Catherine Malabou


Catherine Malabou is a French philosopher. She is a professor at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy 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.

Education

Malabou graduated from the École Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines. 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.

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, 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, and in her forthcoming book about the homeless and social emergency.
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. 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.

Books

Plasticity: The Promise of Explosion.Au voleur! Anarchisme et philosophie
  • * Stop Thief!: Anarchism and Philosophy Le plaisir effacé: Clitoris et pensée
  • * Pleasure Erased: The Clitoris Unthought Avant demain. Épigenèse et rationalité
  • * .
  • Self and Emotional Life: Merging Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience.
  • Sois mon corps, with Judith Butler.
  • * You Be My Body For Me, For, Corporeity, Plasticity in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.
  • La Grande Exclusion, l'urgence sociale, thérapie et symptômes.
  • Changer de différence, le féminin et la question philosophique,.
  • * Changing Difference,.
  • La Chambre du milieu, de Hegel aux neurosciences, collected,.
  • Ontologie de l'accident: Essai sur la plasticité destructrice.
  • * The Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity.
  • Les Nouveaux Blessés: de Freud a la neurologie: penser les traumatismes contemporains.
  • * The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage.
  • La Plasticité au soir de l'écriture.
  • * Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction.
  • Que faire de notre cerveau?.
  • * What Should We Do With Our Brain?.
  • Le Change Heidegger, du fantastique en philosophie.
  • * The Heidegger Change: On the Fantastic in Philosophy.
  • Plasticité.
  • Voyager avec Jacques Derrida – La Contre-allée, with Jacques Derrida.
  • * Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida.
  • L'Avenir de Hegel: Plasticité, Temporalité, Dialectique.
  • * The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic.
  • Le temps.

Articles (selection)