#Catherine Malabou

[dreamofmourning]

#Catherine Malabou #you don't know my attributes

[hiraeth-found]

Something shows itself when there is damage, a cut, something to which normal, creative plasticity gives neither access nor body: the deserting of subjectivity, the distancing of the individual who becomes a stranger to herself, who no longer recognizes anyone, who no longer recognizes herself, who no longer remembers herself. These types of beings impose a new form in their old form, without mediation or transition or glue or accountability, today versus yesterday, in state of emergency, without foundation, bareback, sockless. The change may equally well emerge from apparently anodyne events, which ultimately prove to be veritable traumas inflecting the course of a life, producing the metamorphosis of someone about whom one says: I would have never guessed they would “end up like this”. A vital hitch, a threatening detour that opens up another pathway, one that is unexpected, unpredictable, dark.

Ontology of the Accident, Catherine Malabou

#Catherine Malabou #ontology #philosophy #french philosophy #phenomenology #destructive plasticity #quotes #event and signifiers #honestly it has taken me at least 7 years to find a book that describes my near death accident and what happened in 2016 #when you come back wrong and can’t make your way back nor do you want to #I think I successfully faked it for the most part until 2016 but that year that broke me #personal thesis #this quote captures the foundation of my work and the ambitious turn I want to take with it

[transmutationisms]

takes on malabou’s neuroplasticity / we are not aware of our brains type flow? (other than her being Very French lol)

my problems with malabou stem mainly from what i think is a fundamental error in the relationship she sees between biology and politics. although the relationship is not unilaterally one of politics influencing biology, the way she imputes a specific brain metaphor to post-fordist capitalism implies that these neurological discourses formed prior to political or ideological positioning; are 'objective'; and must simply be reconciled with a philosophical position that rescues the possibility of a radical or anti-capitalist reading of the same biological arguments. this is simply an ahistorical and apolitical understanding of science. she's right that a certain set of ideas about neuroplasticity are invoked in neoliberal demands for worker flexibility &c, but it doesn't follow that neuroscience itself can be a site of liberation. we see over and over and over again that the explanatory frameworks, models, and epistemological assumptions scientists use to interpret their data and observations draw from dominant political and ideological discourses. that the scientific ideas then come to bear on the political ones doesn't mean that altering the scientific interpretation can interfere at the root level of the political or economic forms.

to take a pertinent example, much of what malabou says about neuroplasticity is reminiscent of what lamarck argued in the latter half of his career (~1800–1829), building off his mentor buffon's ideas about biological malleability. for lamarck, the brain was fundamentally mouldable and re-mouldable; it was in constant tension with the environmental conditions and was materially re-shaped throughout an organism's life, in response to the animal's needs and habits. yet the political legacy of lamarck's work, both in his own words and after his death, is wildly variant. lamarck himself thought that certain habits could become ingrained, where the brain would become more and more resistant to changing form, and the soft mouldable tissue would stiffen over an animal's lifetime. it wasn't impossible to change after this point, but it was much harder, and ingrained habits and tendencies could be inherited as inclinations the offspring would tend toward, leading lamarck to emphasise the importance of proper education and management of the living conditions and sensory inputs. over the course of the nineteenth century these ideas percolated with certain medico-juridical projects, and by the start of the third republic in 1870, 'neo-lamarckism' was becoming a coherent ideological movement, with strong hereditarian and eugenic tendencies. on the other side of the coin, certain working-class radicals, particularly in britain, tried to appropriate lamarck's ideas of biological plasticity for their own ends, arguing that lamarckian bio-plasticity, including neuroplasticity, was the biological argument supporting their claims to political liberation for the poor and exploited.

what this all demonstrates is that the political content of a biological argument comes from much more than the internal scientific logic. it's a function of the broader cultural and social situation. lamarckian biological ideas were neither inherently republican nor inherently reactionary, but neither were they ever apolitical. science is always done and interpreted in context, by humans who by necessity are using epistemological frameworks with political and ideological valences. there is no 'neutral' science, but nor is there a politics that draws its authority from an 'objectively' true science. i do reject bioessentialisms in all forms, and it's not that i disagree with everything malabou says about the liberatory potential of her framing of neuroplasticity. but her analysis is so deeply internal to the neurological arguments that it presents the political situation as secondary to, and following from, the science, which is at root still a form of positivism and a failure to engage with the material bases of political action. neuroscience and the brain itself are not ever going to be a source of revolutionary politics, though there are elements of malabou's critique that are useful in thinking through the interplay between neoliberalism and current neuroscientific ideas.

