Catherine Malabou and the Currency of Hegelianism<\/p>\n
Hypatia vol. 15, no. 4 (Fall 2000) by Lisabeth During<\/p>\n
Catherine Malabou is a professor of philosophy at Paris-Nanterre. A collaborator and student of Jacques Derrida, her work shares some of his interest in rigorous protocols of reading, and a willingness to attend to the undercurrents of \u00a0over-read and “too familiar “te xts. But, as she points out, this orientation was shared by Hegel himself.<\/p>\n
Arguing against Heidegger, Kojeve, and other critics of Hegel, the book in which this Introduction appears puts Hegel back on the map of the present.<\/p>\n
It is a brave person who will take G W. F Hegel on his own terms in this day and age. It is, after all, 50 years at least after Martin Heidegger’s gloomy warnings about the “end of metaphysics.”‘ And at least 30 years since Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault first insisted that philosophy would have to choose between “difference” and “dialectic, “if it were to escape the banality of a teleological justification of history.2 In the United States, anyone who still sees vitality in Hegel may find themselves uncomfortably close to the right-wing apologetics of a Francis Fukuyama. For what are we to make of Hegel’s supposed announcement of the “end of history”? It is too easy to hear in it the accents of resignation or premature reconciliation, even if Hegel himself would be the last to be reconciled to the global victory of market-driven “democracy” in the aftermath of 1989. Committed to the foresight of the dialectic, for which history is an externalization of the quietly uninterrupted life of the Idea, can there be anything genuinely “new” for Hegel, any event for which the concept is not already prepared, any history that doesn’t happen, as it were, twice? And if there is no space for the new, is there in fact any space for the present? Georges Bataille fantasized about the immense “weariness” of the Hegelian standpoint.4 Heidegger dismissed it more bluntly: Hegel’s present moment is lost in eternity; it is not temporal at all; indeed all his “times” are<\/p>\n
Lisabeth During homogenous, empty (Heidegger 1984,391-98). Because Hegel could not conceive the present except as a vanishing “point,” it was impossible for him to believe that anything really could happen “in time.” Everything is repetition, recycling: the motions that feel like revolution, overturning, reversal, are not new. They have always already been traced. Calling things to mind, if that is one way of describing knowledge, is, then, only recalling. Catherine Malabou accepts the intransigence of these questions. Is it too late for Hegel? Is any reading of Hegel, no matter how interesting, simply an exercise in nostalgia? Her recent book, The Future of Hegel: Plasticite,Temporalite, Dialectique (1996), makes a claim about Hegel’s place in history that risks disturbing a powerful precursor. Alexandre Kojeve, who was almost single-handedly responsible for French Hegelianism, believes as Malabou does in the “actualite(t he timeliness) of the Hegelian dialectic. Yet while Kojeve’s potent mix of Marxist and Heideggerean ideas made it possible to read Hegel with a modernist conscience, his influential interpretation of the Phenomenology of Spirit as an announcement of the “end of history” foreclosed any future trans-formations of the Hegelian machinery (Kojeve 1968). To approach the fulfilled spirit of Hegel, Kojeve famously decreed, is to step into the shoes of the sage, the one who ceases to act, the one for whom change is arrested.5 Bataille will add that to be “sovereign” in the limited sense of Hegelian mastery is to be dead to suffering, perhaps also immune to ecstasy and shock (Bataille 1990). Although we are told that the dialectic is a logic of unceasing alteration, which Hegel baptized “negativity,” surely only a being who has transcended finitude would be able to see that dialectical logic in history. For those enmeshed in the coils of history, the events of politics, even individual life, seem without meaning, only random and indifferent. Politically as well as philosophically, then, it is a dangerous thing to do, to situate yourself too intimately within the dialectical movements and concepts of the Hegelian system, to know them from the inside out. It is better to be protected by a selective “borrowing” th at sifts the wheat from the chaff, that exports only the more acceptable bits from Hegel. The Hegel which late modernity can claim for itself might include the portrait of desire or the un-happy consciousness. We might find a place among our prejudices for the communitarian intuitions and the distrust of liberalism, for the cult of Antigone and her tragic anomaly, for the critique of immediacy, or maybe the abuse directed at Immanuel Kant and his “formalism.” Doesn’t Hegel need a scrupulous purification \u2014 even licensing as dramatic a cleansing as that provided by John McDowell in his widely read Mind and World (1994) \u2014 before the modern reader can confront his ideas, and, in particular, his language, without wincing? Malabou thinks otherwise. To her the dialectic is a process of “plasticity,” a movement where formation and dissolution, novelty and anticipation, are in continual interplay-in the “time” of the world as in the “time” of individual life. Hegelian thought has futurity because it has plasticity. As she interprets it, the Hegelian future is not a characterless void-a space of unfilled time-but a horizon which will preserve even though it abrogates and