Catherine Malabou_ _Plasticity, In Retrospect_ Changing the Future of the Humanities__ Diacritics Review by Tyler Williams

04/10/13 Catherine Malabou: "Plasticity, in Retrospect: Changing the Future of the Humanities": diacritics review by Tyler Williams

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Thursday, October 3, 2013

"Plasticity, in Retrospect: Changing the Future of the Humanities":

diacritics review by Tyler Williams

PLASTICITY, IN RETROSPECT: CHANGING THE FUTURE OF THE

HUMANITIES

Tyler Williams

a Review of SELECTED works by catherine malabou

What Should We Do with Our Brain?

New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction.

New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

“The Future of the Humanities .”

theory@buffalo, no. 14 (2010): 8–16.

Ontology of the Accident: An Ess ay on Destructive Plasticity.

Malden, MA: Polity, 2012.

DIACRITICS Volume 41.1 (2013) 6–27 ©2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Tyler Williams is a PhD candidate in the

Department of Comparative Literature

at the State University of New York

at Buffalo. His research focuses on

contemporary Continental philosophy;

critical and literary theory; and the constitution

of time, memory, and identity

in the modern novel. He is currently

finishing a dissertation entitled, “Politics

of Dust: ‘Faulkner’ and the Legacy of

Difference.”

Immanuel Kant’s famous 1784 dictum, “we at present [do not] live in an enlightened age

. . . but we do live in an age of enlightenment,” affirms that the ideals espoused by the

Enlightenment tradition need constant reaffirmation and transformation befitting the

political climates in which philosophy finds itself.1 Enlightenment, Kant says, is not a finished

product but a matter of process, change, and adaptability to context. The Enlightenment’s

raising of humankind from its state of “self-incurred immaturity” asserts itself

as a tradition founded upon the malleability of discursive borders, limits, and frontiers.2

Institutions birthed from the Enlightenment’s revolution (humanism and the humanities,

constitutional democracy, the university, etc.) honor a certain notion of flexibility

and promote the universalism of humanist ideals as formable and malleable to reason in

the face of rigid discursive dogmatisms that must be resisted. The humanities, and the

universities that institutionally house them and in which they thrive, according to this

tradition, work as form’s resistance to rigidity.

Indebted as it is to the Enlightenment tradition, the legacy of the humanities has historically

maintained itself as the discourse devoted to the study of frontiers and limits. A

tendency to regard the humanities as an exemplary discourse, as unique among others

(insofar as its very project concerns the frontiers, limits, and borders of discursivity as

such), survives today and permeates discussions regarding the future of the humanities.

Both Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault argue that the primary task of philosophy,

and of the humanities in general, bears the responsibility of “critique” as expressed

in the Kantian project. For Derrida, the “university without condition” must be a place

(although, he adds, this place “does not, in fact, exist”) where its founding Enlightenment

ideals are preserved, where Kantian “critique” has a future, and where rigid dogmatisms

of disciplinarity find “critical resistance,” which is to say, “deconstruction.”3 Foucault

agrees when he writes that the Enlightenment’s “philosophical ethos may be characterized

as a limit-attitude. We are not talking about a gesture of rejection. We have to move

beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. Criticism (critique)

indeed consists of analyzing and reflecting upon limits.”4 The humanities are endowed

with the task of “critical resistance,” of “analyzing and reflecting upon limits,” because

the humanities are not themselves circumscribed by dogmatically legislated boundaries.

Instead, the humanities infinitely resist the determination of a demarcated “inside” or

“outside” because the very questioning of borderlines and the power that enforces them

comprises the most critical task of the humanities. No task other than the critique of and

resistance to frontiers/limits; and this taskless task makes the humanities both an infinite

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04/10/13 Catherine Malabou: "Plasticity, in Retrospect: Changing the Future of the Humanities": diacritics review by Tyler Williams

catherinemalabou.blogspot.ie/2013/10/plasticity-in-retrospect-changing.html 2/13

series of frontiers and limits and a discourse on frontiers and limits.

The open formation of the frontier for Derrida marks a decidedly democratic condition

for the humanities. Not surprisingly, therefore, Derrida frequently recognizes the

shared genealogy of democracy and the humanities (as well as the university, a haven for

critique unperturbed by the dogmatisms of the day) dating back to their double instantiation—

as institutions—in the Enlightenment.5 Without a definitively legislated inside

or outside, which is to say, without predetermined and fixed content proper to it, the

humanities’ democratic structure of critique makes their frontiers uniquely malleable

and flexible. However, Catherine Malabou argues that the humanities have conceptually

posited themselves since the Enlightenment according to a model that is today most

keenly articulated by the sciences: plasticity. The humanities have always posited their

frontiers as plastic, she says, but did not know it. With the humanities still ignorant of the

plasticity they name for themselves, and with the sciences developing increased interest

and research in neural and cellular plasticity, Malabou argues that today the “most accurate

concept of the frontier [qua plastic] is currently being elaborated and articulated

by science.”6 Scientific developments in plasticity have begun, according to Malabou,

to threaten territory typically reserved exclusively for the humanities. Therefore, lest

they wilt under the “threat” of becoming “useless and unproductive,” the humanities are

compelled to “dialogue” with the sciences “in order for them [the humanities] to avoid

being swallowed, or eaten alive, by science without even being aware of it.”7

Malabou’s work argues for a redrawing of the discursive frontiers between the humanities

and the sciences in light of the “new elaboration of the concept of frontiers and

of limits” articulated by biological discourses on plasticity. “The future of any discourse

or of any discursive practice, be it philosophical, literary, or scientific, is linked with the

plasticity of its limits and frontiers.” For Malabou, the relevancy and the future survival

of the humanities depend on their plastic

ability “to receive new forms from the outside”

and also “bestow new forms to other

discourses.” By positing relation at the

heart of discursive survival, a discourse’s

plasticity requires that its frontiers and

limits be adaptable from within while also

requiring the same of external discourses.8

Without such an adaptable relation, there

would be no future because there would be no possibility of change. The future of the

humanities as a future of plasticity, according to Malabou, is already woven into the humanities—

and into disciplinarity as such—from the start.