#catherine malabou

[dipnotski]

Kolektif – Dayanışmanın Zincirlerini Çözmek (2024)

Özgürlükçü düşünce tarihinin en etkili düşünürlerinden anarşist komünizmin kuramcısı Peter Kropotkin’in ‘Karşılıklı Yardımlaşma’ kitabı, dayanışma ve yardımlaşma ahlakının doğadaki ve insan öncesi türlerdeki kökenlerinin izini süren klasikleşmiş bir çalışmadır. Geliştirdiği noröplastisite kavramı üzerinden nörobilim alanına önemli katkılarda bulunan ve Derrida’nın öğrencisi olmuş çağdaş filozof…

View On WordPress

#2024 #Akın Emre Pilgir #Catherine Malabou #Dan Swain #Dayanışmanın Zincirlerini Çözmek #Karşılıklı Dayanışma ve Anarşizm Üzerine #Livera Yayınevi #Petr Kouba #Petr Urban

[the-hexagonal-conundrum]

Catherine Malabou, Ontologie de l'accident, essai sur la plasticité destructrice. 2009.

#catherine malabou #accident #trauma #blessure #psyche

[sinterhinde]

Ontology of the Accident, Catherine Malabou

The Ontology of the Accident (2009, trans. 2012) forms a pendant to Malabou's earlier book, The New Wounded (2007, trans. 2012) — and the aesthetic sense of this metaphor is relevant. In the latter work, Malabou argues for the ultimate inseparability of the effects of organic and sociopolitical trauma. The indifference common to Alzheimer's patients and war veterans reveals that whether psychic disturbance is caused by neuronal change (as in neuropathological cases), or neuronal change is caused by psychic disturbance (as in sociopolitical trauma), the same economy of the accident obtains. The fact of neuronal change, however, renders such psychic disturbance inexplicable in terms of the aetiology of sexuality privileged in psychoanalysis. Against Freud, Malabou argues for the recognition of an alternative regime of events — which she names ‘cerebrality’ — to which sexuality is always exposed: namely, ‘the shock and the contingency of the ruptures that sever neuronal connections’ (9). The distinction of cerebrality from sexuality lies in the resistance to signification of its events, which precludes them from integration into the history of the subject. ‘What patients with Alzheimer's disease show us,’ she writes, ‘is precisely the plasticity of the wound through which the permanent dislocation of one identity forms another identity — an identity that is neither the sublation nor the compensatory replica of the old form, but rather, literally, a form of destruction’ (18). Such patients indicate, in other words, the existence of a ‘destructive plasticity’ that forms the psyche though the deconstitution of identity. It is in response to the question of this power of ontological transformation immanent to subjectivity that Ontology of the Accident takes shape.

(Oxford Literary Review)

I'm excited to read this - first-time Malabouing.

I recently watched a lecture via the European Grad School in which Malabou explores AI's potential for modelling a global consciousness of anarchy as 'non-governability' in line with the fourth stage of Baudrillard's sign-order. Here is the link:

The lecture is in advance of the English translation of Malabou's 2022 book Au Voleur that analyses influential 20th philosophers' concepts containing the element on 'non-governability' and yet are never identified as 'anarchist'. Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy is set to be released January 2024.

Ontology of the Accident is reviewed here by Joe Palmer for the Oxford Literary Review:

https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/olr.2014.0092?role=tab

And here by Stacey Smith for Society and Space:

https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/ontology-of-the-accident-by-catherine-malabou

And again here is the link to the text:

#catherine malabou #french philosophy #contemporary philosophy #french writing #ontology of the accident #2010s #2020s #au voleur #philosophy resource #poetry resource #Youtube #jean baudrillard

[some-velvet-morning]

ontology of the accident by catherine malabou

[drdamiang]

OFF THE SCALE

OFF THE SCALE

the Sun

beamed through my window

only to

take issue with me

scorch the files

on my computer

leaving me desperate

to get a handle on

electromagnetism

so much fire out there

in here

as chatbot and I

argue the toss

over philosopher

Catherine Malabou

and other

anarchist thinkers

wondering about

the Sun's role

in authority, Apollonian

regal power

and how that

might avail itself

to tyranny

especially the kind

with solar ring of confidence

branded by beaming smile

#poem #poetry #anarchism #the Sun #power #danger #fire

[deadtothefuture]

Catherine Malabou, “Jacques Derrida’s Concept of Life”

[ill-will-editions]

[dreamofmourning]

“But does this mean that true gentleness contains an element of negativity? [...] There is a gentleness in the farewell to life, in the ‘disconnection, the illusion of total disconnection,’ in abandonment, in bereavement, in renunciation.” 

