Plasticity

Catherine Malabou is Professor of Philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University (UK) and in the Departments of Comparative Literature and European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She took her PhD under the supervision of Jacques Derrida at Ecoles des Hautes Etudes. She is the author of Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains (Columbia University Press, 2019), Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality (Polity, 2016), Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience (Columbia University Press, 2013), Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (Polity, 2012), The New Wounded, from Neuroscience to Brain Damage (Fordham University Press, 2012), Changing Difference, The Feminine and the Question of Philosophy (Polity, 2011), The Heidegger Change: On the Fantastic in Philosophy (SUNY, 2011), Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction (Columbia University Press, 2010), What Should we do with our Brain? (Fordham University Press, 2008), The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic (Routledge, 2005) and Counterpath: travelling with Jacques Derrida (Stanford University Press, 2004). Tyler M. Williams is Assistant Professor of English, Humanities, and Philosophy at Midwestern State University. He is co-translator of Marc Crépon's The Trial of Hatred (EUP, 2021) and The Vocation of Writing: Literature, Philosophy, and the Test of Violence (SUNY, 2018). He is editor of Plasticity: The Promise of Explosion by Catherine Malabou. Ian James is Fellow in French at Downing College, University of Cambridge.

• Introduction by Ian JamesPart I: Philosophical Heritages1. An Eye on the Edge of Discourse: Speech, Vision, Idea2. Following Generation: Biological and Poetic Cloning3. Philosophy in Erection: Derrida’s Columns4. The Possibility of the Worst: On Faith and Knowledge5. Before and Above: Spinoza and Symbolic Necessity6. Can We Relinquish the Transcendental?7. Is Science the Subject of Philosophy? Miller, Badiou and Derrida RespondPart II: Masks8. The Crowd: Figuring the Democracy to Come9. Life and Prison10. Odysseus’ Changed Soul: A Contemporary Reading of the Myth of Er11. Epigenesis of the Text: New Paths in Biology and Hermeneutics12. Reading Lázló Földényi’s Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears13. Philosophy and the Outside: Foucault and Decolonial ThinkingPart III: Psyches, Brains, Cells14. The Brain of History, or, the Mentality of the Anthropocene15. Whither Materialism? Althusser/Darwin16. Philosophy and Anarchism: Alternative or Dilemma?17. One Life Only: Biological Resistance, Political Resistance18. Philosophers, Biologists: Some More Effort If You Wish to Become Revolutionaries!19. How Is Subjectivity Undergoing Deconstruction Today? Philosophy, Auto-Hetero-Affection and Neurobiological Emotion20. Floating Signifiers Revisited: Poststructuralism Meets NeurolinguisticsPart IV: Destructive Forms21. Is Retreat a Metaphor?22. Plasticity and Elasticity in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle23. Are There Still Traces? Memory and the Obsolescence of the Paradigm of Inscription24. Phantom Limbs and Plasticity: Merleau-Ponty and Current Neurobiology25. The Example of Plasticity: An Interview with Catherine Malabou Works cited

Plasticity is a thoughtfully curated collection of essays by one of the most innovative and inspiring philosophers writing today. For the past several decades, Catherine Malabou has bravely blazed a trail towards something thus-far unprecedented: a novel form of naturalism shaped by the insights of European theoretical currents from German idealism through today. Malabou deftly addresses anew such perennial-yet-pressing philosophical tensions as those between mind and body, freedom and determinism, as well as transcendentalism and historicism. Malabou's oeuvre, both philosophically important and politically timely, opens up crucial possibilities for radically rethinking the interrelationships between philosophy, science, psychoanalysis, feminism, and politics.