Rooted in the Greek plassein (“to mold” and “to model”), plasticity indicates malleability,

suppleness, and being “susceptible to changes of form.”9 Plasticity consequently

serves as the “exact antonym” of “rigidity”10 insofar as it includes both “the aptitude to

receive form” and “the ability to give form.”11 However, thinking plasticity only as the

infinite reception or bestowal of form risks equating it with elasticity. In fact, Malabou

suggests that plasticity’s most decisive characteristic derives from its resistance to elasticity.

While elastic matter returns (or can return) “to its initial form after undergoing a

deformation,” plastic matter does not.12 In addition to harnessing a double sense of active

and passive formation (giving and receiving form), Malabou insists on a third definition

of plasticity that sharply distinguishes it from the sheer flexibility of elasticity: the impossibility

of return—which is to say, the possibility of resistance. Plasticity productively

concretizes a resilient shape, the future change of which does not elastically return but

rather violently explodes.13

Plasticity productively concretizes a

resilient shape, the future change of which

does not elastically return but rather

violently explodes.

Unlike elasticity’s polymorphism, plasticity is also “diametrically opposed to form,”

which means that plasticity paradoxically includes within its creativity “the destruction

and the very annihilation of all form.”14 Malabou thus regards plasticity as both conceptually

and empirically founded upon the following paradox: it doubly stands for form’s

formation and form’s destruction, a creativity that produces through negation. The formal

contradiction woven by plasticity’s etymology is most radically expressed in the example

of plastic explosives, a reference Malabou frequently makes.15 Molded from nitroglycerine

and nitrocellulose into a “dangerous plastic material of putty-like consistency,”

the plastic nature of the plastic bomb makes it both formally malleable and annihilative

of form at the same time.16

From the perspective of plasticity’s capacity for explosion, which is the same as its

capacity for reception and formation, Malabou’s critique of the future of the humanities

concerns both a revitalization of the humanities’ discourse on frontiers and limits for

the twenty-first century and a plastic reformation of the humanities’ relation to their

own tradition. Not only does Malabou’s emphasis on the plasticity of frontiers and limits

threaten the security of the humanities in the face of emerging trends of scientific

research, which insist on the reformation of the frontier between the humanities and

the sciences; it also suggests that the plasticity unwittingly inscribed at the heart of the

Enlightenment tradition risks explosion, deformation—a destructive threat to tradition

without which, oxymoronically, tradition could never be instantiated as such. The earliest

possibility of critique already assumes a certain explosive dynamic of frontiers and

limits, and the future of the humanities must be thought by way of plasticity’s constitutive

capacity for explosion.

At stake across Malabou’s growing oeuvre (nine books of which are currently available

in English) is a radical reformation of those discourses rooted in the Enlightenment

tradition, a reformation Malabou initiates by awakening within those discourses the

04/10/13 Catherine Malabou: "Plasticity, in Retrospect: Changing the Future of the Humanities": diacritics review by Tyler Williams

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scientific implications of the plasticity they have historically posited at their frontiers

without knowing it. The concept of plasticity is itself plastic; it “is the same as its way of

being.”17 Whether it be the mutation of feminism in Changing Difference, the difficulty

brain trauma poses to psychoanalysis in The New Wounded, the role epigenetics plays

in resisting neoliberal ideology in What Should We Do with Our Brain?, or the peculiar

proximity between literature and neuroscience in the recently published essay “Neuroliterature,”

the varied focuses of Malabou’s engagements (the variation of which could

also be called “plastic”) all coalesce around her abiding conviction that the stabilization

of any discipline occurs only in the face of a fundamental capacity for change. Plasticity

names both the stabilization and the destruction of this identity at the discursive level of

the concept and at the material level of scientific empiricism.

Although she contends that Derrida and Foucault recognize the plasticity of the humanities,

Malabou adds that they nonetheless rigidify the plasticity of the frontiers and

limits of the humanities with a determinism that silently underwrites the tradition in

which they take part: “right from the start the plasticity of this frontier is undermined

by the fixity and determination of the spaces it is supposed to limit in a supple and

malleable way.”18 Science has no suppleness for Derrida and Foucault, Malabou claims,

because for them science works only as the mechanical execution of a calculated program

invested solely in “normalization, regulation, and control.” By contradistinction,

Foucault and Derrida posit the humanities as supple, critical, and infinitely transgressive.

Such an affirmation, though, ultimately “rigidifies the meaning of the outside, and

consequently of the inside as well.”19 Not only does such a gesture perform the very normalization

maligned by Derrida and Foucault in the sciences, it also, by ossifying the

sciences as an inert discourse at the frontier of the humanities, ultimately encases and

stunts the free movement of the humanities themselves. According to this model, the

humanities would be as regulating, normalizing, and controlling as the sciences they

purportedly oppose. Consequently, despite the fact that Derrida ascribes a “crossing of

disciplinary borders” as the condition for the newness of the “new humanities,” the domains

within this humanities-to-come remain entirely within the current inside of the

humanities (law, literature, politics, philosophy, psychoanalysis) and, thus, continue to

normalize and domesticate the interiority of the humanities as such.20

In Malabou’s eyes, the oppositional status through which Derrida and Foucault regard

the sciences fails to thematize accurately the plasticity of the limit. For her, the philosophical

problem regarding the future of the humanities resides at the limit between

the sciences and the humanities. Rethinking this frontier as plastic allows the future of

the humanities to be thought with the sciences without reducing the difference between

them. Thinking the frontier as plastic accounts for (and makes possible) the distinction

between the sciences and the humanities, but in such a way that the two discourses do

not fall into a metaphysics of closed interiority and dictatorially controlled borders. A

plastic frontier would be one that recognizes the rigidity of the limit concurrent with its

supple capacity for change. As a result, Malabou’s insistence on the plasticity of frontiers

and limits should not be equated with assimilation, which would indeed nullify the difference

between the humanities and the sciences and consequently erase the very question

of the future of the humanities. While discursive challenges to the Enlightenment’s

critical tradition have demanded that the humanities begin today to “think with the sciences,”

it remains necessary that a thinking with the sciences not amount to an absorption

into the sciences. Contrary to critics who argue that Malabou advocates precisely

such an absorption, the with in the phrase “thinking with the sciences” necessitates for

Malabou a division from the sciences in order to relate to them.