—Lauren Berlant, intro to Anne Dufourmantelle’s Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living

“I liked Hell, I liked to go there alone relieved to lie in the wreckage, ruined, physically undone.”

—Marie Howe, Magdalene: The Addict

“Is it possible to say ‘no’? A cut and dry ‘no’ that is inconvertible to a ‘yes’? [...] Is there a way for life to say no to itself? No to continuity; no to the resistance of memory or childhood; no to beautiful form; no to sensible metamorphosis; no to gradual decline; no to the progress of the negative itself. These questions can be summed up in a single question: is there a mode of possibility attached exclusively to negation?”

—Catherine Malabou, Ontology of the Accident tr. Carolyn Shread

#Lauren Berlant #Marie Howe #Catherine Malabou #a mode of possibility attached exclusively to negation #i liked hell #keep quite still and wait #blurring of affect

[loneberry]

Body, Power, Politics

I've been having fun drafting my syllabus for my Body, Power, Politics graduate seminar happening in the spring. This is still just a draft of the readings... We will think through the body through the lenses of psychoanalysis, affect theory, biopolitics, social reproduction theory, black feminism, queer theory, new materialism, posthumanism, disability studies, and black studies. (I'm honestly tempted to do a whole semester of Sylvia Wynter...)

Seems like grad students from across the university have gotten wind that I'm now on faculty... my class was full within hours of registration opening. Departmental administrator: "This is a first that a class is full on the first day of the registration period." Now I have an inbox of students requesting to be let into the class. What to do!

Week 1: Introduction; Psychoanalysis and the Body

January 10

Course Introduction

Selection from The Routledge Critical and Cultural Theory Reader

2: Sigmund Freud, “A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis,” 1912, p 10

6: Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” 1949, p 57

Week 2: Race and Psychoanalysis

January 17 

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Recommended

Lewis Gordon, “Through the Zone of Nonbeing A Reading of Black Skin, White Masks in Celebration of Fanon's Eightieth Birthday”

Week 3: Between Psychoanalysis and Neurobiology 

January 24

Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage

Catherine Malabou, Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience

“Introduction: From the Passionate Soul to the Emotional Brain”

“On Neural Plasticity, Trauma, and the Loss of Affects”

Week 4: Sylvia Wynter and the Human

January 31

Sylvia Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is Like to Be ‘Black'”

Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—an Argument”

Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must be Found: After Humanism”

Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations”

Recommended

Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, Its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition”

Week 5: Biopolitics, Bodies Without Organs

February 7

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“6. November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?” 149-166

Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze (editor), Biopolitics: A Reader

Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze, “Biopolitics: An Encounter,” p 1

Michel Foucault, “Right of Death and Power over Life,” p 41

Michel Foucault, “‘Society Must Be Defended,’ Lecture at the Collège de France,” p 61 

Giorgio Agamben, “Introduction to Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life,” p 134

Week 6: Entangled Matter

February 14 

Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning

Monika Rogowska-Stangret, “Corpor(e)al Cartographies of New Materialism. Meeting the Elsewhere Halfway”

Week 7: Social Reproduction Theory 

February 21

Tithi Bhattacharya (Editor), Social Reproduction Theory

1. Introduction: Mapping Social Reproduction Theory - Tithi Bhattacharya 

2. Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism - Nancy Fraser 

3. Without Reserves - Salar Mohandesi and Emma Teitelman 

4. How Not to Skip Class: Social Reproduction of Labor and the Global Working Class - Tithi Bhattacharya  

5. Intersections and Dialectics: Critical Reconstructions in Social Reproduction Theory - David McNally 

9. Body Politics: The Social Reproduction of Sexualities - Alan Sears  

10. From Social Reproduction Feminism to the Women's Strike - Cinzia Arruzza

Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “The Power of Women and Subversion of the Community” 

Silvia Federici, Chapter 2, “The Accumulation of Labor and the Degradation of Women” in Caliban and the Witch

Angela Davis, "The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-Class Perspective"

Week 8: Gender, Sexuality, and Capitalism

February 28

Christopher Chitty, Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System  

Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O'Rourke (editors), Transgender Marxism

Nat Raha, “A Queer Marxist Transfeminism: Queer and Trans Social Reproduction”

Zoe Belinsky, “Transgender and Disabled Bodies - Between Pain and the Imaginary” 

Nathaniel Dickson, “Seizing the Means: Towards a Trans Epistemology” 

Recommended

Nat Raha, “Transfeminine Brokenness, Radical Transfeminism”

Week 9: Social Reproduction and the Family

March 7

Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism

Week 10: Resistance and the Body

March 21

Nayan Shah, Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes

Week 11: Surrogacy

March 28

Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures

Recommended

Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now!

