaps" will always
have been enlisted in the service of "must be." Nothing is going to
happen that does not fulfill the destination of the Spirit.
So, Malabou's argument can only go so far because we can
only go so far with Hegel. In the end - meaning both in the long run
and in its telos, in its destination, taking a long teleological telescopic
look-the argument does not succeed. There is no deep or radical
destinerrance in its destination, only a contained contingency. The
destiny of the Spirit drives out the destinerrance to which the event is
always exposed. But there is only a relative and contained errancy
in Heget a waste and proliferation in the contingent. But there is no
absolute errancy in Hegel, never an errancy that reaches as far as the
absolute itself. In my view, what all this real contingency really means
or amounts to is that the Spirit can achieve its destination [telos] in
many different ways, which means that, by whatever contingent
means, whatever arbitrary chance befalls it, the Spirit will always
and necessarily achieve its destination. There is no chance that it will
not. The comparison with Aristotle is telling. For Aristotle the ousia
of a man [sic] might be actualized in many different ways, as a poet, a
statesman or a philosopher; there are multiple plastic individuals, and
each polis has its own. But in the end the ousia sets the limits, the ends,
the parameters: the man will never surprise us and become a bird.
Or more pertinently, the bird will never become a man, which was
the shocking surprise visited upon Aristotelians, upon everyone, by
Darwin (a surprise they still have not absorbed in primitive religious
communities all over the United States-the problem is not confined
to Kansas). The form is fixed and unchanging and so therefore is the
telos. The species are eternal in Aristotle; there can be no "evolution
of the species." Individuals come and go, but the species does not.
There are innumerable fluctuations and unpredictable variations
within the form. But when it comes to the species, Aristotle sees eye
to eye with Plato's eidos and he cannot fly with Darwinian becoming.
The essential form does not mutate. The end is always coming. We

112
 John Caputo

can see that, as surely as we can see anything, but we just cannot
see how. It is like reading a novel in which we happen to know that
the hero survives the crisis, even though the threats by which he
is surrounded in the next to the last chapter seem inescapable. For
Aristotle, there are various accidental variations, several of which
can play prominent paradigmatic ("plastic") roles for us to model
ourselves after, but the essential form is unchanging, and that is as
much of the becoming essential of the accidental as the form can
tolerate. Anything more than that and it would burst or explode!
There is no chance the essential form will mutate under the force of a
plastic individual, no chance of the event of the plastic explosion of
the form.
Just so, the virtual energies of the Spirit may be actualized in
any number of contingent ways, but whatever way it chances upon it
will inevitably find its way home and become itself, the self-thinking
thought. There is no chance that will fail to happen. We know that. We
can see it coming, but we have to wait until dusk to see how. I think
it is at precisely this point Malabou engages in an anachronism. I
do not object to anachronism in philosophy. In fact, I thrive on it,
but I think it is better to be frank about it. At this crucial point, in
dealing with the essential necessity, Malabou invokes a kind of felt
necessity of the particular tradition we have ended up with. In this
way, Malabou tries to suppress what cannot be suppressed in Hegel:
there cannot be an "absolute fact," or a hermeneutics of facticity in
Heidegger's sense, and we do not obtain one by surprising us with
the name of Heidegger just when we expected the name of Hegel. We
really did not see that move coming, but afterwards, when you view
the replay, you can catch her in the act. That I think is a "gratuitous"
move, which can be a grace, a gift, but I would be frank about that.
She substitutes the open-ended "play" of the epochs in Heidegger's
Seinsgeschichte, the Heraclitean child play "without why"-the
epochs are because they are, they are such as they are, without why,
although there is a common destiny running through them-for
the more Aristotelian and Hegelian interplay between necessity
and chance (Heidegger, Principle of Reason 112-13).4 At the most,
Heidegger speaks of a phenomenological necessity, the felt, lived,
experienced necessity of the tradition we have factically inherited.
Heidegger practices an existential-phenomenological hermeneutics,
not a speculative hermeneutics.
Hegel, on the other hand, speaks about the logical necessity
n
i scribed in the essence of the Absolute and the speculative

113
theory@buffalo 16

proposition that i s laid out in the Logic. There can be no "absolute

fact." That would require an absolute being, a necessary entity,
that the absolute be an entity, not merely set itself forth in an entity
[Vorstellung]. The absolute could no more appear as a fact, in a fact,
in fact, than the infinite could ever take the form of an individual­
or finite-being. Individuals, entities, facts, finite things come and
go and only the infinite matrix abides. Being is not a being-that is
both a Hegelian and a Heideggerian principle. There is no absolute
event. Events are always contingent. In my view, one can go very
far in this direction. The truth of the matter in Hegel, the truth of the
Sache, is that the Spirit does not require Greeks or Romans, Christ
or Christianity, Descartes or the Reformation, Napoleon or even,
mirabile dictu, German philosophers. That whole constellation, the
totality of the empirical course of actual history, could have been
quite different, and these names, cultures, languages, particular
stages of the Spirit might never have seen the light of day. Of course
it is difficult to imagine what the alternative course of history could
have been, and even more difficult from Hegel's point of view to
imagine how we could have gotten along without the most felicitous
accident of all, Christ, the "monstrous compound," the monster of
grace, who is the most telling sign of all of the workings of the Spirit.
Still, it could all have been different and we might even have been
forced to do without the Christian Incarnation.
But even then something else would have done duty for the
Spirit, and whatever that would have been-we know this in advance,
we can see this coming-the same mega-story, the same story of the
Spirit becoming itself, unfolding its essence, overcoming its alienation,
explicating what is implicit in its substance, would have taken place,
but by other means. That is as much of the becoming accidental of
the essential, of the chance of the event, as the philosophy of Spirit
can tolerate. Anything more and it would burst or explode! But the
Absolute cannot explode. If Absolute thought cancels our capacity to
imagine a wholly different destination for history, as Malabou says
(FH 163), that is because it does not permit a different destination,
only different, indeed infinitely different means. The Spirit admits of
alternatives, alternate courses, but not radical difference in the sense
of differance and destinerrance.
I hasten to add that I am not in the least ungrateful for
Malabou's Hegel, for the grace of her reading. She has demonstrated
a considerable continge.ncy in Hegel, a great deal more than for
which Hegel is usually given credit. So we are in the debt of Malabou

114
 John Caputo

for her gift, for liberating Hegel from a good deal of perfectly
ridiculous readings while also allowing us to avoid the totalitarian
reading, Hegel the Great Totalizer, even if that will always remain a
risk. Hegel is not a totalitarian insofar as the totality could have been
totally different. But my claim is that it no possible alternate could
be so different that it would not still have finally served the essence
and purpose of the Spirit, of the Spirit becoming Spirit. This is not a
matter of a faith in the impossible, in the incredible, of a hope against
hope, but a matter of absolute knowledge.
I say this because if Hegel is not a totalitarian, Hegel is an
essentialist, as is Aristotle. In Hegel the play of differences plays
by the rules of the Spirit. The measure of contingency that Hegel
provides is strictly set in advance by the essence of the absolute, just
as in Aristotle individuals contingently come and go while the limits
set by the eternal species abide forever. Thinking for Hegel bears
an analogy to the hermeneutics of discerning the essential forms (in
the nominative) of the static species amidst the changing variations
of appearance in Aristotle. For Hegel, thinking is a hermeneutics of
discerning the essence, the "essencing," the Wesen in the verbal sense
(Heidegger), of the movements of the Spirit in time. Philosophy for
Hegel is a hermeneutic skill of bringing to bear upon history the
speculative presupposition of the essence of the Spirit and looking for
its traces. But this hermeneutic skill is essentially a work of deferral.
It can only be conducted at dusk because, while the philosophers
can see that the Spirit is coming they cannot see how it is coming
until after it has arrived. In religion we say "God" has promised
us that he will come, that all will be well in the end, and we know
that God is all good and true to his word, imagining God [vorstellen]
to be an infinitely reliable and powerful fellow. In philosophy, we
comprehend what they are saying in religion, which means that in
philosophy we know the same but we know it better. Speculative
hermeneutics is not merely a matter of understanding differently,
but of understanding better. So we philosophers explain that when
they say in religion that God is faithful to his promises what they
really mean is that the "Absolute" is true to its Wescn. The Absolute
is the Absolute, which means that if the Absolute is put into time, it
is absolutely necessary that it be faithful to itself; it cannot implode
or explode. What we do not know (and the Absolute docs not know,
either, since the "Absolute" is not "somebody" who "knows" things)
is how the Absolute is going to do this, or rather, how this process in
and of the Absolute will be carried out, in the middle voice (nobody

115
theory@buffalo 16

is "doing" anything). We have to wait, to defer till dusk.

Is there, then, is a future in the Absolute, in Hegel's Absolute,
in Hegel? Up to a point. Hegel's future means that what is going
to happen next is an open question, but in the end, no matter what
happens, there will have been an explanation and a necessity. In the
end, there will have been only so much "future" in that sense. Dealing
with the future in Hegel is above all an exercise in patience, as is
speculative hermeneutics. It requires both a taste for the contingent
and a high tolerance of the unexpected-Malabou shows this-but
it also requires the ability to see how the Spirit writes straight with
crooked lines, which Hegel just like the traditional theologians
is always telling us. Speculative hermeneutics is conducted by
means of a world-historical telescope equipped with a zoom lens. It
needs the ability to zoom in to see the Spirit's self-unfolding when
it happens very explicitly and transparently in a text or a deed of
singular and emblematic importance-the Crucifixion, or the World­
Spirit showing up on horseback-and the ability to zoom out, to take
the long look and see how, over a great deal of death and destruction,
of detours and dead bodies, "finally," in its finis, in the end, it ekes
its way forward. It requires a taste for trouble, the heart for enduring
the death-dealing power of the negative, but "in the end"-in the
long run, in its telos, in the long teleological telescope of Hegel­
no matter how twisted and terrible the course, Spirit does what
Spirit is. In that sense, there is no chance and no event. The divine
plasticity has to do with the means, concerns the particulars, but not
the telos, which is necessary. God always, essentially and irreducibly
sees himself coming (FH 118). That's what we mean by God. There
is no chance that is not going to come. The Spirit is like Aristotle's
phronimos: there are a lot of different ways to be good, and there is
no one standard form or formula, but the phronimos will always find
a way that is just right. Just so, there are a lot of ways for the Spirit
to be the Spirit, but in the end the Spirit s
i the Spirit, which means
it always eventually comes home. The Spirit is like the Aristotelian
species: no matter how much harm befalls individuals and their fates,
no manner of harm befalls the Spirit itself. Individuals come and go
but the species and the Spirit are unchanging, just as in Heidegger no
being can hold sway over Being. No matter how negative the course
of the Spirit, the Spirit is not finally going to fail to come. Individuals
are finite, but the Spirit is infinite. This or that individual, nation,
language, religion, art form or culture may and will go under, but it
is all in the cause, for the ·sake, for the Sache of the Spirit. Individuals

1 16
 John Caputo

cannot be this patient, but the species and the Spirit can.
There is an end, a limit and a telos, to the Spirit's plasticity. In
Hegel, the Spirit is always open to the future, but it is not open to
no more future, to absolute death, to telic frustration or catastrophe.
In the end, it never ends and it never ends in a bad infinity. The
Spirit can never mean no more Spirit. There is no law of entropy
hanging over the Spirit's head. In the end, in the telos, Hegel is not
talking about the event, which we cannot see coming, but about
a range of events that we cannot see coming within a larger and
unbreached horizon of expectation, of what we can see coming. The
Spirit includes the chance of death within a larger rhythm of life in
which the purposes of its life are served. God is dead-Long live
God. The Spirit includes the death of this or that body, this or that
finite individual or cultural formation, but it does not include the
chance of infinite and absolute death, of the death of the Absolute.
There is no death of God in Hegel in that final or ultimate sense. That
is as absurd to Hegel as it is to the orthodox theologians of the living
God. The Spirit is not exposed to absolute death. The "necessity" in
the "play" between the necessary and the aleatory rules that out,
absolutely. The logos or Wesen of the Spirit is infinite and immortal;
after all, in religion it travels under the name of God. The spirit can
never drop dead, or be stopped dead in its tracks, blow up, wither
away, fail to eventually come home, suffer absolute amnesia, forget
absolutely who and what it is.
So we can only stretch plasticity so far.5 A plastic Spirit cannot
explode. Contrariwise, if "plasticity" includes explosion, the Spirit is
not plastic.6 It belongs to the very Wesen of the Spirit not to forget that
it must be about the Spirit's business [Sache]. There are many ways
for the spirit to come and go, many ways for it come home, but it
would never not come home, never not complete its circle, and never
explode in mid course. Heidegger himself left the homecoming
open: the future is uncertain, the dark night of the Abendland might
last forever? But in Hegel while there are many ways in which
the Spirit cannot see what is coming, or see itself coming, as to
the contingencies, the empirical actualities of itself, still it always
and essentially sees itself coming inasmuch as it knows what it is.
Whatever happens, we know that it is the Spirit doing what Spirit is.
It is only what it does (it is not a Super-Person); it does only what it is
(abides by its Wesen). But it (we) cannot foresee how it will do what
it has to do, that is, how what must be done will be done. As to the
big picture, however, the large course the Spirit traverses, the large

117
theory@buffalo 16

circle it always cuts, there is no maybe about it; it must be what it

must be. The Spirit must do what must be done but we must always
remember to say "perhaps" as to the particulars.