An interdisciplinary relation between the humanities and the sciences can only be

thought according to the radical disciplinarity that divides discourses. The forefront

of Malabou’s entire project concerns this dilemma: “How then can a genuine dialogue

take place [between the humanities and the sciences], one that would both respect the

autonomy of each field and redraw its limits and frontiers?”21 If the Enlightenment tradition

has safeguarded its disciplines by rigidly distinguishing them from the sciences,

Malabou’s central question concerns how the plasticity of these frontiers can be thought

without reducing their constitutive differences. What change happens when the sciences

are no longer thought according to regulative models of normalization and control but

instead become supple and malleable in the traditional image of the humanities? That

is, what happens when plasticity explodes the division between the mechanical sciences

and the critical humanities, when the sciences begin to demonstrate the plastic capacity

for explosion from within the program itself?

In what may initially appear to be a counter-position to Malabou’s insistence on plasticity’s

redrawing of disciplinary frontiers, Rodolphe Gasché suggests that today “the

individual disciplines are not individual enough” and a “fuller, or more ample, division between

them is necessary.”22 Gasché argues this point in order to suggest that the sharper

the divisions between disciplines, the more one can put “to question their limits and

to bring them into a relation with one another, a relation that is worthy of the name.”23

Gasché insists on the necessity of division in order for any interrogation of discursive

frontiers to be possible:

Even where the limits of conceptual thought become a question, or precisely at the very

moment such a question regarding the creative freedom from conceptual thought becomes

an issue, “the discipline of academic unfreedom,” as Adorno calls the rules that govern the

disciplines, becomes all the more important. Without this academic unfreedom, freedom is

a sham. Or rather, the aim of questioning the disciplinarity of the disciplines is not to free

oneself from all constraints and to establish an unmediated relation to what is, or a license

that everything goes, a point that both Adorno and Derrida have in common. Anyway, no

interrogation of the limitation of a discipline, and the limits within which it has enclosed itself,

is possible without painstakingly observing the distinctions on which it is based.24

According to what Gasché calls the “law of difference,” disciplines derive their disciplinarity

from their relation to others. The “freedom” of any discipline to question itself

04/10/13 Catherine Malabou: "Plasticity, in Retrospect: Changing the Future of the Humanities": diacritics review by Tyler Williams

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and its relation to others works within the “unfree” boundaries of each discipline’s

most minimally distinguished disciplinarity. Consequently, the boundlessness (or seeming

boundlessness) of a discipline like philosophy comes only from within the strictures

of its own defined discipline. Interdisciplinarity is possible only as it is radically disciplined;

philosophy’s thinking with the sciences requires that philosophy and the sciences

relate to each other only through their constitutive differences. Gasché does not

argue that disciplines are incommensurate with one another. Rather, each discipline’s

openness to the other necessitates the divisibility, difference, and distinction that at once

constitutes each discipline and makes the relation of disciplinary frontiers possible.25

Gasché shows that philosophy’s distinction, its disciplinarity, derives from a minimal

condition of relation that is not philosophy’s “own” but rather a “threshold that communicates

between entities, or domains, that are all in the position of others among each

other.”26 He develops this notion of disciplinary contamination from Derrida, who notes

that within this logic of hospitality, the threshold distinguishing the home from the outside

remains always a site of transgression.27 The identity of the home (of the humanities,

for example) is constituted by its exposure to the intrusion of the foreigner (science),

and this intrusion is made possible by the fact that the home is always already exposed

to the foreigner’s entry and that mastery over one’s home can be thought only from the

perspective of the foreigner who threatens that mastery.28 And yet, despite their inevitable

contamination and exposure to the other, these distinctions must be rigorously upheld

in order for there to be any relation, or hospitality, at all. As a result, the autonomy

of the humanities could never be respected because the metaphysics of self-sufficiency

within the notion of autonomy (the sovereign immunity to the exteriority of the other

by being closed in within the borders of itself ) comprises the annihilation of the humanities

and of disciplinarity in general. Autonomy can be thought only according to the

ruptures that invade and ruin autonomy; and this ruination names the very possibility

of the humanities. For Gasché, if it is as necessary to redraw the boundaries between

the humanities and the sciences as Malabou says it is, this redrawing can happen only

through ever-deeper lines that mark the disciplinarity of individual disciplines, dividing

and distinguishing them but also putting them in relation. While these lines may be plastic

according to Malabou, Gasché warns that they cannot be shallow.

It must be noted that Malabou does not reduce the difference between the sciences

and the humanities by insisting on a new thinking of the plasticity of frontiers.

By claiming that science allows the humanities to think the necessity of a doubly plastic

and rigid frontier, Malabou shows

that the limits of the humanities and the

sciences are intimately shaped by developments

within the boundaries of

each respective field. Malabou therefore

shares Gasché’s insistence on difference

as a condition for disciplinary relation;

but she adds that discursive mutations

within a discipline’s deeply drawn divisions

necessarily impact the frontier of

those other disciplines it borders. If the

humanities are constituted by their difference from the sciences—differences that are as

sharply and deeply drawn as Gasché argues—Malabou’s call to think with the sciences

simply shows that scientific discourses provide new avenues to think these differences

within respectively circumscribed fields. What changes at the frontier of one discipline

necessarily changes the frontiers of those discourses it borders. The distinction between

frontiers is thus preserved, but in a new way: “to be able to change difference while respecting

the difference of change.”29 To translate Malabou into Gasché’s parlance, it is

not that plasticity makes disciplinary unfreedom free; rather, the freedom at work within

the rigid unfreedom of a disciplinary programmatic ultimately transforms the boundaries

of that unfreedom from within.

Malabou and Gasché agree on the impossibility of any discipline’s closed relation to

itself and on the necessity that any discipline remain open to and constituted by its exposure

to others. However, for Malabou, the philosophical tradition that, since Kant,

has equated the task of the humanities with the democratization of their disciplinarity

and argued for the necessity of a discipline’s openness to its others has also rigidly pro-

tected those frontiers, the fortification of which undermines the very suppleness of the

frontier.30 For this reason Malabou argues in Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing that the

hospitality Gasché privileges as an emblem of disciplinary relation proves an insufficient

model for thinking the plasticity of the frontier. In Derrida’s formulation of the threshold,

the site of confrontation between host and guest (both of whom are ambiguously

subsumed under the same French signifier: hôte), no formation takes place, both the host

and the guest are rigidly dissociated and plasticity is foreclosed.31 For Malabou, the task

remains to think the frontier in such a way that accounts for its plasticity without abandoning

the difference that marks the threshold of disciplinarity. One has to think rigidity

and flexibility together in a democratization faithful to the Enlightenment instantiation

of the humanities’ critical project.