Week 12: Black Feminism, Flesh, Labor, and Value

April 4 

Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”  

Saidiya Hartman, “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors”  

Denise Ferreira Da Silva, “Towards a Black Feminist Poethics”

Denise Ferreira Da Silva, “1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value”

Denise Ferreira Da Silva, “Difference Without Separability” 

Week 13: Debility/Disabilty  

April 11

Jasbir Puar, The Right to Maim Debility, Capacity, Disability

Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism

“Slow Death (Obesity, Sovereignty, Lateral Agency)”

Week 14: Race and Technology April 18

Ramon Amaro, The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being

Week 15: Antiblackness and the Human

April 25

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World

[transmutationisms]

Can you longpost on epigenetics? I get that it's thorny ground wrt the medical field, but I study plants (though I'm also learning connections between botany, racism, and empire). Gene expression is the hot thing for horticulturists atm. I got the canon "history of genetics" in college, & read Mayr's "One Long Argument." I even read Lysenko critiquing Morgan, and I thought "he's almost describing epigenetics (and that's a good thing)!" Are there contemporary alternatives to epigenetic models?

like, alternatives for what application or explanatory potential? when i talk about epigenetics i'm making basically two critiques:

methodological—it's far more difficult than most people estimate to actually identify a list of differentially expressed genes (you need lots of samples, which is a tremendous amount of data; results vary based on the parameters you give the computer for where to differentiate one discrete gene from the next; many DEGs will only 'differentiate' at fairly low rates); even if you do manage to come up with a list of DEGs you're highly confident in, it's incredibly hard to identify what most of these genes actually do in the organism (genes seldom work alone, but express in the context of other genes and biochemical cascades; hierarchical gene ontologies are plagued by high degrees of uncertainty and are a bitch and a half to make; text mining solutions are worse; all of this is hampered by linguistic and financial barriers that make it difficult to share research); even if you by some miracle have identified strongly expressed DEGs and also know with confidence what they do, altering their expression, eg through up- or down-regulation, is also incredibly difficult (like, no we can't just whip up a pharmacological or biological agent for this most of the time lol) and can have unintended effects on other genes or biological processes. so, the lofty promises of epigenetics as a field are usually pretty fucking far from materialising into anything concretely useful or beneficial;

historical—people who claim that epigenetics is an inherently liberatory science (i think i talked about this wrt catherine malabou, though she's far from the only person to make this claim) are ignorant, wilfully or not, of the past and present relationship between epigenetics, theories of environmental influence, and eugenics (in this context sometimes called euthenics—bad term), and the biopolitical efforts to control and improve populations through management of their surroundings. these run the gamut from efforts predating the science of genetics (1790s french revolutionaries trying to create an ordered and productive citizenry by controlling the nation's sensory inputs and the social environment) to discourses situated between contested uses of the term 'natural selection' & the later 'modern synthesis' of evolution & genetics (1892 charlotte perkins gilman's 'the yellow wallpaper', in which a degenerative madness arises from prolonged exposure to insalubrious environmental surroundings) to later efforts relying more on the scientific prestige of technical genetic language (late 20th century onward attempts to make the 'thrifty gene' hypothesis into an epigenome of 'obesity' that therefore implies a future ability to eliminate fatness). the bottom line here is that the idea of biological malleability is not inherently liberatory and can and does support eugenic arguments; we can't rely on nature or biology to ground or justify our political positions, and science is produced and wielded by humans who place it in our own ideological and political epistemologies.

my argument is not & never has been that gene expression doesn't vary; it is pretty well established at this point that it does: between individuals, between environmental conditions, over one individual's lifetime; as a result of chronic & acute illness; etc. what we do with that information, though, is politically weighted as much as anything else; notions of biological 'improvement' are never neutral (this goes for plants as much as animals; think about agricultural reform & technologies, the use of plant breeding treatises to inform human eugenic discourses, & so forth); and anyway, again, knowing that gene expression varies and changes doesn't mean we automatically have concrete & certain information about this or that gene, how it functions, & what its differential expression means for an organism or population.

#epigenetics

[thewindwhisper]

The Future of Hegel

by Catherine Malabou

The same conclusions can be drawn about the reference to Aristotle.