IV. DERRIDA's QuESTION

Let us put it this way: Is the "death of God" an accident? Could

God have seen it coming or did it take him completely by surprise?
Was this all part of an inscrutabl�r if you are a German
metaphysician, perhaps not so inscrutable-divine plan, all part of a
Providential design, part of the wisdom of God? Is the death of God
a felix culpa, a terrible thing that happened to God but nonetheless
that happened for the best? Was it the one and only way God could
become God, could overcome his abstract one-sidedness and make
his entrance in the world and finally come home to himself in the
Spirit? Was this all part of the unfolding of the implicit divine being
into the fullness of the divine being?
Or was it really all a pure accident? Was the divine Providence
blindsided? Did God, unawares, step on an explosive device? Was
God blown to bits without so much as knowing what hit him? Was
God just destroyed, blown up, adieu, no more God, dead and gone,
requiescat in pace? Could the whole thing have been avoided had God
been a bit more cautious, watched where he stepped, exercised some
foresight?
In other words: Is this death of God an adieu to God [a Dieu] or
was this adieu to God really just an au revoir, or voir re-venir, God's
going being the only and best way for God to come, to come home,
to become God, to see himself come, to return to himself?
That is question posed by Derrida-with infinite discretion,
courtesy, caution and respect-to Hegel and to Malabou reading
Hegel, at the end of "A Time for Farewells," his preface to The Future
ofHegel.8 Derrida begs to disagree, asking leave to raise a question to
which he says he does not know the answer about two adieux, two
times. The one adieu is a final parting, an undisguised good-bye, like
two estranged friends or lovers who part ways for good, or like the
parting of death, especially at death. The other adieu is an "au revoir,"
a "till we meet again," a bientot, see you later, see you again, soon, I
hope, but sooner or later, in the end, we will meet again. The absence
makes their hearts grow fonder and when the separation has ended
the two are reunited, closer than ever, their love made more perfect
by the ordeal. In the first case the separation is permanent; the time

118
 John Caputo

of the adieu is forever. In the second case, the time of the adieu is
temporary; the lovers are apart "just for a time." In the second, the
going away is inscribed within a return, a seeing again, voir re-venir,
and the lovers can see a return coming. The death of God is inscribed
as a moment within the larger life of God, like a stage in the divine
development.
Derrida puts this question to Malabou reading Hegel almost
rhetorically, with the obvious implication that Hegel is talking about
au revoir, reconciliation, as if the lovers had a quarrel and got over it
and were all the better for it, which is the logic of the dialectic, the
power of the negative, the way the "necessity" in things works for
Hegel. In the end, there can be no future, no event for Hegel, not in the
truly radical sense. True, there are contingent events but contingency
is not radical; the Absolute is not contingent. There is a future, there
are events, in a circumscribed sense, and it is a caricature of Hegel
to fail to see that, which is the strength of Malabou's presentation of
Hegel. But there cannot be a future in sense of the more radical time
of the more decisive adieu, the adieu which is issued in a condition of
destinerrance, which is occluded in The Future ofHegel by transforming
Hegelian necessity into Heideggerian facticity. In Heidegger, the
oblivion of Being in the Abend-land may last forever, perhaps, and
there may never be another beginning, perhaps. But in Hegel, God
cannot fail to become God, the divine life cannot finally end, since the
very essence of God lies in his infinite and imperishable life. Finite
things end, but the infinite is the matrix or womb in which they come
and go. The life of God can be transformed, which is the meaning of
God's plasticity, but the plastic life of God cannot be ended, dashed,
snuffed out, exploded, blown to bits, for then the absolute would not
be absolute, God would not be God and the dialectic would not be
the dialectic.
But the more radically risky temporality of destinerrance is the
condition of the event, of the chance of an event, and the only way
for there to be a future-for God. Allowing the chance of the event
in this more radical sense would be true only of a certain Hegel, a
Hegel repeated with a difference, altered and circumcised, one that
Hegel himself would not recognize, recollect or be reconciled with.
It would come as a shocking surprise to Hegel, explosive news. For
there to be a future for God, a future in the radical sense, God would
have to be at risk, and God would have to face the future just like
the rest of us, with fear and trembling, uncertain of and unable to
see what was coming, no guarantees. For there to be a future for

119
theory@buffalo 16

God, God would have to be exposed to the final and uttermost risk
of death, where death would be something more than a moment in a
metaphysical transition, more than the plasticity of transformability,
but the possibility of extinction, of entropic dissipation, where
there would be neither form nor transformation, where the logic
of the dialectic would be exploded by the logic of death and utter
irreversible extinction. As Derrida aptly asks, "Who could or would
possibly be ready or able to subscribe to such a history, I ask you?
Neither Hegel, nor the theologians or thinkers of faith who believe
they are opposed to him" (FH xlvii). On this point in particular­
ascribing a radical future, the chance of an event to God-Hegel and
the theologians who think they oppose Hegel are actually agreed.
The theologians do not oppose Hegel. Hegel is one of them, and like
them a champion of the nfinite
i life of God. When it comes to history,
Augustine and Hegel are on the same side. They agree about what
the theologians call Divine Providence, which means foresight, and
about a long list of other and venerable divine names, omniscience,
benevolence, omnipotence, at the head of the list. Hegel's radicality
is to have reinscribed the divine names in space and time, where
the divine being is set forth, vor-gestellt, and exposed to a certain
(limited) play of chance. Up to a point. Hegel's radicality is to have
set forth the death of God in time, indeed as time, but only in the
sense of the time of adieu as au revoir, where the dialectic has planned
a rendezvous for God with God in the Spirit. The death of God is
a moment in the indestructible life of the Spirit in space and time,
the way maturation demands putting away the things of a child, the
way the seed dies to allow the plant to grow. But in the end [telos],
the future of Hegel is the future of the infinite Spirit, and that is not
the future of the event. The future is the eventiveness within the life
of the Absolute, which is not as such an event, but a necessity, an
Absolute. The future of Hegel's Spirit, in the end, in its telos, is le
futur present, not the a venir in its infinitival exposure to the chance of
an event [evenement].
Derrida himself remains infinitely circumspect in this regard,
in regard to Malabou, from whose work he has learned so much. So
he poses this rhetorical question to himself and responds, "I don't
know anymore" (FH xlvii). He prays to be excused from outright
disagreement. He has his doubts that the notions of the "essential"
and the "accidental" can be of further use when it comes to the event,
which represents a deeper play in the future of God than their simple
interplay (FH xlvi). For accidents are accidents relative to essence

120
 John Caputo

and conversely. If either notion is displaced, both are displaced-in

differance-so that the distinction between the becoming essential of
the accidental (Greek paradigms) and the becoming accidental of the
essential (Christian incarnation) is displaced along with it. Neither
accident alone, even a "pure" accident, nor its interplay with essence,
can accommodate the chance of an event. I am no longer able to
understand this idiom, Derrida says. I have not embraced one or the
other of these times, he says, because adieu, "as the 'perhaps' [peut­
etre]"-adieu is like peut-etre, adieu is peut-etre leaves him unable
-

to understand "my own incomprehension, a certain increasing and

stubborn non-intelligence, on this stubbornness precisely, of an
idiom, of more than one idiom, perhaps [peut-etre]... "(FH xlvii). I do
not understand. Please excuse my failure to understand.
Perhaps God's death means "God is dead-Long live God."
Or perhaps God is dead and gone forever. To be sure, the peut-etre is
the question: to be, but, perhaps, not to be. The Spirit cannot tolerate
this deep "perhaps," the real possibility, the real exposure of God
to possible death, to final extinction, to the possibility of bidding a
real, rending and final adieu to Dieu. The very possibility of the real
and final death of God undoes the dialectic, the Aujhebung, and by
so doing makes the chance of an event-the peut-etre possible. The
-

chance of the event goes back to what in the language of metaphysics

we would call an archi-accidentality that displaces the dialectical
equilibrium of necessity and chance, essence and accident. The
chance of the event gives God a future by exposing God to the risk of
death and hence to the risk of the future. As to the chance that God,
perhaps, could be killed in an explosion, be finished off once and for
all: "would that be the condition of a future, if there must be such a
thing called the future? The very condition for something to come,
and even that of another God, of an absolute other God" (FH xlvii)?
A tout autre God is God as the tout autre, where tout autre est tout autre.
So the chance for God is, metonymically, the name of the chance of
an event, of the coming of the other, of the wholly other, of everyone
or everything wholly other. The chance for God is the chance for the
"perhaps," for God, perhaps. That would include the possibility of
another God, perhaps a wholly other God, a successor God whom
we would possibly not want to call "God" at all, but something else,
in a wholly other idiom or discourse, a wholly other time or a Dieu.
For in the expression the "God to come," or the "coming God," the
"to come" is more important than the "God," 9 and the coming God
might be otherwise than God.

121
theory@buffalo 16

That, Derrida is saying ever so politely to Hegel, and

to Malabou reading Hegel, and to Malabou reading Hegel
reading Heidegger, is something Hegel could never see coming.
That is the chance of the event.

Notes
1. The seminal figure in process theology is Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead's
work was first developed as a process theology by Charles Hartshorne, and continues
today ni theologians like John Cobb, David Ray Griffin, Philip Clayton and Catherine
Keller. Over the years, the Metaphysical Society of America has entertained an on­
going debate between process theologians and Thomistic philosophical theologians.

2. For the relevant texts and a discussion, see john D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in
Heidegger's Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), 126-27.

3. This phrase in particular serves as the touchstone text in the debate between :lilek
and Milbank in The Mo11strosity of Clrrist about whether the Christian Incarnation or
negative dialectics represents the true materialism.

4.I think Malabou assimilates the history of the spirit in Hegel to the play of the
epochs in Heidegger's Seinsgeschichte. Heidegger's The Principle ofReason seems to be
playing in the background of her reading of Hegel.

5. With Derrida, I hold that "Differance s i therefore the formation of form." See
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology1 trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1997): 63. I would argue that "form" is a constituted effect of
diff�rance and therefore that the notion of "plasticity" as transformability is a function
of diffuance, especially fi the series of transformations is non-programmable, since
non-programmability presupposes diff�rance. All of the arguments Derrida made in Of
Grammatology against the notion of linguistic form in Hjelmslev and the Copenhagen
School (57-65) can be brought to bear on "plasticity," not in order to oppose it but to
show that is dependent upon difflrance.

6. There is some doubt about this: in the expression "plastic explosive" it is not that
the plastic is the explosive but rather that the explosive has been plasticized. As Pete
Mandik says, "I must confess that I find a bit hard to swallow the suggestion that
neuroscientific discourse is infected by a poetic association between 'brain plasticity'
and 'plastic explosives.' The 'plastic' in 'brain plasticity' doesn't mean 'explosive.'
Not even the 'plastic' in 'plastic explosive' means 'explosive.' It's the 'explosive' in
'plastic explosive' that means 'explosive.'" See Mandik's review of Malabou's What
Should We Do with Our Brain? in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2009.04.27. But if the
plastic need not be explosive, an event must certainly be capable of being explosive,
of being the end of everything. You can hear this ni English, when a bomb is described
in military parlance as an "in-coming," which literally translates Derrida's invention.

7. See Martin Heidegger, "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking," On Time
and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972): 55-73.

8. Derrida's preface to Malabou's The Future of Hegel is included in the parenthetical

citations attributed to this book. All Roman numeral citations refer to this preface.

9. See Jacques Oerrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews: 1971-2001. trans.

122
 John Caputo

Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002): 182. There, Derrida
says that in the expression "democracy to come" the "to come" is more important
than the "democracy."

Works Cited
Hegel, G.W.F. Lectures on the Philosophy ofReligion. One-volume edition:
The Lectures of1827. Trans. R.F. Brown et. a!. ed. Peter C. Hodgson.
Berkley: U California P, 1988.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
---. The Principle ofReason. Trans. Reginald Lilly. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1991.
Malabou, Catherine. The Future ofHegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic.
Trans. Lisbeth During. New York: Routledge, 2005. [FH]
Zizek, Slavoj and John Milbank. The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or
Dialectic? Ed. Creston Davis. Cambridge: MIT P, 2009.

