Catherine Malabou

Last updated
Catherine Malabou
Born (1959-06-18) 18 June 1959 (age 65)
Era Contemporary philosophy
Region Western philosophy
School Continental philosophy
Main interests
Feminist theory, philosophy, psychology
Notable ideas
Combining philosophy (transsubjectivation) and neuroscience (neuroplasticity)

Catherine Malabou (French: [malabu] ; born 18 June 1959) is a French philosopher. She is a Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University, at the European Graduate School, and in the department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, a position formerly held by Jacques Derrida.

Contents

Education

Malabou graduated from the École Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines (Fontenay-Saint-Cloud). Her agrégation and doctorate were obtained, under the supervision of Jacques Derrida, from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Her dissertation became the book L'Avenir de Hegel: Plasticité, Temporalité, Dialectique (1996).

Work

Central to Malabou's philosophy is the concept of "plasticity," which she derives in part from the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, but also from medical science, for example, from work on stem cells and from the concept of neuroplasticity. In 1999, Malabou published Voyager avec Jacques Derrida – La Contre-allée, co-authored with Derrida. Her book, Les nouveaux blessés (2007), concerns the intersection between neuroscience, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, thought through the phenomenon of trauma.

Coinciding with her exploration of neuroscience has been an increasing commitment to political philosophy. This is first evident in her book What Should We Do With Our Brain? and continues in Les nouveaux blessés, as well as in her book on feminism (Changer de différence, le féminin et la question philosophique, Galilée, 2009), and in her forthcoming book about the homeless and social emergency (La grande exclusion, Bayard).

Malabou is co-writing a book with Adrian Johnston on affects in Descartes, Spinoza and neuroscience, and is preparing a new book on the political meaning of life in the light of the most recent biological discoveries (mainly epigenetics). The latter work will discuss Giorgio Agamben's concept of "bare life" and Michel Foucault's notion of biopower, underscoring the lack of scientific biological definitions of these terms, and the political meaning of such a lack.

In May 2022, Edinburgh University Press published the first authorized collection of Malabou's shorter writings, entitled Plasticity: The Promise of Explosion (ed. Tyler M. Williams with an introduction by Ian James).

Bibliography

Books

Articles (selection)

Secondary literature

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hans-Georg Gadamer</span> German philosopher (1900–2002)

Hans-Georg Gadamer was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus on hermeneutics, Truth and Method.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jacques Derrida</span> French philosopher (1930–2004)

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in a number of his texts, and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy although he distanced himself from post-structuralism and disowned the word "postmodernity".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emmanuel Levinas</span> Lithuanian-French philosopher

Emmanuel Levinas was a French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry who is known for his work within Jewish philosophy, existentialism, and phenomenology, focusing on the relationship of ethics to metaphysics and ontology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hélène Cixous</span> French writer and thinker

Hélène Cixous is a French writer, playwright and literary critic. During her academic career, she was primarily associated with the Centre universitaire de Vincennes, which she co-founded in 1969 and where she created the first centre of women's studies at a European university. Known for her experimental writing style and great versatility as a writer and thinker, she has written more than seventy books dealing with multiple genres: theatre, literary and feminist theory, art criticism, autobiography and poetic fiction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean-Luc Nancy</span> French philosopher (1940–2021)

Jean-Luc Nancy was a French philosopher. Nancy's first book, published in 1973, was Le titre de la lettre, a reading of the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, written in collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Nancy is the author of works on many thinkers, including La remarque spéculative in 1973 on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Le Discours de la syncope (1976) and L'Impératif catégorique (1983) on Immanuel Kant, Ego sum (1979) on René Descartes, and Le Partage des voix (1982) on Martin Heidegger.

In critical theory and deconstruction, phallogocentrism is a neologism coined by Jacques Derrida to refer to the privileging of the masculine (phallus) in the construction of meaning. The term is a blend word of the older terms phallocentrism and logocentrism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexandre Kojève</span> Russian-born French philosopher and statesman

Alexandre Kojève was a Russian-born French philosopher and statesman whose philosophical seminars had an immense influence on 20th-century French philosophy, particularly via his integration of Hegelian concepts into twentieth-century continental philosophy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean Hyppolite</span> French philosopher (1907–1968)

Jean Hyppolite was a French philosopher known for championing the work of G.W.F. Hegel, and other German philosophers, and educating some of France's most prominent post-war thinkers. His major works include Genèse et structure de la Phénoménologie de l'esprit de Hegel (1946) and Études sur Marx et Hegel (1955) and the first translation of Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit into French in 1939.