The problem for Malabou, however, is that the humanities have not yet been able

to articulate adequately the inextricability of rigidity and flexibility. Each attempt, as

she says of Derrida and Foucault, immobilizes discursive boundaries in a manner antithetical

to the humanities’ plasticity. Malabou’s famed turn toward neurobiology is less a

heretical provocation than an indication that neuroplasticity currently demonstrates

more adroitly than the humanities both the empirical and the discursive means by

which a rigidly closed program harnesses within it the critically explosive capacity for

destruction and transformation. Furthermore, in her most ambitious books like What

Should We Do with Our Brain? and Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, Malabou argues

that the scientific advancements in neuroplasticity are structurally instrumental to a

04/10/13 Catherine Malabou: "Plasticity, in Retrospect: Changing the Future of the Humanities": diacritics review by Tyler Williams

catherinemalabou.blogspot.ie/2013/10/plasticity-in-retrospect-changing.html 5/13

future thinking of humanism’s critical and democratic resistance to institutional dogma.

In short, the disciplinary question regarding the limit between the sciences and

the humanities for Malabou is realized in the scientific work on cellular plasticity,

which, in turn, also expresses the means by which a rethinking of critique’s political

resistance must take place.

For Malabou, as for Georges Canguilhem, the plasticity of the brain opposes “the

mechanical theory of the organism,” which imposes rigidity upon life’s dynamism by

seeking to “explain the structure and function of the organism on the basis of the structure

and function of an already-constituted machine.”32 Such a mechanical view of the

organism has dominated the history of science as biological “dogma” but has today become

recognized as a “narrow and insufficient point of view.”33 This persistent dogma

analogizes the brain to a mechanical homeostatic hub equipped with “a series of fixed,

indeed genetically programmed, entities, without any suppleness, without any improvisational

ability”34 that commands the body schema and its motor systems according to

what Žižek calls “blind biological processes.”35 Within the rigidity of genetic mechanics,

plasticity asserts itself as a strictly a-mechanical operation of the brain. Plasticity

(for Malabou “the dominant concept of the neurosciences”36) therefore names a tension

between the genetic machine and its explosive counterpart. The plastic freedom of the

brain—its transformative, reparative, improvisational, and non-deterministic openness

to being formed by experience—must be thought alongside, or in relation to, the rigid

“unfreedom” it exceeds. Plasticity explodes the centralization of the machine metaphor

through a radically democratic model of networked, delocalized power. “The epigenetic,”

Malabou writes, “is not a dogma and should never become one.”37

To explain the relationship between plasticity and the genetically mechanical system

it explodes from within, neurobiologist Jean-Pierre Changeux argues that the variability

of the human brain can only be marked within a certain genetic horizon, what he

calls a “genetic envelope.”38 For example, the determinism of neurogenesis provides a

human fetus with “a jungle of . . . 100 billion nerve cells” after nine months of gestation,

but what the brain does with these billions of genetically determined nerve cells defies

predetermination or programmed expectation.39 The brain organizes these cells into

neural connections through its perceptive and experiential interaction with the world,

losing some while allowing others to grow. The plastic formation of neural organization

includes the deformation of unused connections: a productively negative process of variation

and selection, of establishing strong connections strengthened by use and allowing

weaker ones to be reorganized across ever-mutable internal neural borders.40 “In short,”

Changeux tells Paul Ricoeur,

the brain cannot be viewed as a strictly genetic machine; it incorporates, within a defined

genetic envelope peculiar to the species, a series of nested “epigenetic” imprints that are

established by variation and selection. Another way of stating this hypothesis is to say that

evolutionary (epigenetic) competition inside the brain takes over from the biological (genetic)

evolution of species and creates, as a consequence, organic links with the physical,

social, and cultural environment.41

Changeux’s basic point is that the plasticity of the brain operates within the genetic

envelope and, improvising an opening of the envelope with increasing variation, explodes

the machine-metaphor. While certain functions and compositions of the brain

are “mechanically” programmed, the brain’s plasticity exceeds the closed structure of

programmatic mechanization. Malabou takes Changeux’s description of the brain’s ability

to respond to and be shaped by outside stimuli to argue that the plastic brain must

be thought as delocalized rather than as a nucleic “control center.”42 Because “synaptic

efficacy grows or declines under the impact of strictly individual experience” that

“progressively erase[s]” any semblance of an “original model or standard,” plasticity’s

“delocalization of cerebral activities” both biologically and ideologically (which is to say,

politically) resists the power that enforces a hierarchized concept of the brain.43 Arguing

that “any vision of the brain is necessarily political,” Malabou claims that colloquial

commitments to thinking the brain as a centralized control-machine expose a governmentality

of the brain ideologically situated according to specific notions of hierarchized

power.44 Put otherwise, Malabou recognizes a correlation between the enforcement of

rigid frontiers within the mechanical vision of the brain and the determination of science

as a regulative program of normalization thoroughly antithetical to the humanities’

freedom. Although the brain certainly constitutes a “central” position within the human

nervous system, neurobiology has shown that the plasticity of the brain resists ideologies

of centralization through decentralized processes of individuation. The brain and its

diverse functions operate not from the delegation of a single panoptical source but from

a dispersed communalism that undermines the traditional normalization of biological,

political, and discursive frontiers: “Opposed to the rigidity, the fixity, the anonymity of

the control center,” writes Malabou, “is the model of suppleness that implies a certain

margin of improvisation, of creation, of the aleatory. . . . The representation of the center

collapses into the network.”45

As much as plasticity resists encasement within an immutable structure of rigid

mechanization by exposing its radical transformability, it equally resists the “nihilism”

of ceaseless change.46 Returning to her distinction between plasticity and elasticity,

Malabou notes that plasticity’s resistance to power politically includes a resistance to the

flexibility demanded by neoliberal capitalist society. Malabou’s politicization of neurobiology

is largely influenced by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s book, The New Spirit

of Capitalism, which argues that “new management” strategies of contemporary capitalism

have followed neurobiological discourses away from the centralized brain-machine

to endorse the adaptability and flexibility of both its workforce and its management in

order to delocalize top-down bureaucracy and replace it with networks of flexible teams

within a company. Capitalism’s neoliberal efficacy, according to Boltanski and Chiapello,

and likewise according to Malabou, derives from its delocalization of power into flexible

networks that, qua flexible, have no rigidly determined role exclusive or proper to them.