takes away. If “plasticity” is one of the meanings of futurity in Hegel, it is also one of the best translations of Hegel’s difficult idea that the “concept” needs “self-determination” and “self-differentiation.”Even the notorious “Aufhebung” (French “rel\u00e9ve<\/em>“) is, on Malabou’s reading, another alibi for the future. Against Hegel, Bataille and Theodor Adorno have accused the system of a symptomatic fear of loss, a speculative hunger to absorb all. There are many recognizable traits in their portrait of a philosophical economy too committed to its reserves, too closed to the anomalous and the singular.6 But the virtue of Malabou’s attractive Hegel is that, without glossing over any of the most intractable concepts in the Hegelian repertory, she can save Hegel from such a fate. “Plastic”-borrowed from the lexicon of sculpture, the “plastic” art par excellence-implies mobility, molding, forming and flexibility-“a speculative souplesse <\/em>which is neither passion nor passivity.” It is a generous trait, not a petty or self-protective one. But it also suggests a certain dynamite that shares its name (the plastic bomb). She wonders if her reading of Hegel, driven by a belief that the Hegelian “future” is both open and imaginable, will strike others as “explosive.” In her account of her intention to produce a deconstructive reading, a Hegel subjected to the very metamorphoses his dialectical writing puts into motion, Malabou describes how she chose the notion of plasticity in the belief it might act as the “defective cornerstone” causing the self-reliant systematic artifice to tremble. But in fact neither plasticity nor deconstruction prove to unsettle the Hegelian text in the way Jacques Derrida had taught her to expect. Is it that Hegel-that thinker of breaks and repairs-is simply too resilient, too open himself to the way an argument moves not just from bottom to top, but from side to center, and corer to comer? Malabou prefers to give Hegel the credit. One may also wonder if it is the deconstructive scenario which is less rewarding than she would have liked to believe. Derrida’s Hegel \u2014in Glas (1986), in “Le puits et la pyramide” (1982b), in the essay on “Ousia and gramme” (1982a) which she analyses in her book-is a tricky and fertile thinker, not a prophet of ontological closure or historical triumphalism. But Derrida’s axioms of reading, as Malabou summarizes them in her introduction to her own work, are less interesting as a program than the insights for which they are meant to account. Malabou betrays a moment of self-doubt when reflecting on the results of her own inquiry: has she finished up on the side of a philosophy of cure, of reparation and reconciliation, rather than unending rupture and untidy edges? Can she rest content with the product of her own scrupulous and inventive reading? Is her reading neither “explosive,” as she calls it, nor “transgressive,” as some students of Derrida would expect? 192<\/p>\n It is the fidelity of Malabou’s Hegel which leaves the most lasting impression from her work: a Hegel as supple and ambitious as the reader he asks for. Malabou, a scholarly reader of the history of philosophy, puts her reputation on the line by identifying her very contemporary perspective with Hegel’s. She makes a case that should strike many as persuasive, claiming that Hegel’s thought is “relevant,” timely, its designs on us unfinished and still to be under-stood. For her, Hegel is not an interesting “maitre” worth a passionate but irritated conversation (as he is for Irigaray7), nor a source of philosophical guidelines who can be absorbed and then moved beyond (as he is for Judith Butler 8), but someone who must be followed “to the very limits” (jusqu’au bout), to the extremities of his unexpected thought, in order that the risk and challenge of his ideas be recognized and aspired to. If such a result is not enough to align Catherine Malabou to any particular “school” of French philosophical thought, it is more than enough to make her graceful and generous writing a novelty in the present landscape of Hegel scholarship. Her commitment to a “plastic” reading follows not only Hegel’s own instructions, but the suggestion of another influential French philosopher from the generation and circle of Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy. Nancy anticipates her in emphasizing the contribution of the reader as a “repetition” which restores the “plasticity” of the author’s exposition. (His La Remarque speculative [1973] introduces this understanding of the term.) Plastic reading, which Hegel identifies with the ideal philosophical attitude, releases the force and inexhaustibility of the “content” from its contingent and rigid form: it is as much an act of receptivity as a formative process. Refashioned and recuperated by the plastic individual, the life of philosophy (which is what Hegel, we must remember, meant by the “concept”) is freed from any moribund or “congealed” thought structure, whether that be the artificial “fixity of the proposition,” as Hegel maintained, or our more self-conscious yet no less provisional habits of mind. Plasticity, Nancy and Malabou agree, is the true product of the notorious Hegelian Aufhebung<\/strong>. Seen in this way, the Aufhebung<\/strong> marks the difference between a dependent, self-enclosed thought and a thought of transformation, of “futurity.”If \u00a0speculative thought is plastic rather than recollective, transcendental, or merely “critical,” it is because it is a movement that dissolves and restores, fractures