123
 Adrian Johnston

THE REAL UNCONSCIOUS:

A FRIENDLY REPLY TO CATHERINE MALABOU

My agenda in this intervention is simple and straightforward:

to problematize select dimensions of Catherine Malabou' s critique of
psychoanalysis and, in so doing, to clarify and nuance the analytic
concepts in the crosshairs of some of her criticisms. Although I am
much more sympathetic to analysis than Malabou, I readily admit
that the multiple challenges which she poses to both Freudian
and Lacanian schools are serious ones; they demand a substantial,
detailed response from anyone who maintains, as I do, that analysis
theoretical and clinical has a viable, vibrant future in the twenty­
first century. Her neuroscientifically grounded objections to analysis,
unlike many neuroscientific (and, all too often, pseudoscientific)
dismissals of it, are informed by a profound knowledge of the
discipline of the unconscious manifestly evident in her subtle,
thought-provoking readings of key texts by Freud and Lacan.
As a highly informed and talented critic of analysis, Malabou
clearly has the power to help push forward the analytic field precisely
through how she pushes back against some of its most cherished and
established doctrines. Partisans of Freud and Lacan stand to gain a
great deal from engaging with her ideas. I hope my reply to Malabou
in what follows both does justice to her significant contributions
to contemporary thought as well as assists, if only to a very small
extent, in the ongoing work-in-progress of refining and enriching the
living psychoanalytic tradition.
Of what Malabou has released in print thus far, her 2007 book
Les nouveaux blesses: D_e Freud a Ia neurologie, penser les traumatismes

124
 Adrian Johnston

contemporains and 2009 book Ontologie de /'accident: Essai sur la

plasticite destructrice contain the material most relevant to me in this
context.1 However, in addition to these two published books, she
and I recently completed a co-authored manuscript forthcoming
from Columbia University Press, entitled Self and Emotional Life:
Merging Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neurobiology. At certain
points below, I will draw on content from this unpublished text. In
fact, this response to Malabou constitutes an addiional
t installment
in the dialogues and debates we initiated with each other in our co­
authored book.
To put my cards on the table right up front, I believe that
Malabou's criticisms of psychoanalysis sometimes hinge on tacitly
construing it as essentially a type of hermeneutics lop-sidedly
favoring continuity over discontinuity. Such a construal is far from
unusual or unprecedented, in the past as well as the present, amongst
its proponents and critics alike. Nonetheless, despite intuitive
appeal and wide acceptance within and beyond analytic circles, this
portrayal of analysis as an activity of uncovering and/ or constructing
threads of signification running seamlessly through all the moments
and periods of entire life histories distorts Freud's foundational
framework-with Lacan going furthest amongst the inheritors of
the Freudian legacy toward correcting this misrepresentation of
what is at stake in analysis. Through turning to Lacanian analyst
Colette Soler's presentation of Lacan's "real unconscious" in her
two latest books, Lacan, l'inconscient reinvente and Les affects lacaniens,
I will assemble, contra Malabou, a counter-image of Freudian­
Lacanian psychoanalysis as a non-hermeneutical orientation open
to the possibility of radical discontinuities. More than any other
expert on Lacanianism, Soler, in her recent publications, spells out
with exquisite precision just how far the unconscious arising out of
Lacan's "return to Freud" is from being the continuous expanse of a
deep, dark reservoir of hidden meanings.
Before turning to Freud, Lacan, and Soler, I must take the
time to furnish a faithful sketch of those aspects of Malabou's
critical position that I wish to address (and, I periodically will
punctuate this synopsis with rejoinders to certain points made by
Malabou, particularly apropos matters having to do with Freud's
ideas). Her general strategy relies upon confronting psychoanalysis
with examples and cases taken from contemporary neuroscience,
instances in which "it is not possible to se parate the organic wound
from its psychical repercussions" (NB 47).2 To be more specific, she

125
theory@buffalo 16

sees "the new wounded" [les nouveaux blesses] of neuropathology­

the ranks of this corps include Alzheimer's patients, sufferers of
senile dementia, and all those with various kinds of brain damage
or neurophysiological alterations resulting from disease, injury,
malnutrition, poverty, war, and/or substance abuse-as disturbing
figures facing analysis with what, allegedly up until now, it has failed
to recognize as incarnations of its conceptual and curative limits
(NB 309-10). Those unfortunates whose socio-symbolic selfhood
is severely diminished or utterly destroyed by neurophysiological
traumas embody, according to Malabou, something analysis has yet
really to think through: meaningless material events of destruction,
brutal and total breaks, in which the human organism survives the
ordeal of a senselessly imposed erasure of its prior accompanying
form of subjectivity.3
Motivated by her particular argumentative agenda, Malabou
is especially preoccupied with rather extreme instances of
neuropathology in which personality and capacity to feel emotions
are obliterated as a consequence of lesions compromising the central
nervous system (i.e., neuro-traumas resulting from any number of
causes). In relation to his/her significance-saturated ontogenetic life
history as a proper psychical subject, such a victim of major neuro­
trauma undergoes a radical, irreversible change without analytically
interpretable rhyme or reason. Malabou insists that trying to make
sense of such senseless shocks of contingent ruptures (NB 34-35)
in terms of regression (NB 94), repression (OA 75-77), and/or (de)
negation (OA 83) is an invalid and impossible endeavor.
Additionally, even if the sufferer's trauma could be inscribed
into the narrative of analytic interpretation, the biological body living
on after the infliction of its wounds, now bereft of its former subjective
identity, would be incapable of benefitting from such interpretative
(re)inscriptions. With such a body on his/her couch, the analyst
would have no one to address, given the absence in this semblance
of an analysand of a psychical life sufficiently rich for productive
participation in the analytic process as driven by interactions
between analyst and analysand. As Malabou voices this in Ontologie
de I'accident, "The body can die without being dead" (36, 66-67) (one
cannot help but hear echoes of Lacan's interrelated notions of the
"second death" and the state "between-two-deaths" [entre-deux­
morts] here4). Deprived of both a robust sense of personhood as well
as an ability affcctively to register and digest his/her post-traumatic
circumstances, the representative of Malabou's new wounded (for

126
 Adrian Johnston

instance, someone at the stage of very advanced Alzheimer's or

an individual with anosognosia) has no hope of finding healing
anamnesis and liberatory working-through within the four walls of
the analyst's consulting room. And, no matter what the analyst says,
he I she has no real analytic explanation regarding the absence of
positive therapeutic prognoses for these neuropathological patients.
Malabou frequently emphasizes the "indifference" and
"coldness" of the post-traumatic survivors that preoccupy her most.5
In this vein, she contrasts the Freudian death drive [TodestriebJ with the
neurobiological death of (all) drive (NB 53). Given the entanglement
of emotion and motivation in the functional living brain (as per the
neuroscientific triad of the emotional, the motivational, and the
cognitive as the three basic dimensions of brain-based mental life),
the second term of this contrast (i.e., the neurobiological death of
[all] drive) suggests the dissipation of affective life, the demise of
the "emotional brain." The detached, disinterested being who lives
on after the "event" of his/her neuro-trauma-Malabou speaks of
both "cerebral events" and "material events" in connection with
sufficiently drastic transformations of the central nervous system
(NB 62, 343)-has neither the means nor the motives to attempt a
cathartic reckoning with what happened to him/her (such as the
type of catharsis-through-Durcharbeiten aimed at by analysis). In the
wider context of contemporary French philosophy, the Malabouian
event could be seen as the dark underside of the Badiouian event,
the latter being frequently celebrated nowadays as the brilliantly
bright source of novelty, invention, creativity, etc. Conceptions
of contingent disruptions bring with them a negative backside in
addition to a positive front side.
In Les nouveaux blesses, Malabou claims that, "Every brain disease
or cerebral lesion affects the brain's auto-affection" (92). The concept-term
"auto-affection" has become, over the pastseveral years, a cornerstone
of Malabou's philosophical reflections on the neurosciences.
Consequently, it has taken on a range of distinguishable senses in
her recent writings. However, for the moment, and in line with the
immediately preceding, the sense of most relevance here has to do
with affect qua emotion. After the exogenous hetero-affection of
certain neuro-traumas (i.e., "brain disease or cerebral lesion" as a
non-emotional affecting of a person's central nervous system), the
auto-affeciont characteristic of the human brain (i.e., its largely
non-conscious, endogenous self-regulation6) is interrupted and
altered. In the more extreme examples foregrounded by Malabou,

127
theory@buffalo 16

this interruption/ alteration can be so severe as to obliterate the

possibility of the traumatized individual being affected emotionally
thereafter in relation to him/her-self (i.e., to be auto-affected
emotionally, such as being saddened or dismayed at one's impaired
condition) or other persons and things (i.e., to be hetero-affected
emotionally, feeling various feelings in response to one's material
and social surroundings). At the outer limits of neuropathology,
one encounters, so to speak, the living dead of human organisms
traumatically hetero-affected so brutally that, in the realms of
affective-qua-emotional life, they can no longer be further auto- or
hetero-affected.
With respect to the dire cerebro-lesions on which she zooms
in, Malabou contends that psychoanalytic conceptions of trauma
are quite inadequate for truly thinking the severity of the traumas
producing her new wounded (NB 223-24). Post-traumatically,
Malabou's zombie-like survivors, stripped of a subjectivity
emotionally and motivationally inclined toward the kind of
laborious process epitomized by analysis, are uninterested and
unable to undergo the sorts of experiences crucial to a therapeutically
beneficial analysis (unlike those differently traumatized analysands
committed to remembering, repeating, and working-through
their painful pasts on the analyst's couch). Pre-traumatically, the
impossible-to-imagine ordeal of living death as the physically
inflicted erasure of one's very selfhood and personal identity-this
defies depiction via representations and expectations in the non/
not-yet-traumatized subject's psyche-cannot, by virtue of this
very impossibility, be foreshadowed by prior fantasies and similar
formations of psychical subjectivity (NB 34-35) (however, at least
as regards literal death per se, Freud likewise maintains that this
unavoidable eventuality cannot be grasped as such by the psychical
apparatus7; more generally, Lacan frequently depicts the fantasmatic
and desiring life of psychical subjectivity as orbiting around the
Real qua unrepresentable, non-specular centers of libidinal gravity).
Hence, for Malabou, considering the total absence in the non/ not­
yet-traumatized subject's psyche of any trace of accurate anticipatory
imagining of dramatic neuro-trauma, if and when such a trauma
occurs, it cannot plausibly be fastened back onto an unbroken
thread of an uninterrupted ontogenetic life history of a particular
subject. The lack of preceding pre-traumatic Vorstellungen, as intra­
psychical coordinates anchoring desires, fantasies, and the like,
blocks the standard analytic gesture of establishing links between

128
 Adrian Johnston

the endogenous libidinal economy and various arrays of exogenous

forces and factors. Related to this, Malabou criticizes Freud for
invariably privileging the endogenous over the exogenous to such
an extent that he purportedly denies the reality of purely exogenous
traumas,8 such as the meaningless material events profoundly
impacting the brain upon which she ruminates (but, Freud's later
revisions of his account of trauma in light of those suffering from
a single, adult, and non-sexual violent event breaking the history
of their lives n
i two through a sudden horrible glimpse of death
arguably present evidence conflicting with Malabou's interpretive
assessments [Beyond 12-14, 29-33]).
To Malabou's ears, neuropathology's new wounded testify
against the analytic assumption of there being an underlying,
indestructible continuity of significances and temporalities at
the foundational base of psychical life, an unbreakable continuity
licensing the art of analytic interpretation (NB 51-52, OA 20-21).
They do so by bearing witness to the ineliminable and omnipresent
possibility, one haunting everyone for whom this threat has not (or
not yet) become a materialized actuality, of undergoing and surviving
a senseless, random, unforeseeable neuro-trauma eventuating in
an ontogenetically unprecedented post-traumatic subjectivity (or
even in the non-existence of any fleshed out socio-symbolic and I or
affective subjectivity altogether). Already in Les nouveaux blesses, but
especially in Ontologie de ['accident, Malabou strives philosophically
to generalize into a fundamental ontology aspects of what is involved
here in her neuroscience-informed critique of psychoanalysis.
The roots of this larger philosophical pursuit lie in Malabou's first
major work, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic
(originally her doctoral dissertation). Therein, she extracts from a
close reading of Hegel (particularly his "anthropology" as laid out
in the third volume of the Encyclopedia ofthe Philosophical Sciences, the
Philosophy ofMind) what arguably has become since then the master­
concept of her whole oeuvre: "plasticity."9
The cardinal feature of plasticity a Ia Malabou is its two­
sidedness, its peculiar ambiguity (this is quite fitting for a notion
initially taken from Hegel's dialectical philosophy). Throughout
each and every of her works, she regularly insists that the plastic
simultaneously involves, on the one hand, flexibility, fluidity, and
malleability, and, on the other hand, inflexibility, rigidity, and
fixedness. The balance (or lack thereof) between these negative
and positive poles of plasticity, as the recto and verso of what also