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Such a model is not unlike how neural efficacy derives from its openness to formation,

how different zones of the brain can be co-opted for various uses, and how the oncerigid

borders of these zones improvisationally mutate in response to environmental developments

from outside.

However, Malabou notes that treating brain plasticity as employable capital reduces

the plastic functioning of the brain to elasticity. To be “employable” in today’s job market

means to be pliable, elastic, flexible, adaptable—and therefore passive and conciliatory.

But as Malabou frequently points out, plasticity also resists elasticity and threatens it

with explosion. If the “new spirit” of capitalism expresses itself in conjunction with the

plasticity of the brain, as Boltanski and Chiapello suggest, then Malabou shows that capitalism’s

structure must include its own explosive resistance, its critique, from within.

And no effective power from outside could dogmatically impinge upon plasticity’s right

to resistance; its right, as it were, to put everything into question, to “unconditional resistance,”

to civil disobedience, to say everything or anything critically and with impunity.47

From within the flexible networks of neoliberal capitalism, plasticity—as something that

gives, receives, and explodes form—includes the following political defensive: the ability

“not to replicate the caricature of the world” and to say “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.”48 Malabou sees plasticity as an inherently excessive dynamic that

overflows legislated boundaries, dogmas, and demarcations that seek to encase it within

an anticipatable definition or regulative law. At the same time, it also sternly opposes

conciliatory assimilation. Plasticity’s resistance and flexibility therefore work together

to disobey (or exceed) the authority of a legislated program by insisting on the individuality

of difference (of identities and unique brains; as well as the individuality of

disciplines, as Gasché notes above) and on the difference of individuality (the ability to

be reshaped, mutable, contingent, and explosive).

Hence Malabou’s titular question: if the brain’s synaptic plasticity actively “sculpts”

itself unique to each individual’s experiences and in response to outside stimuli, and

if this sculpting power bears political consequences, then what should we do with our

brain? As Daniel Smith notes, Malabou’s question returns her analysis of plasticity to its

Kantian legacy. The “condition” of Kant’s critical question proposed in the Second Critique

(what should we do?), Smith claims, has indeed changed greatly since Kant’s time.

While Kant urgently sought to identify “freedom” within the determinism of a Newtonian

and Galilean universe, science has today issued the need to flip Kant’s project by

suggesting that “we live in a world that seems to have been re-injected, as it were, with

certain degrees of freedom.”49 By inverting the Kantian paradigm, Malabou suggests that

the time has come for critique to reinvent itself. The time has come, in other words, to

stop seeking a priori human freedom within a deterministically mathematized universe

and instead start questioning the foundation of limits and frontiers instituted in the face

of the indeterminacy of the universe and its biological organisms. Smith explains,

physics has become nondeterministic; genetics emphasizes 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 emphasizes 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?50

If the brain operates in an auto-mutable synthesis of world and biology, and if this

auto-mutation not only invalidates the mechanical associations with the brain but also addresses

a certain vitality of individualism and practical responsibility (“our brain is in part

essentially what we do with it”51), then the brain opens itself as the very site of freedom

from within the program itself. The inversion of Kantian freedom at the heart of Malabou’s

interest in the future of the humanities does not dismiss Kantian critique but instead, by

remaining indebted to the plastic model of the critical tradition, asks it to reinvent itself

in response to emerging neuro-political contexts, asks it to do exactly what critique has

always claimed to do since the Enlightenment: to transform itself, to redraw its frontiers

and limits, to be plastic, adaptable, democratic, and resistant to “self-incurred immaturity.”

Of course, the injunction that the humanities reinvent themselves coincides, for

Malabou, with the fact that the concept “human,” on which the universalization of “the

humanities” was founded centuries ago, has itself been reinvented today by the sciences.52

Malabou argues for a movement away from classically Cartesian treatments of the human

ego as a self-contained entity separated from the world (despite the fact that it also

works as a synthesis of the noumenal and the phenomenal), and toward a necessary connectivity

between the phenomenal and the neural. The assertion of the self is no longer

the cogito ergo sum, but rather the “brain that changes itself,” which, Malabou says, “is

exactly what ‘I’ am.”53 Malabou defends the “human subject” as divided, different from

itself; and she adds that this difference must be thought as being different even from the

frontiers that mark difference because those very frontiers, sharp as they may be, are already

plastic and therefore open to a future indeterminable mutation. In short, the plasticity

of these frontiers indicates that the inside/outside paradigm of the Cartesian ego

no longer holds. The self for Malabou is nothing other than the plastic frontier between

the inside and the outside, which ruins the “normalized” stability of this frontier as Foucault

envisions it on a discursive level. For Malabou, the brain serves as the image of a

new frontier of difference, a “cerebrality” that names both the constitution of the affective

psyche and its exposure to an “inassimilable” wounding.54 The brain’s synaptic connectivity

does not divide inside/outside, does not differentiate the neural subject from

the world, but also does not homogenize or assimilate this difference. Difference is the

condition of plasticity insofar as a brain considered entirely “itself” could not be plastic,

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could not change or respond or transform in the future. Plasticity preserves difference as

a necessary condition, but threatens any structure of its normalization with explosion.55

Plasticity’s critical resistance to capitalist power and its radically democratic decentralization

of governing hierarchy concerns, quite literally, the realization of the transcendental.

Although Malabou does not phrase it in these terms, it is clear that for her

there could be no transition from the “biological to the cultural” or from the “strictly

natural base of the mind to its historical—and thus also, necessarily, its political and

social—dimension” without positing a material realization of the transcendental.56 The

infinity of critique’s tasklessness and the transgression of borders, thresholds, and limits,

according to Malabou, has been imminently realized in the (plastic) materiality of the

brain. For the brain to become a real model of socio-political, cultural, and historical

discourses—and not just a metaphor for them—and additionally to expose the plastic element

of critique latent in those discourses, Malabou must ultimately cast suspicion upon

the rigidified border between the empirical and the transcendental.