and reweaves, in the same way that plasticity allows the organ to regain its resilience or the work of art to make and remake the possibilities of its material. It is this notion of plasticity-not so much a notion as a sign of generous reading-which tells us less about the secret and trouble-some “meaning” of Hegel’s philosophy-something neither I nor Malabou assume to be the desired goal-and more about what it would be like to carry out a Hegelian “reading” of philosophy. Here we can understand why Malabou thinks it is so important to defend the “future” of Hegel and to resist his relegation to the museum of dead onto-theological monuments. Her work intends to do something more than add another piece to the body of Hegel scholar-ship. It has no interest in the condescending way in which the present believes it can “update” or appropriate for its own ends a past form of thought. The Future of Hegel belongs not to the commemoration of Hegel but to the pro-longed effects of Hegel’s thought as it continues to address us. Inspired by her teacher and collaborator Derrida, Malabou sees a way to transform and pre-serve (auffieben) the sort of reading which Hegel’s writing teaches us how to want, and whose sophistication and clarity has rarely been recognized as effectively as here.<\/p>\n NOTES<\/p>\n 1.The notes that became Heidegger’s essay” Uberwindungder Metaphysik” come from the years1936-1946; Being and Time( 1927) proclaimed the end of the “history of ontology” in order to pose in a radical and renewed fashion “the question of being.” See Heidegger(1985) and (1996).<\/p>\n 2. See, on this, Descombes (1980).<\/p>\n 3. See Fukuyama (1982).<\/p>\n 4. Bataille speaks of Hegel’s immense fatigue in Bataille (1987). See also Derrida (1978), and on the inescapability of weariness, Blanchot (1993).<\/p>\n 5. This conclusion is implicit in almost every passage of Kojeve’s lectures, but see especially Kojeve (1981, 95-99, 167-68). 6. For Adorno o n Hegel see Adoro (1993); for Batailles see Bataille (1987;1990).<\/p>\n 7. See Irigaray (1987).<\/p>\n 8. See Butler (1987; 1997).<\/p>\n REFERENCES<\/p>\n Adorno,Theodor W. 1993. Hegel: Three studies. Cambridge: MIT Press.<\/p>\n Bataille,G eorges.1987. Inner experience.Trans. Leslie Ann Boldt. Albany: SUNY Press. .1990. Hegel,death and sacrifice. Yale French Studies 78:9 -28.<\/p>\n Blanchot, Maurice. 1993.The infinite conversation. Trans. Susan H anson. Minneapolis: University of \u00a0Minnesota Press.<\/p>\n Butler, Judith. 1987. Subjects of desire: Hegelian reflections in twentieth-century Fra nce. New York: Columbia University Press.<\/p>\n \u2014., 1997. The psychic life of power: Theories of subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press.<\/p>\n Derrida, Jacques. 1978.From restricted to general economy:A Hegelianism without reserves. In Writing and difference, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.<\/p>\n 1982a. Ousia and gramme. In Margins of philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1982b. The pit and the pyramid. In Margins of philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1986. Glas. Trans. John P. Leavey and Richard Rand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.<\/p>\n Descombes, Vincent. 1980. Modem French philosophy. Trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press.<\/p>\n Fukuyama, Francis. 1982. The end of history and the last man. New York: Free Press.<\/p>\n Hegel, G. W. F 1977. The phenomenologyof spirit. Trans. A . V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.<\/p>\n Heidegger, Martin. 1984. Sein und Zeit. Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer. 1985. Vortrdge und Aufsatze. Pfullingen: Neske .1996. Being and time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press.<\/p>\n Irigaray, Luce. 1987. L’universel c mme mediation. In Sexes et parentes. Paris: Editions de Minuit. . 1993. The universal as mediation. In Sexes and genealogies. Trans.Gillian C. Gill. New York: Columbia University Press.<\/p>\n Alexandre Kojeve. 1968. Introduction a la lectured e Hegel: Lecons sur la Phenomenologie de l’Esprit professes de 1933 a 1939 a I’Ecole des Hautes Etudes reunites et publiees par Raymond Queneau. Paris: Gallimard. 1980. Introduction to the reading of Hegel: Lectures on the phenomenologyof spirit. Ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.<\/p>\n Malabou, Catherine. 1996. L’avenir de Hegel: Plasticite, temporalite, dialectique. Paris: Vrin. Malabou, Catherine, and Jacques Derrida. 1999. La contre-allee. Paris: La Quinzaine Litteraire-Louis Vuitton.<\/p>\n McDowell, John. 1994. Mind and world. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.<\/p>\n Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1973. La Remarque speculative. Paris: Galilee.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Catherine Malabou and the Currency of Hegelianism Hypatia vol. 15, no. 4 (Fall 2000) by Lisabeth During Catherine Malabou is a professor of philosophy at Paris-Nanterre. A collaborator and student of Jacques Derrida, her work shares some of his interest in rigorous protocols of reading, and a willingness to attend to the undercurrents of \u00a0over-read … Continue reading “malabou catherine review hegel and plasticity”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hegel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4652"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4654,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4652\/revisions\/4654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}