129
theory@buffalo 16

could be called "forming," can and does shift into unevenness in

any number of ways. What's more, anything properly plastic has
a form it can lose and, if and when it loses one form, it usually has
the potential to take on another. Her 2004 tour de force, What Should
We Do with Our Brain? (a project hinted at in the concluding pages
of The Future of Hegel [192-93]), convincingly combines her notion
of plasticity with the scientific conception of neuroplasticity. This
combination sets the stage for much of what she does in Les nouveaux
blesses and Ontologie de /'accident.
In Les nouveaux blesses, Malabou describes the neuro-traumatic
termination of a pre-traumatic subjectivity as a "creation by destruction
of form," namel� as a "destructive plasticity" (49). Put differently,
cerebro-lesions cancel/ negate a prior subjective form and, at one
and the same time, create a new one discontinuous with the old,
with this creation sometimes producing instances of an absence of
subjective form tout court as a paradoxical type of subjectless subject
(i.e., the zombie-like living dead surviving in cold, indifferent
anonymity). In Ontologie de ['accident, a book whose sub-title includes
the phrase "destructive plasticity," she carries these speculations
further. With the more extreme examples of post-traumatic subjects­
without-subjectivity evidently in mind, she maintains that all
established disciplines, and not just psychoanalysis, have failed to
contemplate the idea of destructive plasticity in its most striking
manifestations (OA 12-13, 15). Even the neurosciences themselves
are judged guilty of this shortcoming. Defensively averting their
gaze from the upsetting sight of irreparably shattered lives, the
neuroscientists prefer to restrict their attention to the regenerative
side of neuroplasticity and their curative role in helping along the
recuperative process. Through keeping themselves preoccupied
with the contingent, circumstantial causes of the individual cases of
trauma which they treat, they avoid acknowledging the necessary
universality of each and every person's inherent vulnerability to
10
such wounding accidents and misfortunes (Freud offers a similar
analysis of defensive mental maneuvers vis-a-vis the fact of death's
inevitability [Thoughts 290)). Addressing both the psychoanalytic
doctors of the soul and the neuroscientific doctors of the brain,
Malabou asks about, "How to think, without contradicting oneself, a
plasticity without cure [remede]?" (NB 307).
Ontologie de ['accident, as its very title already indicates, is
devoted to laying the groundwork for an ontology finally taking
into account, as previous orientations haven't yet, explosive events

130
 Adrian Johnston

of indigestible, meaningless traumas in which destructive plasticity

goes so far as to destroy plasticity itself, in which plasticity is
exposed, thanks to itself, to its own disruption (33-34). That is to say,
in a Hegelian/ dialectical-style self-subversion, destructive plasticity,
on Malabou's account in Ontologie de /'accident, can (and does) make
possible a cutting off of the openness to the possibility of taking on
subsequent forms a venir, a possibility characteristic of plasticity
per se. She speaks of this possibility of no more possibilities as the
"negative possible" (OA 72-73, 82-84). The massive cerebra-lesions of
catastrophic neuro-traumas produce the bodies of human organisms
living on but not, as it were, living for, that is, not inclining toward
future plans, projects, and prospects in the manners in which full­
fledged human subjects proper continually do. As the ontologically
essential dynamics of acquiring and losing form (i.e., "forming"),
plasticity (including neuroplasticity) stands permanently under the
shadow of the virtual danger of its liquidation, an elimination with
which it cannot help but be complicit (specifically in terms of its
propensity for loss of form) when this elimination eventually comes
to pass. Old age, if nothing else, will bring this about sooner or later.
According to Malabou, both psychoanalytic and neuroscientific
theories are forced to balance delicately between "system" (qua the
continuity of self-regulating structures and dynamics) and "event"
(qun the discontinuity of disturbances and breaches disrupting
systems) (NB 59-60, OA 12). In her view, whereas neurobiology
allows for conceiving of the primacy of event over system (in terms of
thl' utterly system-destroying events of neuro-traumatic destructive
plasticity), analysis, by contrast, unwaveringly insists on the
supremacy of system over event (in terms of a psychical apparatus
sustaining indestructible threads of connection across vast temporal
swathes of an ontogenetic life history). Analytic metapsychology a Ia
Freud and Lacan allegedly clings to continuity at all costs (NB 233-
34). But, how so, exactly?
Malabou begins setting up the argumentative detailsbuttressing
this objection to analysis' ostensible privileging of continuity over
discontinuity by observing that, in the Freudian corpus, death is
an ubiquitous (albeit sometimes shadowy) presence throughout
Freud's elaborations of the different versions of his drive theory
well before 1920's Bet;ond the Pleasure Principle (NB 179, 217). In
other words, it's not as though Freud abruptly introduces mortality
into sexuality-some readers of Freud's oeuvre might be tempted to
believe that his pre-1920 drive theory is, as it were, all sex and no

131
theory@buffalo 16

death-only starting with the initial formulations of the notion of

the Todestrieb in 1920. On this point, Malabou is absolutely correct.
Any minimally attentive reading of the Standard Edition reveals the
omnipresence of reflections related to death across the entire arc of
Freud's long intellectual itinerary from the 1890s onward.U And yet,
anticipating the subsequent moves Malabou makes on the basis of
this, one reasonably might ask: Even though Freud often, both before
and after 1920, muses about mortality in relation to sexuality, does
this mean that death always and invariably is sexualized for him? I
am convinced that the answer to this question is negative, with this
"no" complicating Malabou's line of argumentation.
Anyhow, for Malabou's purposes, the crucial upshot of her
preceding observation about mortality in Freud's corpus is that
mortal finitude is a tangible reality for the analytic psyche exclusively
in a derivative, indirect fashion. That is to say, according to Freudian
analysis, the psychical subject, both consciously and unconsciously,
relates to death (its own in particular) solely as refracted through the
prism of sexuality: for instance, death fantasmatically represented
as a variant of castration and/ or as related to the hateful, id-level
sadism of the death drive qua dimension of the psyche's affective
and libidinal economies (NB 219) (I must note that I consider this
depiction to oversimplif}j through excessively generalizing from a
handful of select remarks by Freud, his complex, shifting positions
with respect to mortality). Malabou is overridingly concerned with
theorizing death as both the destruction of prior forms of subjectivity
in addition to the random, unpredictable annihilation of the
supporting body of any and every form of subjectivity (a body also
capable of supporting the desubjectified lives, the living deaths, of
the new wounded). As noted earlier, she contends that these sorts of
cuttingly abrupt ends cannot be foreseen and rehearsed in advance
by psychical subjects prior to the event of a (neuro-)trauma; no
ideational, representational imaginings or symbolizations can and
do capture and bind these spectral terminators from a black future
refractory to anticipations, forecasts, and predictions. Therefore,
Freud's treatment of mortality, insofar as this finitude features in his
models of the psyche as an ontogenetically continuous permutation
of sexuality past and present, in no way grasps or addresses the sorts
of deaths Malabou dredges up from biological fields. Not only are
the kinds of new wounded spoken of by Malabou post-traumatically
indifferent to sexuality (as per a libidinal coldness in line with their
affective coldness) (NB 314-15)-pre-traumatically, the psychical

132
 Adrian Johnston

subjectivity of Freudian psychoanalysis is constitutively incapable

of envisioning a death that would erase it (i.e., this very subjectivity
itself) and its accompanying matrices of desires, drives, fantasies,
and feelings. Malabou challenges analysis to try to think a death
of the psyche carrying it beyond the sexual-libidinal coordinates
of pleasure and pain, love and hate (NB 314-15, 322-23, 344-45).
She thereby pits the discontinuity of neuroscientific "cerebrality"
against the continuity of psychoanalytic "sexuality" (NB 234, 256)
(with the cerebral brain, unlike the sexual unconscious of Freud
as constitutively ignorant of its own mortality, being extremely
sensitive to its frail finitude, a sensitivity intrinsic to its auto-affective
self-regulation [NB 89-90]).
Malabou considers Lacan to be as guilty as Freud of holding
fast to a fatally flawed sexual etiology of even the most shattering of
traumas (NB 233). And, in the context of her provocative reading of
pivotal sessions of Lacan's renowned eleventh seminar, she claims
that "automaton" (i.e., "system" in her sense as highlighted above)
always triumphs over "tuche" (i.e., "event" in her sense) in the
Lacanian envisioning of trauma (NB 231-32). In general, she accuses
Lacan of completely disregarding the central nervous system (NB
341-42). Elsewhere, I've defended Lacan against this charge of
utterly neglecting the brain and all things biological12 (as has Soler
too in her own fashion13). Moreover, on another occasion, I've
responded directly to a number of Malabou's criticisms of Freudian­
Lacanian analysis as summarized h�re thus far.14 I also cannot
resist mentioning as an aside that the theory of drive proposed in
my first book, Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the
Dritw, redeems Freud in the face of Malabou's charges to the effect
that he fails to incorporate plasticity (in her precise meaning) into
his mctapsychological theories (NB 280, 288-89, 290-91)-and this
to the extent that my Freud-inspired temporal model of drives as
a combination-in-tension of a repetitive "axis of iteration" (parallel
to plasticity-as-fixity) and a differentiating "axis of alteration"
(parallel to plasticity-as-fluidity) reveals the Freudian Trieb to be
plastic according to the exact Malabouian definition of plasticity.15
But, instead of repeating these pro-analytic defenses and responses
already elaborated, I will, in what follows, try to articulate a new set
of additional replies to Malabou's indictments of Freud and Lacan­
and this, as signaled at the start of my intervention, through drawing
on the recent work of Soler.

133
theory@buffalo 16

As the title of Soler's 2009 book promises (Lacan, l'inconscient

reinvente), she pursues the elucidation of Lacan's "reinven ion"
t of
the unconscious. The word "reinvention" is well chosen, conveying
the dialectical double-sidedness of the famous Lacanian "return to
Freud" as simultaneously both an orthodox recovery of the core of
Freud's thought (i.e., "re-") as well as a heterodox modification of
this same core (i.e., "invention"). Specifically apropos Lacan and his
unconscious, Malabou makes several related assertions. To begin
with, she claims, "Psychical energy is, in a certain way, the rhetorical
detour of nervous energ t (NB 74) (this claim is reiterated by her
in our co-authored book 6). The choice of the adjective "rhetorical"
[rhetorique] undoubtedly hints that Lacan's metapsychology of
psychical subjectivity is being targeted here. Then, making this
glaringly explicit on the following page, she posits that, "The
unconscious is structured like a language only to the extent that the
brain does not speak" (NB 74). In both Les nouveaux blesses and Self
and Emotional Life, she contests the assumption that the brain is
organically closed in uron itself in the mute, sealed-off dumbness of
inert material silence.1
On my reading, Malabou seeks to attribute directly to the auto­
affective central nervous system various aspects of Lacan's (subject
of the) unconscious. Cerebral auto-affection is neither conscious nor
self-reflective/ reflexive (NB 85, 234-35) (as is the Freudian-Lacanian
unconscious that knows without knowing that it knows and thinks
without thinking that it thinks). Along the same lines, there is no
"mirroring" in the brain (NB 234-35) (just as the Lacanian sujet, as
different-in-kind from the specular ego [moil born within the frames
of the reflective surfaces of mirrors both literal and figurative , eludes
being captured in the visible worlds of Imaginary-Symbolic reality).
Finally, the physical brain is a Real material T hing similar to, but
nonetheless different from, Lacan's Real Thing [La Chose du Reel] (NB
234-35). (To remark in passing, Lacan often links his register of the
Real to materialities along the lines of what Malabou is after too).
With Lacan's apparent anti-naturalist distaste for things biological
in mind, Malabou contends that the brain he seems disdainfully to
ignore embodies key features of his subject of the unconscious while,
all the same and at the same time , complicating and I or contesting
other facets of his analytic discursive apparatus. Assuming that
Soler and I , each in our own ways, already have managed to call
into question whether Lacan is as hostile to the life sciences and as
neglectful of the brain as Malabou and most others assume, 18 what

134
 Adrian Johnston

might Soler have to say in response to the preceding?