The following is a bibliography of works by Jacques Derrida.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean Beaufret</span> French philosopher (1907–1982)

Jean Beaufret was a French philosopher and Germanist tremendously influential in the reception of Martin Heidegger's work in France.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Augusto Vera</span> Italian philosopher

Augusto Vera was an Italian philosopher who followed Hegel's theories and translated many of his works.

The Collège international de philosophie (Ciph), located in Paris' 5th arrondissement, is a tertiary education institute placed under the trusteeship of the French government department of research and chartered under the French 1901 Law on associations. It was co-founded in 1983 by Jacques Derrida, François Châtelet, Jean-Pierre Faye and Dominique Lecourt in an attempt to re-think the teaching of philosophy in France, and to liberate it from any institutional authority. Its financing is mainly through public funds. Its chairs or "directors of program" are competitively elected for 6 years, following an international open call for proposals. Proposals are free and directors are elected after a collegial, peer-assessment of their value for philosophy. The College recognizes that philosophy is better served by being located at "intersections" such as Philosophy/Science, or Philosophy/Law. Proposals must respond to this exigency of "intersection" as wished by Jacques Derrida. The College has few registered students, who may receive the Diplôme du Collège international de philosophie, which is not a university degree but may be, in some cases, validated by French or foreign universities. Otherwise, attendance to seminars is open and free.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">François Laruelle</span> French philosopher (born 1937)

François Laruelle is a French philosopher, formerly of the Collège international de philosophie and the University of Paris X: Nanterre. Laruelle has been publishing since the early 1970s and now has around twenty book-length titles to his name. Alumnus of the École normale supérieure, Laruelle is notable for developing a science of philosophy that he calls non-philosophy. He currently directs an international organisation dedicated to furthering the cause of non-philosophy, the Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bernard Stiegler</span> French philosopher (1952–2020)

Bernard Stiegler was a French philosopher. He was head of the Institut de recherche et d'innovation (IRI), which he founded in 2006 at the Centre Georges-Pompidou. He was also the founder in 2005 of the political and cultural group, Ars Industrialis; the founder in 2010 of the philosophy school, pharmakon.fr, held at Épineuil-le-Fleuriel; and a co-founder in 2018 of Collectif Internation, a group of "politicised researchers" His best known work is Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus.

<i>Of Grammatology</i> 1967 book by Jacques Derrida

Of Grammatology is a 1967 book by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. The book, originating the idea of deconstruction, proposes that throughout continental philosophy, especially as philosophers engaged with linguistic and semiotic ideas, writing has been erroneously considered as derivative from speech, making it a "fall" from the real "full presence" of speech and the independent act of writing.

<i>The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity</i> 1985 book by Jürgen Habermas

The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures is a 1985 book by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, in which the author reconstructs and deals in depth with a number of philosophical approaches to the critique of modern reason and the Enlightenment "project" since Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche, including the work of 20th century philosophers Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Cornelius Castoriadis and Niklas Luhmann. The work is regarded as an important contribution to Frankfurt School critical theory. It has been characterized as a critical evaluation of the concept of world disclosure in modern philosophy.

The following is a bibliography of John D. Caputo's works. Caputo is an American philosopher closely associated with postmodern Christianity.

Marc Froment-Meurice is a French and American writer and philosopher.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marc Crépon</span> French philosopher

Marc Crépon is a French philosopher and academic who writes on the subject of languages and communities in the French and German philosophies and contemporary political and moral philosophy. He has also translated works by philosophers such as Nietzsche, Franz Rosenzweig and Leibniz.

References

  1. Clemens, Justin (2010). "The Age of Plastic; or, Catherine Malabou on the Hegelian Futures Market". Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol 6, No 1. Open Humanities Press. Archived from the original on 2011-07-22. Retrieved 2010-11-28.

Further reading

Interviews