Hegel clearly adopted the Aristotelian problematic of the στιγµ. In defining time, he followed the first phase of the aporia set out in Physics IV: time is composed of ‘nows’. But Hegel also takes on, although not explicitly,the second part of the aporia: time is not composed of ‘nows’. Derrida directs our attention to this point precisely. In the second phase of the aporia, Aristotle argues that it is impossible for the parts of time to coexist with one another: ‘A now cannot coexist, as a current and present now, with another now as such.’42 Derrida concludes:

The impossibility of co-existence can be posited as such only on the basis of a certain co-existence, of a certain simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous, in which the alterity and identity of the now are maintained together in the differentiated element of a certain sameness (un certain même) . . . The impossible ­ the co-existence of two nows ­ appears only in a synthesis . . . in a certain complicity or complication maintaining (maintenant) together several current nows (maintenants) which are said to be the one past and the other future.43 The writer draws attention to the little word hama, which appears five times in Physics IV, 218a, and means ‘together’, ‘all at once’, ‘both together’, and ‘at the same time’. This locution ‘is first neither spatial nor temporal’. The simul, here, ‘says the complicity, the common origin of time (the possibility of the synthesis of the co-existence of the nows) and space (the potential synthesis of the co-existence of points), appearing together as the condition for all appearing of being.’44 The exposition of Physics IV allows us to see how Aristotle understands time at the same ‘time’ as a sequence of nows and as an instance of synthesis.

In Hegel’s analysis of the relation between space and time, he shows that the same conception of the synthesis applies. In reference to space he writes:

It is inadmissible to speak of spatial points as if they constituted the positive element in space (on account of its lack of difference),space is merely the possibility, not the positedness of a state of juxtaposition and what is negative.

也就是说，时间不是现在的连续。现在作为点积性，是瞬间消逝，也就不能抵达下一瞬间，也就没有时间。或者说，两个现在不能共存，也就不会有现在的连续。现在和现在不能共存，因为现在是转瞬即逝的。那么，如果是一个现在结束之后，另一个现在又冒出来了呢？能不能把时间想象成和点一样，无数个点的连接就变成了线，那么无数个���在的连接就变成了时间？

然��这不就是黑格尔所说的把时间看成是“由现在构成”，或者说，仅仅是现在的外在连接吗？那么这种外在连接的问题在哪里？

前面这段话是废话，总是，就这么一个问题，如果我们要总结起来的话：

为什么不能将时间看作是现在的外在连接，或者说，诸一的拼接？

问题在于，这里的现在是一个抽象的东西，不是一个积极的元素。一是什么？一只是不可再分。一旦一是个什么，那么它就不是一，它又有连续性了。现在是瞬间，也就是说现在没有广延，它只是在一个对于一段时间的切分当中永远作为潜在的瞬间来存在，而不是真的有自在的现在，能肯定地存在。

或者说，不可能去说一个现在，因为现在永远已经消逝。现在和现在的外在连接，仿佛两个现在可以彼此接替。

当然也可以反过来。我的思路很乱，太快了。现在我要先理清把时间当作现在的外在连接是怎样的逻辑。

首先是现在，不可分的一，非连续的一。一个现在消逝后，另一个现在接替，以此类推，以至无限。因而时间有了长度，时间能够绵延。

首先预设了一个一，也就是现在。其次“以此类推”也很有问题，似乎无限是一个彼岸，只是作为一个可能性。

现在没有彼此接替这一说。现在作为瞬间消逝的现在，不能和另一个现在在一个序列里面共存。也就是说，如果要坚持一个作为点的现在，那就只有现在，只有一个现在，现在和现在不能并列，不能接替，因为等到另一个现在出来，这个现在已经没了，但是这样说也不对，等到似乎还意味着现在有长度，但是这里的现在不能说有长度，那就是只有这一下，接着就没了。把时间作为现在的连续的话，那么在每一个现在时间都是不能运动的，只是纯粹的自身同一，不能过渡到它物去，那么把这些现在加起来，一整段的时间里就不会有运动，所以没有时间，整个时间都是静止的。

好了这个问题解决了，那么进入到下一个问题。

德里达说，除非在一个 非同时性的东西的同时里 现在才能共存。在这个同时性里，现在的他异性和同一性都被保留了。

#草稿 #哲学

[anaparastasi]

catherine malabou

#*

[onetwofeb]

Catherine Malabou & Mladen Dolar | Festival INDIGO 2023

#youtube