In both Lacan, l'inconscient reinvente and Les affects lacaniens,
Soler seeks to illuminate what she christens "the real unconscious"
[l'inconscient reel (ICSR)], namely, the unconscious as related mainly
to the Lacanian register of the Real. Although, in these efforts, she
relies heavily on the later Lacan of the 1970s, Soler justifiably rejects
the standard periodization of Lacan's intellectual itinerary dividing
it, as per his register theory, into the early primacy of the Imaginary
(the 1930s and 1940s), the middle primacy of the Symbolic (the 1950s),
and the late primacy of the Real (the 1960s through 1981). Along these
lines, she states that the Lacan of the 1950s never really was a classical
structuralist properly speaking; even then, his subject is, according
to her, "the living being marked by language" [le vivant marque par
le langage] (L'inconscient reinvente 5-7). In fact, Soler tirelessly stresses
again and again that Lacan unwaveringly, throughout the vast span
of his teachings, grounds unconscious subjectivity in the living
being as a material incarnation of the Real; in this vein, she speaks
of "living jouissance," "the Real of the living being," "the organism
affected by discourse" (L'inconscient reinvente 69-70, 29, 61, 120), and
"the affected living being" (Les affets 49-51). Her Lacan, over the time
of his thinking, moves seamlessly from talking about "the Freudian
Thing" to dwelling on a parletre (speaking-being) that itself morphs
into the subject of the real unconscious (L'inconscient reinvente 15-16).
The Solerian ICSR and the subjects associated with it have
everything to do, on Soler's reconstruction of Lacanianism, with
what the Lacan of the 1970s baptizes "lalangue" (L'inconscient
reinvente 21). It can be defined thusly:

This neologism is formed through collapsing the space between

the definite article and the noun in the French 'la langue' (which
could be translated as 'the tongue' or 'the natural language').
One could say that a nonsense-word is created through
skipping over the spacing so crucial to the syntactical and
grammatical structures of recognizably meaningful (uses of)
natural languages. Moreover, the sound of the word 'lalangue'
recalls, through its first two repeating sounds ('lala'), the
murmurings of infants before mastering their 'mother tongue'
[la langue maternelle] as a transparent medium of socially
comprehensible communication. An infant's babbling, prior to
his/her acquisition of and accession to Ia langue as a system
of signifying signs employed in exchanges of ideas, frequently

135
theory@buffalo 16

involves playing with phonemic elements of his/her auditory

milieu as meaningless materials to be enjoyed for the sensations
they produce in the libidinally charged orifices of the mouth
(when vocalized) and Ior the ears (when heard). The neologism
qua nonsense-word 'lalangue' is coined by Lacan to designate,
among other things, the nonsense uttered by babbling infants
joyfully and idiotically reveling in the bodily pleasures of pure,
senseless sounds. (Johnston, "Misfelt Feelings")

Soler offers identical specifications of what Lacan intends

to covey with this notion.l9 Additionally, she shows that Lacan's
privileging of signifiers as material rather than meaningful long pre­
dates such interrelated 1970s-era concept-terms as lalangue, "letter,"
and "jouis-sens" (enjoy-meant). I too have insisted repeatedly, like
Soler, that the signifier as meaningless materiality, instead of as
significance-laden unit of communicative natural language, is a red
thread running through the Lacanian corpus from the 1950s until his
death.20
What's more, Soler correctly traces back all of this (i.e., the
jouis-sens of lalangue as the associative play within the unconscious
of meaningless signifier-letters in their acoustic and/ or graphic
materiality as tied up with the orifices of theliving organic body) to the
pioneering Freud of the 1890s and first years of the 1900s (especially
the author of The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology
of Everyday Life, and jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious)
(L'inconscient reinvente 32). Hence, from the early Freud to the late
Lacan, a fundamental dimension of the psychoanalytic unconscious,
whether this be dubbed Freudian "primary process" or Lacanian
lalangue, reveals itself to be independent of and unconcerned with
constraining strictures of meaning I significance. Already apart from
various sorts of traumas (including those of interest to Malabou),
many of the fundamental underpinnings of the Freudian-Lacanian
unconscious precipitate out of the senseless accidents of events
of contingent collisions between, on the one hand, the "living
substance" of the Real corporeal body laden with its libidinal and
affective jouissance (as Soler renders this21), and, on the other hand,
the universe of material signifiers into which the prematurationally
helpless and uncomprehending young human being is randomly
thrown through the accidental circumstances of conception and
birth (tangentially related to this, it would be very interesting to see
Malabou engage with Otto Rank's unjustifiably marginalized 1924

136
 Adrian Johnston

analytic classic The Trauma of Birth).

Soler's ICSR becomes, over the course of her theorizations,
synonymous with what she refers to as the "lalangue-unconscious."
The Real unconscious of /alangue has several features by her account.
First, this ICSR consists of a savoir (as well as a savoir faire with
meaningless material signifiers) as a set of "unknown knowns" (to
resort to Donald Rumsfeld's irresistible phrasing). This peculiar
type of unconscious knowledge continually overflows and escapes
from the grasp of (self-)conscious cognition, including from that
of the analyzing analyst (who nonetheless, with his/her analytic
savoir [faire], knows how to attempt going with the flow of this free­
associative slipperiness).22 Second, the ICSR qua lalangue-unconscious
remains immanent to the signifying planes of Imaginary-Symbolic
reality, albeit as inevitably mis/un-recognized by the ego-endowed
inhabitants of these planes; it subsists "extimately" (as per Lacan's
neologism "extimite") as singular "a-structural" idiosyncrasy
within-but-beyond reality's socio-linguistic configurations and
constellations (L'inconscient reinvente 26-27, 40, 59). Third, Soler
stipulates that, "The /alangue-unconscious has effects at the level
of jouissance, but remains, in essence, unknown" (L'inconscient
rcinvente 27). In other words, the primary-process-style jouis-sens
interwoven with acoustic and/ or graphic letters produces libidinal
rf
and affective effects likely to a ear mysterious and opaque to the
spenking being thus affected. Fourth, this Real unconscious is
grounded on senseless neologistic signifiers. It consists of peculiar
mnlt'rial clements of a lalangue that's always private qua meaningless
rt.'lntlvc to the codes and conventions of socio-symbolic big Others
(l.'iiiCCJIISciC'IIf rchzvente 41, 48, 88).
This fourth and final feature explains the previous three in
that th<.' conscious selves of personal identities, with their secondary
process mentation and fixation on what is recognizably significant
as per the cstnblishcd standards and norms of given Imaginary­
Symbolic realities, are bound to be perplexed and puzzled by
symptomatic manifestations of the (il}logics of the ICSR-and
this insofar as these primary processes (as jouis-sens) by no means
obey the shared principles and rules of inter- and trans-subjective
structures psychically introjected to become egoistic and super­
egoistic assemblages. Thus, ego-level self-consciousness tends
to experience the Real of the lalangue-unconscious in the guise of
strange, incomprehensible phenomena (such as enigmatic affects
and inexplicable impulses). The Lacanian-Solerian unconscious of

137
theory@buffalo 16

the Real is both too clever (in its unchained playfulness) and too
stupid (in its uncommunicating idiocy) to be reliably known (in
the sense of both savoir and connaissance) by mindsets embedded in
Imaginary-Symbolic realities.
Before I conclude by enumerating the implications of Soler's
illuminating reflections on Lacan's conception of the unconscious
for Malabou's critique of Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, I want
briefly to refer to a single text by Lacan quite relevant to some of
what is up for grabs above. As shown, Malabou, in Les nouveaux
blesses, latches onto Lacan's 1964 distinction between automaton and
tuche so as further to substantiate her contenion t that, supposedly
like Freud, he too subordinates the discontinuities of the accidental
and contingent (i.e., tuche) to the continuities of a randomness­
squelching automaton, namely, the signifying unconscious sustaining
an indissoluble temporal-ontogenetic unity across the whole span of
psychical life. Consistent with the sustained underlying systematicity
Soler and I claim runs through Lacan's teachings from at least as
early as the 1950s all the way through the 1970s, the tuche-automaton
pair of the eleventh seminar expresses a trajectory of thought
already articulated in the postface to the "Seminar on 'The Purloined
Letter'" (30-46) (Bruce Fink rightly comments that this postface
hasn't received the exegetical attention it deserves, an injustice he
helps to rectify ["Nature of Unconscious Thought" 173-191]). To cut
a long story short, one of the basic lessons of this supplement to the
opening chapter of the Ecrits is that the automaton of the Symbolic
unconscious (represented, in this postface, as the combinatory
laws for consecutive-but-overlapping sets of two or more binary
units [Os and 1s, plusses and minuses, heads and tails, and so on]
marking random events) emergently arises from and parasitically
rests atop unfurling sequences of utterly accidental and contingent
happenings (i.e., the tuche of chance occurrences represented as
the non-necessary, unpredictable impacts of real material events as
random and disconnected as coin tosses).
How is this lesson from the "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter"'
relevant to certain of Malabou's interpretations of Lacan? Expressed
in her own philosophical terminology, the groundless ground of the
Freudian-Lacanian unconscious is composed of nothing other than
a tissue of instances of exogenous hetero-affections without ultimate
meaning; the zero-level of auto-affective psychical life is a baseless
base of externally imposed random accidents and contingencies
sans sense. The subje<;ts at stake in analysis take shape through their

138
 Adrian Johnston

endogenous subjectifications (or lack/ failure thereof) compelled by

the Outside of these chances beneath all rhyme and reason, these
episodes and encounters always-already exceeding any and every
rational concatenation of "Whys?" This goes some way toward
turning what Malabou puts forward as a strict difference-in-kind
between the analysands of psychoanalysis and the patients of
neuropathology into a mere difference-of-degree, however great (a
point to which I will return in my closing observations momentarily).
Furthermore, as Lacan's 1956 postface openly acknowledges,
the law-like continuities created and sustained in/by the automaton­
like unconscious are fictitious pseudo-laws superimposed upon the
discontinuities of lawless successions of isolated tuche-like events
with no real connections between them. In response to Malabou's
charge that he (and Freudian analytic theory as a whole) is the one
who projects this continuity onto actually discontinuous material
happenings, Lacan might reply that, as an analyst devoted to
describing what he deals with in the practice of analysis, he is just
theoretically mirroring what hetero-affected-but-auto-affecting
psychical subjectivity perpetually does on its own to itself and
its lived real(ity). If and when an analyst comes across a human
being who is no longer capable of and invested in continuing such
superimpositions and projections-faced with the postface to the
"Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,"' Malabou probably would
usc the model of the coin toss to suggest that Lacan falls short of
�peculating about a toss resulting in the disappearance through
loss or destruction of the heads-and-tails-generating coin itself
(or at least of the function of retaining and extrapolating from
pnst tosscs)-an analyst might curtly concede that this person has
�uffcrcd a misfortune placing him /her on the nether side of the outer
boundaries of analyzability even for those analysts with the widest
of wide scopes. Such an individual simply doesn't have enough coin
for analysis, as it were. But, this concession doesn't mean that those
impoverished by severe neuro-traumas bring about the complete
bankruptcy of analysis as both theory and therapy (something I
defend in Selfand Emotional Life24).
What about Soler's contributions to a more refined appreciation
of the Lacanian unconscious? As is perhaps obvious by now, my
succinct gloss on Lacan's postface to the "Seminar on 'The Purloined
Letter"' dovetails for the most part with what Soler stipulates
regarding the ICSR of /alangue. Her rendition of the real unconscious
sets up with special lucidity a twist on Malabou's critique of

139
theory@buffalo 16

psychoanalysis with which I will conclude. If l'inconscient du Reel is

the rock-bottom basis sought after over the course of analyses, then
the appropriate termination of an analysis must involve bringing
to light previously eclipsed extimate dimensions of psychical
life eerily resembling the new wounded of the brain sciences: the
ghosts of an acephalous subjectivity of the unconscious produced
out of meaningless material events; the specters of an impersonal
subjectless subject often cold and indifferent in relation to the
emotions and motivations moving the ego of conscious selfhood;
unknown and unknowable vicissitudes of aimless drifting and
dissolving cut loose from the plans and purposes of the reasonable
self. Malabou's nouveaux blesses would thereby be "uncanny" exactly
a Ia the Freudian Unheimliche as embodying something repressed
that, although it wasn't supposed to, comes to light unexpectedly
nevertheless.25 For those who are analytically minded, close,
unflinching scrutiny of many characteristics of the traumatic cases
put on display by Malabou would lead them to view these living
dead as embodiments of something "in you more than yourself" (as
the Lacan of Seminar XI would phrase it). Maybe one of the most
unsettling qualities of Malabou's trauma victims has to do with their
disavowed familiarity rather than different-in-kind foreignness. Not
only, as per Malabou's accidental ontology of destructive plasticity,
do they incarnate destructions and deaths unavoidable in the
future for everyone when all is said and done-from a Lacanian­
Solerian perspective, these shocking suffers represent, with the
potent effectiveness of exaggerated degree, the past and present
of those subjects not impacted by neuro-traumas who nonetheless
unknowingly suffer daily from the senselessness of material
signifiers.
The end of a properly terminated Lacanian analysis is
varyingly described as entailing the dissolution of the transference
onto "the subject supposed to know," "subjective destitution," the
confrontation with the non-existence of the big Other, "traversing the
fantasy," and similar things. To risk an oversimplification, one lowest
common denominator of what these various phrases designate
is the ordeal, at the conclusion of an analytic process, of facing up
without illusions to several hard, connected truths: The one-and­
only universe of material beings isn't a cosmos qua meaningful order
created and administered by the highest authority of a big Other such
as God or Nature; There is no profound and significant teleological
undercurrent responsible for the shape of one's life history as a

140
 Adrian Johnston

presumably meaningful narrative; Neither the analyst nor anyone

else can provide a cure for the vulnerable, mortal human condition,
for a death one must at some point meet up with in final, absolute
aloneness. What Malabou, via the neurosciences, advances as a limit
qua external check on analysis both conceptual and clinical arguably
could be recast as a limit qua internal culmination of the analytic
experience, namely, as the limit-experience of the true end of a real
analysis. Registering the uncanniness of one's otherness to oneself,
glimpsing an extimate unconscious subject alien to one's sense of
self in fashions akin to Malabou's new wounded, is an essential
component of any analysis worthy of the name.

Notes
1. Les nouveaux blesses has been translated by Steven Miller and is forthcoming from
Fordham University Press in Spring 2012 under the title, The Nct1.1 Wounded. Ontologie
de /'accident is currently being translated by Carolyn Shread.-Ed.
2. English translations of Malabou's Les nouveaux blesses and Ontologie de /'accident as
well as Soler's Les affects lacaniens and Lacm1, l'inconscient reinvente arc the author's
uwn.-Ed.

