Graham – Along with Žižek you have worked closely with another leading European philosopher, Catherine Malabou. What has been Malabou’s significance for you, and what is the most important thing present-day philosophy can learn from her?
Žižek was responsible for first drawing my attention to Malabou’s work— specifically, her groundbreaking 2004 text Que faire de notre cerveau? (What Should We Do with our Brain?). It was around 2006 that I read this book, which was a real experience that compelled me promptly to devour the rest of her published writings then available.
In April 2007, I had the opportunity to meet Malabou at an event at Cornell University at which we both were speaking. Quite fortunately, we immediately hit it off in person. And, intellectually, we recognized each other as having a tremendous amount in common. We both operate at the intersections of philosophy, biology, and psychoanalysis and, in particular, jointly are pursuing immanent critical engagements with the life sciences anchored in the history of European philosophy generally and the tradition of (post-)Hegelian dialectical materialism especially.
Apart from Žižek himself, few other contemporary philosophers besides Malabou and myself conjure with this specific array of multiple disciplinary resources. That alone already provides Malabou and me with a feeling of kinship and solidarity. This feeling is further reinforced for the two of us, with our similar insistences on the significance of various things biological, by our shared struggles against the antinaturalist tendencies continuing to hold general sway amongst Continental philosophers and their fellow travelers in the theoretical humanities.
Soon after meeting in 2007, Malabou and I decided we wanted to co-author a book together. This decision initiated the dual brainstorming process that eventually led to Self and Emotional Life. In my introduction … I also spell out how Malabou and I, while sharing so much in common, also pointedly disagree with each other on a number of crucial issues; many of these cluster around questions concerning the consequences of neurobiological discoveries for psychoanalysis both theoretical/metapsychological and practical/clinical.
Loosely speaking, Malabou is more anti-, and me more pro-, psychoanalytic. The penultimate (eleventh) chapter of Adventures in Transcendental Materialism (“The Real Unconscious: Malabou, Soler, and Psychical Life After Lacan”) amounts to an additional installment after Self and Emotional Life addressing some of the disagreements structuring the latter book. I happily anticipate that Malabou and I will remain in dialogue for many years to come.
In my view, there are a number of important things Malabou has to teach contemporary philosophers. To begin with, her engagements with the sciences strike a nice balance between, on the one hand, respect and enthusiasm and, on the other hand, immanent critical/philosophical non-submissiveness.
I think this balanced stance, avoiding extreme versions of either science-philia or science-phobia, is exemplary and ought to serve as a model for other philosophers on both sides of the Analytic-Continental divide.
Furthermore, Malabou deserves enormous credit for having discerned and developed the spontaneous dialectic impulses arguably operative within today’s life sciences (usually at an an sich rather than an an und für sich level in these sciences, to employ fitting Hegelese here).
Finally, I consider her reflections on essentialism and anti-essentialism in the three areas of ontology, feminist theory, and biopolitics—she consistently bases these reflections on her science-supported dialectical materialism of “plasticity”—to be of great significance and productivity.
In particular, she convincingly demonstrates that a dialectical materialist (quasi-)naturalism supported by biology need not (and, indeed, should not) be construed as tantamount to an old-style naturalist essentialism entailing an objectifying, reifying reduction of everyone to a set of pre-determined codes and programs dictated by evolutionary-genetic imperatives and neurobiological hard-wiring; in short, the either/or choice between naturalist essentialism and anti-naturalist anti-essentialism presently can be seen to be a false dilemma. These are lessons philosophers of all orientations and persuasions would do well to heed nowadays.