What interests me in this remarkable phenomenon is that this self-transformation of the

brain, the modifiability of its circuitry and organization renders forever improbable the limit

between the transcendental and the empirical. Neuroplasticity is an empirical fact. . . . Biology

deals with materiality and raw facts. At the same time, however, because the very

meaning of our biological being is indeterminate and consequently free, we can also say that

the brain is made of a transcendental material and that as such, it is perfectible, meaningful,

auto-organized, and open to the future. Because the organization of the brain is affected by

experience—a process that must be exercised, a process with which it is necessary to experiment—

we ourselves are constantly being rewired and reorganized.57

Malabou does not do away with the transcendental; nor does she argue for its dissolution.

She claims that the frontier between the empirical and the transcendental has been

“deconstructed” within the materiality of the brain. Deconstruction, for Malabou, no

longer has to be contained within Derrida’s structure of the promise because, following

a linearly epochal model of scientific enlightenment, Malabou sees deconstruction’s insistence

on the transgression of borders and its untamable right to critique at work in the

brain’s immanence.58 The empirical body (of the brain) materializes the transcendental

critique historically reserved for the humanities. In what she concedes may be her own

“dialectical stubbornness,” Malabou argues that transcendental structures of “pure dissymmetry,”

like otherness, alterity, différance, the limit, etc., take shape and form—which

is to say that these transcendental dissymmetries work empirically (and are inseparable

from this empiricism)—in the flexibility and explosion of the organism’s plasticity.59 Plasticity

does not conceptually replace deconstruction; it clearly inherits deconstruction’s

legacy of difference. Malabou maintains that plasticity is deconstruction’s form; plasticity

preserves and conserves the difference of alterity and the unanticipatable coming of

the future, but according to a materialism that explodes the limit between the empirical

and the transcendental.

If the transcendental can only be thought today via the transformation of its material

body, and if this transformation is indeed “unavoidable,” then Malabou suggests that

there can be no securely determined frontier between the inside and outside. Science

has begun to show that the self is nothing but the neural mutability of this frontier, the

collapse of an “irruptive transcendence,” or “pure event,” or “messianism.” Because the

transcendental has been transformed “into a plastic material” by the sciences, which

threatens the humanities’ traditional abode, Malabou argues that one need not wait messianically

for the “new humanities” Derrida calls for because the future of the humanities

has already begun to take shape within the sciences.60

Nevertheless, the assurance of plasticity can only be thought retrospectively, in response

to, or at least inseparably from, a minimal structure of the promise. While Malabou

posits a becoming-empirical of the transcendental as the primary facet of plasticity’s

materialism, a becoming-transcendental of the empirical comprises an equally

constitutive dynamic without which plasticity would be unable to recognize its “own”

transformation, the duration of change, or the effect of its explosion. Plasticity’s unpredictability,

the time that transformation takes, the accidents it risks, exposes plasticity

to an uncertainty that cannot be separated

from its promise. Even the most radically

destructive of plasticity’s explosive capabilities

could not be exempted from this

quasi-transcendental structure. In Ontology

of the Accident Malabou theorizes

a phenomenology of “the power of ontological

and existential explosive plasticity,”

which has been “neglected by

psychoanalysis, ignored by philosophy, [and] nameless in neurology” because it attempts

to account for the complete “evacuation” of a subjectivity transformed by a “surprised”

event of destruction.61 But even in this extreme case—of a break that does not

coincide with the positively reparative sense of plasticity but instead marks the abrupt

discontinuity between a pre- and post-traumatic subject—it is clear that the recognition

of this transformation as plastic requires a relation to the promise of plasticity as a quasitranscendental

concept. The new post-traumatic subject, differentiated entirely from an

old, pre-traumatic self, is recognizably “new” only in relation to the old. The hermeneutics

of this transformation (of a destruction that will have already happened) only makes

sense as plastic insofar as the past-promise of plasticity’s destruction is “remembered”

in the future. Plasticity, therefore, may never conceptually coincide with the real it imminently

realizes; in a gesture of retrospection, it will only ever be able to respond to or

answer for the plasticity that, it promises, will have already happened.

Plasticity’s empiricism must thus retain a becoming-transcendental in order for it

to be conceptualized in the first place. While Malabou argues that this becomingtranscendental

would also be a plastic transformation unto itself,62 one can further assert

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that the “ultra-transcendental” structure of the promise that plasticity’s materialism is

supposed to ruin cannot be ruined without also ruining the possibility of thinking plasticity.

63 “Plasticity” will always be thought after plasticity, that is, according to a conceptual

delay that divides plasticity from itself and makes it dependent on the promise

of its explosion. The disciplinary relation between the sciences and the humanities at

the heart of Malabou’s work makes the necessity of this delay clear: the humanities, divided

disciplinarily from the sciences, can only ever recognize plasticity retrospectively,

which is to say, never “with” the sciences in the concurrence of a discovery but in response

to a promise. The “epochality” of Malabou’s call for the humanities to redraw

their discursive frontiers and limits vis-à-vis the sciences is already, first, a response to

discoveries already made within scientific discourses and, second, the recognition of a

promise issued by the Enlightenment’s critical (i.e., plastic) resistance to dogmatisms of

“self-incurred immaturity.” It is precisely because of this delay that both the division and

relation between the humanities and the sciences are necessary and unavoidable; but it

is also because of this delay that any thinking with the sciences unavoidably submits itself,

as a promise, to the realm of the “possible,” to which Malabou relegates literature.64

It is no mere coincidence that, after announcing the neurological problems of destructive

plasticity, the major course of Ontology of the Accident comprises sustained readings

of Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Marguerite Duras, Thomas Mann, Maurice Blanchot, and

Ovid. While an analysis of the “literary” dimension of Malabou’s work would require

more attention than offered here, one can ultimately discern a literary facet endemic to

plasticity’s explosive force. This literary facet would comprise the promise of plasticity’s

transformation as well as the promise that has sustained the Enlightenment’s tradition

up to the epochal moment in which, today, it can come to realize, retrospectively,

that it has been plastic all along. While Malabou asserts that “plasticity will only last the

time of its forms” and cannot therefore be subsumed under “an empty, transcendental

instance,”65 the promise of plasticity’s future, which is also a memory of its prior transformations,

nonetheless relies on a quasi-transcendental structure that conditions the

future of the humanities as being inseparable from a thinking with the sciences.