:t &'t• NB 37-38, 45, 94, 253-254, 258-260, 272-273, 293; and OA 9-10, 18-19, 23-24.

4. &•t• l.acan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacon, Book Vll 260, 294-295, 320; and Lacan. Le
S11111il111in• cit' facques Lacan, Livre VIII 122.
!i. St-t• OA 21, 24, 27-31, 39-40, as well as "Go Wonder" and "The Paradoxes of the
l'rlndplt• of Constancy" in SEL.

fl. St•t• NH H:l, 115, R8 and "Go Wonder" in SEL.

7. St•c Staml11r11 Edition [SE) 14: "The Unconscious"186-187, and "Thoughts for the
'llnwH on War and Death" 296.

H. Sl.•t• NR 32, :l4-:l5, 241-242, 251-252.

9. Sl.'l.• FH 6, R-9, 26, 71. 73-74, 192-193.
10. Sec NB 52-53, 274; and OA 10-13, 33-34.

11. Sec Johnston, "Scxtimacy" 35-59.

12. See Johnston, "The Weakness of Nature" 159-179 and "On Deep History and
Lacan."

13. See Soler, Lacan, l'inconscient reinvenll! 138-139, 204.

14. See Johnston, "From Non-Feeling to Mis-Feeling" in SEL.

15. See Johnston, Time Driven: Melapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (Evanston:
Northwestern UP, 2005.)

141
theory@buffalo 1 6

16. See "The Paradoxes of the Principle of Constancy" in SEL.

17. See NB 76-77 as well as "Go Wonder" and "The Paradoxes of the Principle of
Constancy" in SEL.

18. See "The Weakness of Nature" 159-179; "On Deep History and Lacan"; and Lacan,
l'inconscient reinvente 138-139, 204.
19. See Lacan, l'inconscient reinvente 25 and Les affects lacaniens 41, 54-55, 109-110.

20. See Johnston, Zii.ek's Ontology 87-90; Johnston, Badiou, Ziiek, and Political
Transformations 122-124; and Johnston, "Slavoj Ziiek's Hegelian Reformation" 9.
21. See Lacan, l'inconscient reinvente 37-39, 61, 119, 141; and Les affects lacaniens 112.

22. See Lacan, l'inconscient reirwente 24, 31, 60, 121-123; and Les affects Iacaniens 102,
108-109, 166-167.

23. See Lacan, l'inconscient reinvente 29-31; and Les affects Iacaniens 84, 103, 105-107.

24. See "From Non-Feeling to Mis-Feeling" in SEL

25. See Standard Edition (SE] 17: "The Uncanny": 217-256.

Works Cited
Fink, Bruce. "The Nature of Unconscious Thought or Why No One Ever
Reads Lacan's Postface to the 'Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter.""
Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan's Return to Freud. Ed. Richard
Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus. Albany: SUNY P, 1996. 173-
191.
Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud. 24 volumes. Ed. and trans. James Strachey, in
collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan
Tyson. London: Hogarth, 1953-1974:
-. "The Unconscious." SE 14: 159-215.
-. "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death." SE 14: 273-302.
-. "The Uncanny." SE 17: 217-256.
-. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. SE 18: 1-64.
Johnston, Adrian. Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of
Change. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2009.
-. "From Non-Feeling to Mis-Feeling: Affects Between Trauma and the
Unconscious." Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou. Selfand
Emotional Life: Merging Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neurobiology.
New York: Columbia UP, 2012 [forthcoming]. [SELl
-. "Misfelt Feelings: Unconscious Affect Between Psychoanalysis,
Neuroscience, and Philosophy." Adrian Johnston and Catherine
Malabou. Selfand Emotional Life: Merging Philosophy, Psychoanalysis,
and Neurobiology. New York: Columbia UP, 2012 [forthcoming]. [SELl
-. "On Deep History and Lacan." Journal of European Psychoanalysis (2011)

142
 Adrian Johnston

[forthcoming].
-. "Sextimacy: Freud, Mortality, and a Reconsideration of the Role
of Sexuality in Psychoanalysis." Sexuality and Psychoanalysis:
Philosophical Criticisms. Ed. Jens De Vleminck and Eran Dorfman.
Leuven: Leuven UP, 2010. 35-59.
-. "Slavoj Zizek's Hegelian Reformation: Giving a Hearing to The Parallax
View." Diacritics: A Review ofContemporary Criticism 37.1 (2007). 3-20.
-. "The Weakness of Nature: Hegel, Freud, Lacan, and Negativity
Materialized." Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic.
Ed. Slavoj Zitek, Clayton Crockett, and Creston Davis. New York:
Columbia UP, 2011. 159-179.
-. Ziiek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity.
Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2008.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar ofjacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis
Porter. New York: Norton, 1992.
-. Le Seminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre V111: Le transfer!, 1960-1961. Ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2001.
-. "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter."' Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in
English. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2006. 6-48.
Malabou, Catherine. Tlte Future ofHegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic.
Trans. Lisbeth During. New York: Routledge, 2005. [FH]
-. "Go Wonder: Subjectivity and Affects in Neurobiological Times."
Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou. Selfand Emotional Life:
Merging Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neurobiology. New York:
Columbia UP, 2012 [forthcoming]. [SELl
-. l-t'1> llotweaux blesses: De Freud a la neurologic, penser les traumatismes
rolltt•mporains. Paris: Bayard, 2007. [NB ]
-. 0111ologit• de /'accident: Essai sur Ia plasticite destructrice. Paris: Editions
Ll•o Scheer, 2009. [OA]
-. "The Paradoxes of the Principle of Constancy." Trans. Adrian Johnston.
Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou. Selfand Emotional Life:
Maging Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neurobiology. New York:
Columbia UP, 2012 [forthcoming). [SEL)
Soler, Colette. 1-t•s affects lacaniens. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
2011.
-. Lacan, l'inccmscimt rt!invcnte. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
2009.

143
 Catherine Malabou

DARWIN AND THE SOCIAL DESTINY OF NATURAL SELECTION

I. ON THE PLASTIC EQUILIBRIUM BETWEEN vARIATION AND SELECTION AT

ITS SOCIAL DISEQUILIBRIUM

An attentive reading of The Origin of Species reveals that

plasticity constitutes one of the central motifs of Darwin's thought.
Indeed, plasticity situates itself effectively at the heart of the theory
of evolution. This concept allows the articulation-as Darwin
indicates at the beginning of his book-of a fundamental connection
that preserves at once the variability of individuals among the same
species and the natural selection between these same individuals.
Variability first. During the process of filiation, every term that
characterizes the mutability of a species-change, modification,
"deviations of structure," variations, understood as small variations
that appear in large numbers as population, reproduction-finds
itself in a certain sense implicated in the generic concept of the
"plastic condition of the offspring" (Darwin, Origin 129). At the
beginning of chapter five, Darwin writes, "the reproductive system is
eminently susceptible to changes in the conditions of life; and to this
system being functionally disturbed in the parents, I chiefly attribute
the varying or plastic condition of the offspring" (129). Considering
descent, as Darwin again affirms, one has the impression that "the
whole organization seems to have become plastic" (23). Observable
in the structure of the organism is its aptitude to change forms. At
the same time, the whole species reveals its mut�bility, the flexibility
of its potential morphological transformations. Characteristic of
variability, plas!icity also designates the quasi-infinite possibility of

144
 Catherine Malabou

changes of structure authorized by the living structure itself; in other

words, the structural law of changing structure.
Selection second. How should we understand the connection
between this structural law and the process of natural selection? "It is
not probable," writes Darwin, that the "variability is an inherent and
necessary contingency" (47). This affirmation is an understatement.
In reality, variability is not contingent at all and obeys certain rules.
Many of the latter are certainly unknown, Darwin recognizes, but
one of them, which appears in nature as the most operational and
effective, is perfectly clear: the law of selecion.
t "Over all these causes
of Change I am convinced that the accumulative action of Selection
. . . is by far the predominant Power" in the economy of mutability
and variability (Darwin, Origin 48).
One must therefore understand that selection guides and
orients variability and that it has in this sense the value of regulating
a system that transforms. We therefore uncover a second significance
of plasticity: the taking of oriented form, a type of change that is not
hazardous (we do not have here a polymorphism without structure
or rule) but obeys the natural exigency of the viability, consistency
and autonomy of individuals. The plastic condition-otherwise
called the motor of evolution itself-therefore hinges on plasticity
understood as the flexibility and fluidity of structures on the one
hand and plasticity understood as a natural decision of viable,
durable forms likely to constitute a legacy or lineage. If one wants to
explain the formation of a new species, one must appeal to a natural
process that assures the permanent sorting [tri) of variations.
The relation between variation and selection raises fundamental
philosophical questions. In nature, the relation between variation
and selection is said to be "plastic;" measure that is not, properly
speaking, planned. The Darwinian concept of nature is a plastic
interpretation of determinism. It is thus that natural selection
appears as a mechanism deprived of all selective intention. The best
is the fittest, but aptitude is here independent of all value judgments
or all actual [n�elle) teleology.
Natural selection is a-teleological, without intention. Insofar as
it is not more than a mechanism-a term that, by definition, evokes
nonetheless a blind movement, the opposite or reverse of freedom­
natural selection is paradoxically unanticipatable, a promise of forms
never chosen in advance, of differences to come.
However, and this is the central problem that I wish to address,
it seems that natural selective plasticity has never had, without

145
theory@buffalo 16

disguise or misrepresentation [travestissement], a social destiny.

We know the errors of "social Darwinism," which is everything
but a philosophy of plasticity to the degree that it reduces down
to a simple theory the struggle of the strong against the weak.
For many years, particularly in France, natural selection will be
understood as a simple process of eliminating the weakest and
life [will be understood] as a merciless struggle for power in all
its forms.1 We may have also been able to confuse Darwinism and
Malthusianism, despite precise precautions taken regarding this
subject in The Origin of Species, taking natural selection as a simple
quantitative dynamic governed by the ratio between the number
of individuals in a population and the availability of resources.2
This is not the type of "social destiny" of Darwinism (which results
from a series of misunderstandings) that I hear discussed. I would
like to return to a plasticity of natural selection and ask why this
plasticity seems definitively lost in social selection. Why-in the
logic of exams, competitions, or in professional selection in general,
the discrimination of candidates regarding aptitude functions, of
competencies, or of specific technical capacities-does selection
seem denied plasticity, which is to say of any flexibility on the one
hand and the absence of any predetermined selective intention on the
other? Why, most of the ime,
t does social selection give the feeling
of being an expected or agreed process, a simple logic of conformity
and reproduction, whereas natural selection is incalculably open to
possibility?
The plastic condition Darwin describes calls for a particular
articulation of identity and difference. Identity, because individuals
selected are able to reproduce and to therefore inscribe themselves
into the stability of an identifiable type. Difference, because this
identity is not rigid and is obtained precisely from variability.
Specific identity is an identity produced by the differentiation of
structures and types. However, in nature, there is an automatic
and blind equilibrium between identity and difference while it
seems that, in the social order, there is always a predominance of
identity over difference and that the natural grace of the balance is
interrupted. As soon as selection becomes an intention of selection,
which presupposes predefined criteria, certainly programmed this
time, as soon as there is no more naturality or spontaneity n i the
promotion, the plastic condition is menaced or even inexistent.
Could we then consider that Darwinism stops itself at the
threshold of society and culture, and that all social destiny betrays

146
 Catherine Malabou

it, which is to sa� precisely, alters it? An entire sociological study

has shown that "heirs" were not exactly concerned with the "plastic
condition of descendants"! Selection would then be nothing other
than a reproductive process of the identical. Can we not envision,
in spite of everything, a plasticity of social condition and recover
the wealth of variations and deviations of structure at the heart of
culture? Is it not possible to think a social and political equilibrium
in the relation between variaion t and selection; and to think "bio­
mimetically" (if we can call it that), by taking a model from nature, a
future open to difference? Where are we today with Darwin on this
point?

