Catherine Malabou: Anarchy and pleasure, scenes of a plastic life

In the First Person

Afonso Dias Ramos

One of the most prominent philosophers of the twenty-first century and arguably the one most engaged with the issue of change in the world today, Catherine Malabou has covered the most disparate topics in contemporary critical thought, from neuroscience to feminism, from artificial intelligence to cryptocurrency, from epigenetic trauma to sexual pleasure. In conversation with Afonso Dias Ramos, Catherine Malabou recalls the journey that culminated in her new book on the political idea of anarchism, the latest variation on the concept that brings together her entire work: plasticity.

Catherine Malabou is a prominent figure within contemporary European philosophy and is widely regarded as one of the most exciting names of the so-called ‘New French Philosophy’. A specialist in contemporary French and German philosophy, Malabou is praised for some of the most original readings of canonical thinkers such as Hegel, Heidegger and Kant, and is increasingly acclaimed for pioneering the dialogue between the traditional social sciences and the hard sciences, probing the unexplored relationship between neuroscience, philosophy and psychoanalysis. The rare case of a philosopher engaging with life sciences, Malabou has undertaken a radical reading of figures from Freud to Spinoza or Kafka from the viewpoint of contemporary neurology and maintains that we have yet to assimilate the revolutionary discoveries made in biology over the last half a century. A prolific author since the late 1990s, Malabou’s work continues to take unexpected directions, from exploring the concepts of essence and difference within feminism to questioning the place of the feminine in philosophy, from creating a new theory of trauma to calling for a redefinition of the subject, from artificial intelligence to cryptocurrency, from epigenetics to anarchism. This entire work is essentially a long and consistent attempt to reconsider ideas of mutation, metamorphosis and transformation, rendering Malabou one of the preeminent thinkers of change today. The central concept in her work is plasticity, a term initially taken from continental philosophy but developed over the last two decades in proximity with neuroscientific studies of the brain. Plasticity refers to the coexisting power to give, receive, explode or regenerate form, the ability of any form to be transformed and to transform itself. Such a concept is flourishing within contemporary social, economic and political discourses, mobilised repeatedly for rethinking politics, literature, art, law, and justice. At a time when corporations and governments insist on the mantra of flexibility, this philosopher calls us to develop new forms of sociality and modes of being, reinvesting in the constitutive plasticity of the human being as a ‘principle of internal disobedience.

Catherine Malabou is a Professor of Modern European Philosophy at both Kingston University (UK) and the European Graduate School (Switzerland), and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California Irvine (US), a position previously held by Jacques Derrida, her former supervisor and interlocutor, with whom she co-authored Counter-Path (1999). Among her most important books are Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing (2004), What Should We Do With Our Brain? (2004), The New Wounded (2007), Changing Differences (2009), Ontology of the Accident (2009), with Judith Butler, You Be My Body For Me (2012), with Adrian Johnston, Self and Emotional Life (2013), Before Tomorrow (2014) and Morphing Intelligence (2017). In her previous, polemical book, Erased Pleasure (2019), Malabou focused on the clitoris as a pleasure island systematically obliterated by patriarchal societies, not only as the sexuality of the female body but also in psychoanalysis and philosophy. It was but a prelude to a newly released book, Au voleur! Anarchisme et philosophie (2022), which calls for a totally new philosophical elaboration of the idea of anarchy, as something that is more politically urgent than ever. Catherine Malabou talks to Electra about some of the new challenges and directions in her own thinking.

Carol Rama, Opera No. 47, 1949 © Photo: Pino DellAquila / Courtesy Archivio Carol Rama, Torino

AFONSO DIAS RAMOS What led you into the study of philosophy?

CATHERINE MALABOU In France, philosophy is compulsory in the last year of high school. As soon as I was initiated into philosophy, I decided that this is what I would do. I was immediately attracted to it. There was nothing else. I never asked myself what else I could do or what other discipline I could study.

ADR And what made you write a doctoral thesis on Hegel at a time of such anti-Hegelian consensus?

CM I was attracted to philosophy but it was very general. In fact, I was attracted to something that I really did not understand. It was at least three years later that I started reading important texts and Hegel stood out as the most interesting one. The first book that I read by him was On the Philosophy of Right, in which he develops this critique of a Rousseauan model of society, with the people in the state of nature who gather and then form the civil society. Hegel said, ‘No. The origin of politics was never the collection of individuals, because politics is always what it is: a community.’ I was fascinated by this idea! When I was young, I was convinced by the dogma of the social contract, that there was a state of nature and then we gathered and so on. But when I saw Hegel challenging this idea, I thought that it was extremely audacious. The idea was bright, of course, but what struck me was that someone could challenge a very well received thesis. It was both things. Then I started really reading him and he became, and still is, the leading figure for me. He is truly inspirational.

"The brain does not appear to researchers as a series of fixed locations but, on the contrary, as the capacity to respond to external influences, to integrate them and transform them in return."

ADR And that, in turn, meant challenging your supervisor, Jacques Derrida? Is this how you stumbled upon the idea of ‘plasticity’?

CM When I decided to show that Hegel was not a thinker of the past but did indeed have a future, I knew that writing my PhD with Derrida would create a strange situation. Had not Derrida written Glas, in which he equates Hegel with death? There was a bit of struggle between us. At the same time, Derrida was so open and so generous that it was very easy to convince him about the plasticity of Hegelian concepts. But in order to demonstrate this potential or future, I had to find an unexpected angle, a way out of the established interpretations. That is how I found plasticity in a neglected corner of this system. Plasticity, for Hegel, designates the capacity to be affected by something external, by an event or an encounter of any kind, and to be transformed by it. At the same time, plasticity also implies a resistance to too profound a transformation. It is an intermediary state between total solidity or fixity and total liquidity or fluidity, between suppleness and resistance. I became more and more interested in this concept. One day, in a train station, I found a scientific magazine by chance, whose title was on plasticity of the brain and memory. I asked myself: what is that? I bought the magazine and discovered that plasticity is a central concept in neurology today. The brain does not appear to researchers as a series of fixed locations but, on the contrary, as the capacity to respond to external influences, to integrate them and transform them in return. We find the same movement, the same intermediary state between the capacity to receive and the capacity to respond by giving a new form to what is received. I discovered that there were many passage points between Hegel and the brain and that perhaps plasticity is a property of all systems in general.

ADR You wrote that ‘the human being is plastic, not flexible’.

CM Not flexible because a resistance to an excessive amount of transformation is essential. Flexibility means that you may be bent into any shape, people can do what they want with you and can push you in any direction. In flexibility, you do not have an idea of resistance. Plasticity implies the capacity to listen, to be influenced and to be open. But, at the same time, there is also a threshold of resistance that cannot be transgressed. If it is transgressed, then it is at the cost of destruction. I think that this is very important because in capitalism today the main word is ‘flexibility’.

ADR And how did the university system receive that shift from studying Hegel under Derrida to exploring the brain and biology?

CM Very badly. The Hegel book [The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic (1996)] was well received and because it was my PhD thesis, I was able to get a position at the Paris Nanterre University. But when I turned to the brain and stopped caring for only one author, it became obvious that I would never become a specialist in anything, as they say. This is very badly received, at least in the French academic system. You need to have one object of study and devote your entire life to it. As this was not my case, I had to leave at some point. I started going to the US to teach as a visiting professor and in fact had had many visiting professorships before I found this position in the UK.

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