1 Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 21.

2 Ibid., 17; translation modified.

3 Derrida, “The University Without Condition,”

204.

4 Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 45.

5 See Derrida, “The University Without Condition.”

For Derrida, the irresponsible tasklessness of the

humanities should not be read as an idealism that ever

fully “exists” in itself. Instead, the “freedom” of the

humanities in each instant of its actualization is also

limited by the contexts of its institution. That is why

Derrida argues that an actual university “without condition”

could never “in fact, exist.” The humanities are

never just this excessively democratic capacity for critique;

they are also always institutionally and juridically

contextualized within a phenomenal horizon, which,

from the start, divides the “work” of the humanities

from within. In other words, the transgressively critical

task of the humanities would never be perceptible

without the rigidity of a horizon to transgress.

6 Malabou. “The Future of the Humanities,” 8.

7 Ibid., 9. It is not entirely clear in Malabou’s text

what this “swallowing” would entail. On the surface, it

suggests that unless the humanities become aware of

their discourse’s own plastic construct, they risk being

surpassed by the sciences as a dominant discourse on

the thinking of frontiers and limits. But such a surpassing

hardly constitutes being “swallowed” or “eaten

alive.” Evoking incorporation, assimilation, and, obviously,

ingestion, these terms suggest that the humanities

themselves risk becoming scientific (without being

aware of it) unless they reconstitute their frontiers for

a new age in which scientific plasticity has become

a prominent “motor scheme.” Certainly, Malabou is

more interested in the necessity of the humanities’

reconstitution than she is in the characterization of

the threat they face, but her essay remains vague on

the latter point. If the humanities do not reconstitute

themselves, what is the actual “threat” to the humanities?

What is the connection between the humanities’

potential irrelevancy (being surpassed by) and their

being “swallowed” by (being incorporated into) the

sciences? And by what measure—according to what

program—would the relevancy of the humanities be

decided vis-à-vis the sciences?

8 Ibid., 8.

9 Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, 67.

10 Malabou, What Should We Do with Our

Brain?, 5.

11 Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing,

87n13.

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12 Malabou, What Should We Do with Our

Brain?, 15.

13 For all its mutability, plasticity preserves itself

and stands steadfast as a resistance to the “nihilism”

of ceaseless flexibility. The structural resistance

to dynamism at the heart of Malabou’s conception

of plasticity’s dynamic features exposes Alexander

Galloway’s mischaracterization of her work. Galloway

assimilates plasticity with elasticity when he considers

plasticity a “voracious monster” of infinite variation

and ceaseless production and thereby overlooks the

critical resistance that makes plasticity as equally

inert as it is adaptable (“Catherine Malabou, or The

Commerce in Being,” 15). Galloway even goes so far

as to ascribe to plasticity the status of a proto-nihilism,

a position premised upon this misunderstanding of

plasticity’s dual dynamics. Plasticity could only be

nihilism or nihilistic if its capacity for change allowed it

to change ceaselessly—a feature Malabou consistently

attributes to elasticity alone.

14 Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, 67.

15 Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 9; What Should

We Do with Our Brain?, 5; The New Wounded, 17;

Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, 67; Ontology of the

Accident, 5. The specific example of the plastic bomb

does not appear directly in Ontology of the Accident,

but Malabou does refer to this necessarily destructive

component of plasticity in this book as “terrorist” (5).

16 Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, 67.

In his review of What Should We Do with Our Brain?,

Pete Mandik writes that he finds this connection

between plasticity and plastic explosives “hard to swallow”

because, as he claims, “not even the ‘plastic’ in

‘plastic explosive’ means ‘explosive.’ It’s the ‘explosive’

in ‘plastic explosive’ that means ‘explosive.’” Mandik

wants to argue that the annihilative function of form

inscribed into the concept of plasticity is not as radically

annihilative as Malabou suggests because the

“explosive” nature of plastic explosives has nothing

to do with their being plastic except as a metaphor.

However, as Carolyn Shread succinctly points out, “A

closer reading of Malabou’s translated text, a more

attentive awareness to its status as a translation, would

have revealed [to Mandik] the close association in

French between plastique (plastic) and plastiquer (to

explode), with nothing but an r between the concept

and its explosive connotations” (“The Horror of Translation,”

82–83).

17 Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 186.

18 Malabou, “The Future of the Humanities,” 10.

19 Ibid.

20 Derrida, “The University Without Condition,”

230. Derrida has elsewhere argued that domestication—

the circumscription and recognition of identifiable

limits—already begins the process of normalization.

Without calling attention to this point, Malabou

suggests that the repeated inclusion of the “old

humanities” within the “new humanities” begins again

the process of domesticating the humanities within a

secure tradition, which, in turn, operates according to

the same normalizing impulses typically prejudiced

against the sciences. (See Derrida, Points, 386.)

21 Malabou, “The Future of the Humanities,” 9.

22 Gasché, “One More Division,” 34.

23 Ibid., 35.

24 Ibid. On the necessity of difference as a minimal

condition for relation, see Gasché’s earlier text,

Of Minimal Things: Studies on the Notion of Relation,

especially pp. 4–12, for a concise elaboration of the

problem.

25 Gasché, “One More Division,” 37. Similar to

Gasché, Samuel Weber notes that the “intellectual

division of labor” across the modern university system

has, for “at least three centuries,” since the Enlightenment,

made possible the university’s ideal “of comprehensive,

total knowledge, by increasingly distancing

the different divisions and disciplines from one another.”

Gasché’s double insistence on the relation and

the difference of disciplines is in accord with Weber

who calls the demarcations made in the humanities

the “ambivalence of demarcation”: the humanities are

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posited as an inclusive discipline, but this inclusivity is

distinguished against the sciences, which makes the

demarcations “proper” to the humanities inclusive only

by way of their exclusivity. (See Weber, Institution and

Interpretation, 240, 138.)

26 Gasché, Of Minimal Things, 11. The journal

Labyrinthe published a 2007 issue La fin des disciplines?,

which largely takes up institutional relations

within the humanities under the ubiquitous title, “interdisciplinarity.”