II. ARTIFICIAL SELECTION AND NATURAL SELECTION

We know that The Origin ofSpecies takes as its point of departure

the consideration of the process of artificial selection, or, techniques
for building the concept of natural selection. The experience of
horticulturalists and stockbreeders proves that it's possible to
profoundly modify vital types, whether animal or vegetal. A living
individual always presents slight variations that are "personal" to it.
If tht• stockbreeder wants to obtain a certain type (sheep with thicker
wool, for example), he or she selects, chooses among the young those
thnt present the desired characteristics most remarkably and isolates
tht•m. Tlw relationship between identity and difference is therefore
In plnct•: thanks to arificial
t selection, we witness of the appearance
of those durable breeds that present the distinctive characteristics­
the dlffcrt•ncc-desired. Artificial selection therefore organizes itself
in two moments: stockbreeders [eleveurs] or horticulturalists notice
the existence of spontaneous variations among individuals of the
same species first; they then discern and choose those traits they
wish to conserve and increase.
But, if natural selection and artificial selection surely have
common traits, it is clear that they also consistently diverge. Darwin
insists that he devised the concept of natural selection via "metaphor,"
in taking support, in an analogical manner, from the process of
artificial selection. He very quickly recognizes the characteristic of
pedagogical montage of this borrowed term. The correct analogy
between the two selections keeps to the accumulation of variations.
The latter is able to produce a significant transformation on the
condition that it is oriented. In this sense, there is certainly an analogy
between the stockbreeder who realizes (realise] this orientation and

147
theory@buffalo 16

nature as a principle of selection. But the analogy stops there. The

conditions under which the transformation of a species is carried
out are not all the same. In stockbreeding or culture, the recognized
and chosen variations increase by the isolation of reproducible
individuals. In nature, where there are heterogeneous populations,
isolation is impossible. What's more, breeds produced by artificial
selection are monstrous and could not survive as such in nature. But
above all, and this is the central point, arificial
t selection is already a
rupture of the plastic condition, since the relation between identity
and difference, between variation and selection, is programmed,
predetermined-while the idea of choice, according to an apparent
paradox, as we have said, is entirely absent from natural selection. In
nature, selection is unconscious.
The fittest is never, in nature, the one who accidentally fell
upon a favorable environment for its survival. It is a matter of simply
"adjusting a response to the environment," to restate it in Fran�ois
Jacob's terms (Logic of Life 300). Adaptation, the agreement between
the environment and variation, can of course be unpredictable. There
is no better "in itself."
The idea of natural selection, or rather the expression of natural
selection, has no specific content since the selective intention in it is
absent. Certainly, Darwin described natural selection as a "work of
perfectioning" or as an "improvement," but these notions of "better"
remain without intention. As Barbara Stiegler precisely recalls,

we know that Darwin was very reticent to speak of "progress,"

that he himself never wanted to understand his theory as
a theory of "evolution," a term that would risk suggesting
a linear progress comparable to the Lamarckian law of
complexification. He insists instead on the hesitant slowness of
the evolutionary process which, as Lange says, "fires millions
of rifle shots into a vast field and in all directions" instead of
aiming for and directly hitting its target. The random and blind
character of the majority of variations explains this hazardous
arbitrariness, this trial and error. But selection functions exactly
like the anti-random principle, which becomes accountable for
the global direction of evolution. If evolution does not proceed
linearly there is undeniably, from the first organisms to the
emergence of man, a global progress, a relative perfectioning,
in which selection permits precisely, to give an account. (93)

148
 Catherine Malabou

We find here the idea of a selection without predefined criteria.

The improvement of which Darwin speaks is not subordinated to
a finalism. Certainly, "Fran�ois Jacob affirms that 'natural selection
imposes a finality' on the organism and that 'to recognize the finality
of living systems is to say that we can no longer study biology
without referring constantly to the 'project,' to the 'sense' that their
existence itself gives to their structures and their functions"' (Stiegler
93-94). But this "sense" is a direction that, in distinguishing living
being from inanimate being, is nothing more than a functional norm.
The form of survivors, its permanence over time, is in a certain
way sculpted by the disappearance of the disadvantaged, by the
return of eliminated living forms to the inorganic. As in the words
of Canguilhem: "death is a blind sculptor of living forms" (Vital
Rationalist 212). The inanimate therefore becomes, negatively, the
condition of sense or the project of the living.

III. SOCIAL SELECfiON

The process of social selection-understood as the sorting and

choosing of capacities or special aptitudes within the framework
of examinations, contests, or recruitment interviews-immediately
appears as the antonym to the plastic condition that presides over
the economy of natural selection and its non-signifying sense.
The catalogue of tasks, the outline of jobs, the protocol of
exams always precede the real encounter with the variability and
diversity of candidates, thus preventing differences from emerging
by themselves. Such selection cannot in fact consist in the production
of differences but instead only in the perpetuaion
t of the criteria
through which one chooses them. It is not the best that are selected,
or even those that exhibit an astonishing capacity for adaptation, but
those who are the most conformable. Agreement takes precedent
over value. Ensuring the perpetuation and renewability of the
identical, social selection therefore ensures the return of sociological
heaviness, never the emergence of singularities.
Marx, particularly in his Critique of Hegel's Pltilosoplly of
Right, was the first thinker to have denounced the conservative
characteristic of the social selection of aptitudes. Taking the
example of "functionaries," Marx shows that one expects of thC'm
no special competence beyond that which consists in perpetrating
the established order. Hegel writes in his Elements of the Philosoi'"Y
of Right: these "individuals are not destined by birth of personal

149
theory@buffalo 16

nature to hold a particular office, for there is no natural or immediate

link between the two. The objective moment in their vocation is
knowledge and proof of ability" (332). However these capabilities,
says Marx, are not capabilities; no "technique" is necessary to become
functionary, no specific expertise except for the talent of obedience,
of respect for the State and therefore of conformism.
Another critique of social selection would be conducted in the
work of Pierre Bourdieu, notably in the famous text, The Inheritors,
which he coauthored with Jean-Claude Passeron in 1964 concerning
students. Selection norms, always defined in advance, constitute a
veritable program and coincide, again, with pure and simple values
of conformity, those of the dominant class, that fix the criteria of
"cultural legitimacy." The principal characteristic of this legitimacy
is to be a dissimulated social authority. This is the function of social
reproduction of cultural reproduction, founded upon "privilege"­
by definition the most predetermined selective criterion ever.
Espousal of a culture is fixed in advance by the "action of privilege"
that confuses itself with social membership:

Privilege is only noticed, most of the time, in its crudest forms

of operation-recommendations or connections, help with
schoolwork or extra teaching, information about education
and employment. But, in fact, the essential part of a cultural
heritage is passed on more discretely and more directly, and
even in the absence of any methodical effort or overt action.
It is perhaps in the most "cultivated" backgrounds that there
is least need to preach devotion to culture or deliberately to
undertake initiation into cultural practices. In contrast to the
petit-bourgeois milieu, where most of the time the parents can
only transmit cultural good intentions, the cultivated classes
contrive diffuse incitements that are much more likely to
induce espousal of culture through a sort of hidden persuasion.
(Inheritors 20)

One can- see that privilege imitates the freedom of play or the
grace of natural selection. The espousal of a culture seems to work
without effort, almost automatically. In reality, this selective ease is
the result of the tightest calculations; the one that presides over the
predetermined construction of a type, or an "-ideal type" that one
seeks to produce.

150
 Catherine Malabou

It is understandable that the crowning glory of this system

should be the national competitive examination, the concours,
which perfectly ensures the candidates' formal equality but
which, through anonymity, precludes any allowance for real
cultural inequalities. The champions of the aggregation can
legitimately argue that, as opposed to a system of selection
based on caste and birth, the concours gives everyone an equal
opportunity. They forget that the formal equality provided by
the concours merely transforms privilege into merit, since it
allows the influence of social origin to operate, though through
more secret channels. (Bourdieu, Inheritors 67-68)

One cannot be truly surprised at the eminently contradictory

characteristic of a selection that, functioning as a principal of
anti-plasticity, has the goal of reproducing order, privilege, or the
dominant ideology. One never selects the aptitude for action or
political struggle, for example, but always aptitudes that respect
order. Who among us has never been shocked by the injustice of this
sorting !triJ, which only retains those individuals most compliant,
never the most singular, and who, finally, elects so many mediocre,
incompetent and narrow minds? Who has never had the feeling that
social selection was, in effect, a program and never a promise, and
that the morphological transformations of society were, deep down,
only agents of conservation?
The question that arises then is whether the destiny of social
selection is a fatality; or if selection could, in the political realm, join
in any way the natural plastic condition. How to ensure, within the
realm of community and culture, the equilibrium between variation
and selection, the future of difference, the promise of the unexpected?

IV. THE ABSENCE OF PREDEFINED CRITERIA

There would have to be only one solution to this: to know

that criteria do not preexist selection itself. In society, such would
be the recovered plastic condition. The whole problem always
concerns knowing how not to identify the difference in advance,
since selection in the order is always an act that confers value, and
therefore creates hierarchies and norms. How must one think at
once the evaluating character inevitable to all social selection and its
possible indetermination or liberty?

151
theory@buffalo 16

The only philosopher to have dearly posed this question is

Nietzsche. It is certainly not for him to condemn selection, for the
latter is inevitable, and it has an ontological foundation: becoming
is itself nothing other than selection. Do not forget the following
saying by Heraclitus: "For even the best of them choose one thing
above all others, immortal glory among mortals, while most of
them are glutted like beasts" (Fragment 29). Becoming is so rich in
differences that it can only occur upon the mode of choice. The task
of philosophy is essentially selective since it chooses the differences
opened by the flux of life, sorts them, and interprets them. In Ecce
Homo, Nietzsche declares, "What is it, fundamentally, that allows us
to recognize who has turned out well? . . . he is a principle of selection,
he discards much" (224).
No criteria preexists this elimination-selection. Incorporating
the primitive sense of the Greek agathon-that is called "good"
which is good "for"-Nietzsche establishes that the good be decided
only on the possibility of its return. That which is worthy of being
chosen, that which is good for, valid, constant, is that which returns;
the ability to return is the only criteria for sorting(tri].
In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze insists on the indissoluble
line that unites selection, return, and viability:

Laziness, stupidity, baseness, cowardice or spitefulness that

would will its own eternal return would no longer be the same
laziness, stupidity, etc. How does the eternal return perform
the selection here? It is the thought of the eternal return that
selects. It makes willing something whole. The thought of the
eternal return eliminates from willing everything which falls
outside the eternal return, it makes willing a creation, it brings
about the equation 'willing = creating.' (69)

The doctrine of the eternal return is therefore the only attempt

to philosophically answer the question of knowing how a non­
identification prior to selected differences is possible. Selection is a
return, but a return that is not the same. It is productive repetition
of difference, neither a replication nor an identical reproduction.
The eternal return is the being of difference, we read in Difference
and Repetition; and the eternal return signifies that being is selection.
That which repeats itself, which is elected, is therefore the singular,
which does not have an ontological constancy, of essence outside of
its return: "resemblance and identity do not pre-exist the return of

152
 Catherine Malabou

that which returns. They do not in the first instance qualify what
returns" (Difference and Repetition 300). Which is to say that selection,
in its process of repetition, of circling, produces its own criteria
as it operates. It therefore becomes sensitive to the validity and
viability of differences. The difference will be selected, as it unfolds,
demonstrating its aptitude for return, which is to say the possibility
of engendering a heritage or tradition. Thereby "good" music
engenders the tradition of its interpretations, a great text the lineage
of its readers. Any good game is one we replay. Selection should
therefore happen after the emergence or springing of differenCl', in
the same manner that variability precedes natural selection.
Can contemporary biology, in its order, present a plastic theory
of selection that could function also in the social order and integrate
the logic of interpretation-selection? Do the actual reflections on
Darwinism permit one to think a significant porosity of borders
between natural and social selection? Are we again conwrsely
condemned to test the second as a logic of privilege? Will it be
necessary pronounce the total airtightness between nature and
society when it comes to choosing the best?
The response to these last two questions is perhaps-at least I
would like to think-happily negative and I tum to finish toward the
hope which could represent, in this domain, the theory elaborated
by Jean-Pierre Changeux-with the assistance of Philippe Courr�ge
and Antoine Danchin-called "mental Darwinism," or again of the
epigenesis by the selective stabilization of synapses.
Changeux invites us to distinguish between the "genetic
envelope," which contains the program's data, and the "epigenetic
variability" of individuals; variability that depends for an essential
part on environmental influences, on education, and on experience
which Darwin greatly helps us think. Neurobiology is without a
doubt the domain where epigenesis is most obviously at work, and
it is clear that the teaching provided by neural plasticity is likely to
articulate the two types of selection and present a coherent theory
regarding a certain continuity between nature and society. "From my
point of view," writes Changeux,

evolution by variation and selection [which is to say, precisl'ly

the process described by Darwin as the "plastic condition" !
applies itself to the development of the brain, but in a strictly
epigenetic manner, without initiating any modification of the
genome. This idea, revised and extended by Gerard Edelman

!53
theory@buffalo 16

under the name of "neural Darwinism," has been the subject

of numerous discussions. One of its principally beneficial
effects has been to focus the research on molecular mechanisms
involved in the regulation of synaptic development by the
nervous activity (electrical and chemical) and, for this reason,
to better understand the epigenetic variability of our cerebral
organization. We can now attain the establishment of what I call
the "cultural circuits" of the brain, which pertain to reading,
writing, but also to the symbolic systems proper to each culture
which Pierre Bourdieu has named ['habitus. (18)

Non-genetic mechanisms of variation-selection, which

are in many aspects analogous to those of natural selection that
Darwin describes, allow elimination on one hand and stabilization
on the other of certain synaptic configurations-the stabilized
configurations would be analogous to individuals deemed the
"fittest" in evolution. The memory of acquired experiences
perpetuates itself therefore in the brain under the form of stable
neuronal traces. These are the mechanisms of acquisition, founded
first on the progressive development of the cerebral connectivity,
then on the selection of synaptic variables in an almost infinite
number, which will allow, beyond the individual, to account for the
existence and the permanence of rational objects (the true [le vrai]),
moral objects (the good [Ie bien]), and aesthetic forms (the beautiful
[le beau]). These objects are, at the beginning, selected configurations
that are stabilized and then deposited into tradition.
Exploring the epigenetic promises, which partake in the
blurring of borders between nature and culture, Jean-Pierre
Changeux proposes to purely and simply abandon the notion of
genetic program in order to insist on a complex evolutionary strategy
in which the genetic envelope certainly plays an important role, but
not a unique one. "From an evolutionary perspective," he writes,

the passage from a defined level of organization to the next

superior level is conceived at the level of the variation-selection
scheme, with telescoping, interlocking, of multiple evolutions
which participate, with very different kinetics, in the complexity
of the organization of man's brain. I will distinguish at least
four of these evolutions (there are a lot more): that, genetic, of
species, and those, epigenetic, of individual history, culture,
and development of thought. (95)

154
 Catherine Malabo
u

Cultural forms (whether forms of thought or al•sthetic forrn

s)
obey a principal of variation-selection analogous to the one th
operates in nature. This principal would also be devoid of theselectj
t
:
intention. The different configurations or neuronal as semblages th
constitute the biological basis of all cultural production (at the lev
a �
of their design as of their reception) would find themselves selecte
l
�
which is to say, chosen among others to last and imposl' tht•msetv
. . es '

by the1r capacity to return.

Taking account of this complexity of evolution onct• ag<l"
1
situates plasticity-epigenetic variable par cxccllma-at tht• hca
of the relationship between variation and selection. Cttltu r
r �
�l
variables-works, for example, but also our talents, our aplitu h
l .•-;,
our experiences or abilities-are selected and stabilized a th�
s ,:/
operate and are developed, guided by durability but withou t a
predefined value criteria. Forms intrude, become viable, 11tabll•, it, u/e
shimmer of their differences, and not in their power of conforma ti(
)
and reproduction. We do not know the reason for stabilization,
more than we know the reasons that preside over the work of lliltu
"�
r· 1
sdt•ction. The evolution of the species, as well as their developmc
would become in a certain way analogous, according to Changl•u
�;
'
'
to tht• art collection. Choice without predetermined criteria, chara
ct �
lndl'fini�cly open to collection, and variation-selection in
proportion.
l'llll��
If, as I believe, this theory of mental Darwinism is valid, It C<)u
ld
help us to postulate that the forms that are imposed in a
<:u ftu rt•
(those of works, therefore, but also, we can deduct those of talen
t,
aptitudes, as well as the ability to select them) owe their success to ,,s,
n
encounter between a certain chance and a certain strength, f!e)(ibi lit
or internal sustainability, which no program can decide in advane
The possibility of a plastic condition of forms, and of habits a
/
�
'

ni
talents, would therefore be the promise that Darwin had reservl'<!
fo
us, who knew that, perhaps one day, the epigenetic would excl't'll
other programs and would open within social selection the plil
ill �
stk
future that had never been found.
Nietzsche intervenes here again unexpectedly, at l
lnr<,
anticipatory and retroactive, to tell us that this stabilizati0 1,
11f
neuronal forms should not give rise to a new monumentalizatj01
The freely selected values must not form a type of normalizati{)n
<ll\�t
conformity other than those preprogrammed selected values thnt w
have been talking about. They must not be considered as stntctt1 rt' �,
theory@buffalo 16

having become immutable by the force of plasticity. Viable forms,

do not forget, are to vary and to engage in the metamorphology of
evolution. The epigenetic is not a dogma and should never become
one. It would be convenient to allow the intention of elimination to
eliminate itself all alone.

Translated by Lena Taub & Tyler Williams

Notes
1. On this subject, see Antoine Compagnon's expos�.
2. On the relationship with Malthus, see the conclusion to The Origin ofSpecies.

Works Cited
Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron. The Inheritors: Frenclr Students
and their Relation to Culture. Trans. Richard Nice. Chicago: U Chicago
P, 1979.
Canguilhem, Georges. A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings of Georges
Canguilhem. Ed. Fran�ois Delaporte. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer.
New York: Zone, 1994.
Changeux, Jean-Pierre. Du Vrai, du beau, du bien, une nouvelle approche
neuronale. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2008.
Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. London: Cassel & Co., 1909.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York:
Columbia UP, 1994.
---. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia
UP, 1983.
Hegel, G.W.F. Elements of the Philosophy ofRight. Ed. Allen W. Wood. Trans.
H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.
Jacob, Fran..ois. Tire Logic of Life: A History of Heredity. Trans. Betty E.
Spillmann. New York: Pantheon, 1973.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York:
Vintage, 1989.
Stiegler, Barbara. Nietzsche et Ia biologie. Paris: PUF, 2001.

156
 Contributors

ARNE DE BoEVER teaches American Studies in the School of Critical

Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. He also directs the
School's M.A. Program in Aesthetics and Politics. He has published
numerous articles on literature, film, and critical theory and is
editor of Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy. His book,
States of
Exception in the Contemporary Novel will be published by Continuum.

jOHN D. CAPUTO is the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion

Emeritus at Syracuse University and the David R. Cook Professor of
Philosophy Emeritus at Villanova University. His major works are
Radical Hermeneutics (19Bn The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida
(1997), and The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (2006). He
has also addressed a wider audience in On Religion (2001) and What
Would Jesus Deconstruct? (2007). He is currently finishing a book
II II
entitled, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps, a sequel to The
Weakness of God.

LENORA HANSON is a Ph.D. student in the English department at the

University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include
British Romanticism, the long nineteenth century, critical theory,
biopolitics, and the Italian Autonomia. Her dissertation project will
be a comparaive
t analysis of sovereignty articulated at the level of
the individual in British Romantic poetry and on the level of the state
in nineteenth century Italian political thought..

LISA HoLLENBACH is a Ph.D. student in English Literary Studies at

the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include
contemporary American experimental poetry and critical theories of
memory and technology.

157
thcory(glbuffalo 16

ADRIAN JoHNSTON is Professor of Philosophy at the University of

New Mexico at Albuquerque and an assistant teaching analyst at the
Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta. He is the author of Time
Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (2005), Zitek's
Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (2008),
and Badiou, Ziiek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence ofChange
(2009). With Catherine Malabou, he has co-authored a book on affects
entitled Self and Emotional Life: Merging Philosophy, Psychoanalysis,
and Neurobiology (forthcoming). He is currently working on a trilogy
entitled Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism addressing forms of
materialism ranging from historical and dialectical materialisms
to such recent developments as speculative realism, with the first
volume, The Outcome ofContemporary French Philosophy, to be released
in late 2012 or early 2013 ..

CATHERINE MALABou is Professor of Modern European Philosophy at

Kingston University in London after having taught at the Universite
de Paris-X, Nanterre. From 2009-2011, she was Visiting Professor
of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at
Buffalo. Her doctorate was obtained from the Ecole des hautes
etudes en sciences sociales under the supervision of Jacques Derrida
and Jean-Luc Marion. Her dissertation became the book, The Future
ofHegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic (2005). Her other books in
English are, What Should We Do With Our Brain? (2008), Plasticity at
the Dusk of Writing (2009), Changing Difference (2011), The Heidegger
Change (2011), The New Wounded (2012), The Ontology of the Accident
(2012), and a forthcoming book co-authored with Adrian Johnston
titled, Self and Emotional Life.

CAROLYN SHREAO is Visiting Lecturer of French at Mount Holyoke

College. She holds a master's degree in Translation Studies and a
doctorate in French and Francophone Studies from the University
of Massachusetts Amherst, as well as a bachelor's degree in French
and Philosophy from Oxford University. In addition to translating
three of Catherine Malabou's books, she has translated scholarly
and literary texts, and has written numerous articles in the field of
translation studies.

158
 (. ·�ml ribuh H'S

DANIEL W. SMITH is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Purdue

University. He is the translator of Gilles Deleuze's Francis Bacon:
The Logic of Sensation and Essays Critical and Clinical (with Michael
A. Greco), as well as Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious
Circle and Isabelle Stenger's The Invention of Modern Science. He has
published widely on topics in contemporary philosophy. His book,
Essays on Deleuze, will be published in 2012.

EwA PLONOWSKA ZIAREK is the Julian Park Chair of Comparative

Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is
the author of The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism,
Reinvention of Modernism (1995), An Ethics of Dissensus: Feminism,
Postmodernity, and the Politics ofRadical Democracy (2001), and Feminist
Aesthetics: Literature, Gender, and Race in Modernism (forthcoming).
She is also the co-editor of Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable
Boundaries of Kristeva's Polis (2005) and lntermedialities: Philosophy,
Art, Politics (2010).

159
 Call for Papers

theory@buffalo 17: THE WORD FLESH

Flesh is the element that connects us to the world and the

objects that inhabit it. In Maurice Merleau-Ponty's conception, the
"flesh of the world" designates our shared carnality and our sensual
connectedness with our surroundings as an alternative model to
the classical dichotomy of spirit and matter. In this sense, the flesh
is pre- and even anti-individual. It is an inbuilt distance, a sensible
strangeness to ourselves from ourselves simultaneously creating a
proximity and thus folding in upon itself. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty
conceives of language as a system of meaning that always refers
back to its own corporality. Meaning grows out of this self-relation
of the flesh to itself.
Merleau-Ponty is far from unique in his focus upon the
relationship between the flesh and meaning. With his concept of
delayed action [Nachtriiglichkeit], Freud imagined trauma as language
and he developed a vocabulary to incarnate the meanings of flesh
into language. While recent developments in the human sciences
increasingly collapse the difference between matter and meaning­
and thereby retroactively confirm some of Freud's sharpest insights­
they have offered us little by way of a language to describe the
materiality and significance of this fusion. The problem of fleshliness
and its relation to symbolization is not unique to psychoanalysis or
phenomenology, however. Theorists as diverse as Gilles Deleuze,
Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Luc Nancy, Luce Irigaray, and Frantz
Fanon have all made this issue central to their thinking, and the
question of embodiment more generally has preoccupied disciplines
ranging from gender and performance studies to theology.

160
 Call for Papers

New materialisms in literary theory, philosoph)" and the

sciences are currently reformulating the relationship between flesh
and language in ways that direct our attention away from the
traditional points of reference. Fields of inquiry such as affect and
trauma studies, speculative realism and actor-network theory no
longer take their cues from literary texts but, instead, have turned
to the natural sciences for new ways to articulate the relationship
between flesh and word. Thus, the interest in matter over meaning, or
in objects over subjects, evinced by the anti-hermeneutic turn poses
the problem of language and its ability to embody the relationship
between flesh and word in novel ways.
The editors of theory@buffalo 17 seek submissions that
interrogate the relationship between acts of inscription, metaphors
of physicality, and the ontotechnologies of the flesh. Will the new
materialisms in science and philosophy leave us speechless in the
confrontation with our sensate being? Are we losing the ability to
offer "thick descriptions" of our fleshy existence? What new (and
obliterated) metaphors can we come up with to conceptualize the
way social and material forces inscribe themselves on the flesh?
Is there anything to be gained from an insistence on the split and
relation between psyche and body? How can we conceptualize the
swing between object and subject in sensitive and pertinent ways?
What is the place of literature and visual art in this problematic?
Can we construct narratives that pose an alternative to Christian
dualisms and the doctrine of incarnation?
theory@buffalo also accepts book reviews. These can be on
any topic and must be 1,200 words or less. All other submissions
should be no longer than 10,000 words. Please send two blind copies
with a cover page and disk to the address below. Or, please attach
submission electronically as an MS Word attachment to janaschm@
buffalo.edu or brianone@buffalo.edu, re: theory@buffalo 17.

All submissions are due September 1, 2012

theory@buffalo
]ana Schmidt and Brian O'Neil, Editors
Department of Comparative Literature
638 Samuel Clemens Hall, North Campus
State University of New York at Buffalo
Buffalo, NY 14260

161
 Mail Order Form

theory@buffalo 1 6 ISSN 1 535-5551

ISBN 978-0-9845662-2-8

Current Issue: Plastique: Dynamics of Catherine Malabou $ 1 0.00

Subscriptions: • Individual $10 • Institution $20

Outside US/Canada: • Individual $20 • Institution $30

PAYMENT OPTIONS
Charge: • Visa • Mastercard
• American Express • Discover
Name on Card
Card Number
Expiration Date __________________

Signature
Phone

or

Check Enclosed: payable to UBF/theory@buffalo

Name
Address

City, State
Zip, Country

Send orders to:

theory@buffalo
638 Clemens Hall
State University of New York at Buffalo
Buffalo, New York, 14260
USA

Order online: http://wings.buffalo.edu/theory/order.html

***All payments should be made in US Dollars.•••

A brain that changes itself.
That is exactly what "I" am.
- Catherine Malabou

Edited by:
Jarrod Abbott
Tyler Williams

Contributions from:
Arne De Boever
John Caputo
Lenora Hanson
Lisa Hollenbach
Adrian Johnston
Catherine Malabou
Carolyn Shread
Daniel W. Smith
Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

ISB 978-0-9845662-2-8
510.00