See in particular Laurent Dubreuil’s

essay, “Défauts de savoirs,” which engages in part with

the collaborative differences at work within the hard

sciences versus those of the humanities.

27 Derrida, Of Hospitality, 75.

28 Ibid., 5, 61, 125–27. In his essay “L’Intrus,”

Jean-Luc Nancy argues that the intruder (l’intrus)

must be thought as a stranger who enters one’s home

by surprise. The connection between the stranger’s

surprise and his/her strangeness is necessary insofar

as a stranger who “already has the right to enter and

remain” loses any semblance of strangeness and

therefore ceases to be a surprising intruder. Because

intrusion always surprises, a preemptive protection

against intrusion is fundamentally impossible.

29 Malabou, What Should We Do with Our

Brain?, 79.

30 Malabou, “The Future of the Humanities,” 10.

31 Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, 73.

32 Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, 75–76.

33 Ibid., 75.

34 Malabou, What Should We Do with Our

Brain?, 4.

35 Žižek, The Parallax View, 214.

36 Malabou, What Should We Do with Our

Brain?, 4.

37 Malabou, “Darwin and the Social Destiny of

Natural Selection,” 156.

38 Changeux, Neuronal Man, 212.

39 Schwartz and Begley, The Mind and the

Brain, 112.

40 On the social implications of plastic selectivity,

see Malabou, “Darwin and the Social Destiny of Natural

Selection.” Plasticity’s balance between production

and negation is addressed throughout Malabou’s

work, but perhaps most prominently in What Should

We Do with Our Brain? and Ontology of the Accident.

In the former, Malabou addresses plasticity as a

dynamic that uses negativity as a productive process

of formation while in the latter Malabou entertains the

possibility of a “purely” negative plasticity that would

have no productive or reparative outcome proper to

it. Such a “destructive plasticity” also serves as the

foundation for Malabou’s interest in brain damage in

The New Wounded.

41 Changeux and Ricoeur, What Makes Us

Think?, 6.

42 Malabou, What Should We Do with Our

Brain?, 33.

43 Ibid., 6, 44.

44 Ibid., 52. See also The New Wounded, xvi.

45 Malabou, What Should We Do with Our

Brain?, 35.

46 On accusations of nihilism within Malabou’s

formulation of plasticity, see note 13 above.

47 Each of these “rights” are also outlined in

Derrida’s comments on the unconditionality of the

“university” as a site of critique in “The University

Without Condition” (204–8).

48 Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?,

78, 79; emphasis added.

49 Smith, “What Should We Do with Our Brain?: A

Review Essay,” 23–24.

50 Ibid., 24.

51 Malabou, What Should We Do with Our

Brain?, 30.

52 Ten years before Malabou’s call to redraw the

frontier between the humanities and the sciences,

Weber argued (also in an essay titled “The Future of

the Humanities”) that the future of the humanities has

found itself threatened in the midst of economic crisis.

Is there a future left for the humanities, Weber asks,

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in a world “progressively dominated by an economic

logic of profit and loss”? The human has been traditionally

thought according to “productive labor,” as

self-producing and self-realizing, but today’s economy

sees a rapid division between “productive labor”

and the “accumulation of wealth” to such a degree

that “those who have to ‘work for a living’ have seen

themselves increasingly marginalized in large parts of

the world.” If to be human no longer means to be selfrealizing

according to productive labor, Weber asks,

what is the future of the humanities? Weber’s analysis

makes an important argument that his essay does

not explicitly take up but that should nevertheless be

commented upon: namely, that outside (i.e., scientific)

discourses like economics dramatically shape the

manner in which the humanities think their own disciplinarity.

Economic crisis provokes a transformation of

the human, which in turn demands that the future of

the humanities be rethought as a discipline (Weber,

Institution and Interpretation, 236).

53 Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, 82.

54 “Cerebrality” is a term Malabou coins as a

substitute for Freud’s “sexuality.” While Freud regards

sexuality as a causality of sexual behavior, Malabou

designates cerebrality as the governing of psychic life

by the brain’s cerebral functions. This is the reason

Malabou is so interested in brain damage: if the

psyche is now subordinate to cerebrality, then any

wound inflicted upon the brain, and any subsequent

transformations this trauma provokes in the victim’s

emotional life, poses serious “hermeneutic” problems

to the discourse of psychoanalysis. This hermeneutic

problem, for Malabou, derives from the fact that

the event of the brain damage always comes from

outside and, entering the “inside” only upon the event

of its wounding, is never internalized by the psyche it

wounds. It remains “constitutively inassimilable” and

“without reason” because “the psyche cannot stage

this knowledge for itself” (The New Wounded, 5, 9).

55 On the relationship between preservation, conservation,

and the “memory” of difference inscribed

in plasticity, see Malabou and Williams, “How Are You

Yourself?,” 15.

56 Malabou, What Should We Do with Our

Brain?, 56.

57 Malabou, “The Future of the Humanities,” 15.

58 Malabou and Williams, “How Are You Yourself?,”

16–17.

59 Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, 40.

60 Malabou, “The Future of the Humanities,” 14.

61 Malabou, Ontology of the Accident, 5, 6, 30.

62 Malabou, Changing Difference, 65. Earlier in

the chapter “Grammatology and Plasticity,” Malabou

makes this same argument about Derrida’s generalization

of “writing” from its exoteric sense of notation

to its esoteric sense of the trace. She argues that the

possibility of transforming the exoteric into a generalized

esoteric concept already assumes a certain

plasticity of the concept.

63 Derrida describes différance as an “ultratranscendental”

structure in order to account for its

“originary” sense without sacrificing it to the idealism

of a Kantian idea (Of Grammatology, 61).

64 In a recent interview, Malabou claims, “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” (Malabou and Williams,

“How Are You Yourself?,” 17).

65 Malabou, Changing Difference, 66, 65.

Boltanski, Luc, and Ève Chiapello. The New Spirit of

Capitalism. Translated by Gregory Elliott. New

York: Verso, 2005.

Canguilhem, Georges. Knowledge of Life. Translated

by Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg.

New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

Changeux, Jean-Pierre. Neuronal Man. New York:

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Pantheon, 1985.

Changeux, Jean-Pierre, and Paul Ricoeur. What

Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher

Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the

Brain. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Princeton:

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———.

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Posted by Michael O'Rourke at 6:32 PM

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