La Chambre du milieu : De Hegel aux neurosciences

by Catherine Malabou

Une chambre est un espace d'intimité et de tranquillité, accommodé pour le confort et l'agrément, le sommeil, la détente, le désir. Elle est le cadre habituel de la rêverie, de la prière, de la sexualité, de la récupération de la santé. Mais la chambre est aussi un lieu public, une assemblée (chambre haute, chambre basse, chambre des lords...), l'endroit où l'on débat, le coeur de la politique. C'est entre l'intimité et la publicité de la chambre, ouvrant un nouvel espace, entre les deux, une nouvelle chambre, que se déploie la méditation philosophique. La philosophie habite la chambre du milieu. Les textes qui dessinent ici l'architecture de cette chambre rassemblent les grandes étapes d'une aventure de pensée qui commence avec la dialectique, se poursuit avec la déconstruction, se prolonge avec les recherches actuelles sur le cerveau et la plasticité neuronale. À la fin du XXe siècle, le cerveau n'apparaît plus comme un organe dénué de fonction symbolique. Il devient le lieu même de la subjectivité. Quelles conséquences cette prise en compte d'un nouvel objet a-telle rétrospectivement sur les discours qui l'ignoraient ? En quoi la conscience de notre cerveau change-t-elle nos façons de lire et de comprendre une réalité qui prend de ce fait une nouvelle ampleur ? Les problèmes abordés ici différence, négativité, genres et sexes, régénération, membres fantôme esquissent le nouveau corps, biologique et politique, qui vient se loger dans la chambre.

Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Catherine Malabou (b. 1959) is a French philosopher. She is a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS and professor of modern European philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University, London. She is known for her work on plasticity, a concept she culled from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which has proved fertile within contemporary economic, political, and social discourses. Widely regarded as one of the most exciting figures in what has been called “The New French Philosophy,” Malabou’s research and writing covers a range of figures and issues, including the work of Hegel, Freud, Heidegger, and Derrida; the relationship between philosophy, neuroscience, and psychoanalysis; and concepts of essence and difference within feminism.

Born in Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria, Catherine Malabou began her advanced studies at the Université Paris-Sorbonne before attending the prestigious École normale supérieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud, where, in 1994, she submitted her dissertation on G.W.F. Hegel under the direction of Jacques Derrida. Her thesis was published in 1996 under the title L’avenir de Hegel: Plasticité, temporalité, dialectique (The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, 2005) with a long preface by Derrida, whom she would later co-author La Contre-allée (1999; Counterpath, 2004). Before arriving at Kingston University, Malabou became assistant professor at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre in 1995 and, as a frequent lecturer in the USA, has taught at UC Berkeley, The New School in New York City, New York State University at Buffalo, the University of Wisconsin in Madison, UCLA, Johns Hopkins, and, most recently, UC Irvine.

Catherine Malabou’s philosophical work forges new connections and intellectual networks that imaginatively leap across existing synaptic gaps between, for example, continental philosophy and neuroscience; the philosophy of neuroscience and the critique of capitalism; neuroscience and psychoanalysis; and continental and analytic philosophy (notably Kant). As well, her work is explosive and iconoclastic, shattering perceived understandings of Hegel, feminism and gender, and the implications of post-structuralism.

Starting with her 2004 book, Que faire de notre cerveau? (What Should We Do With Our Brain?, 2009), Catherine Malabou has argued passionately and provocatively for a connection between continental philosophy and empirical neuroscience. She centers her argument on a highly original interpretation of the concept of plasticity, an interpretation that she first uncovered in her reading of Hegel’s dialectic. Plasticity refers to the capacity both to receive form and to give form. Although the concept of plasticity is central to neuroscience, Malabou’s work shows that neuroscientists and lay people often misunderstand the basic plasticity of the brain, succumbing to an ideology that focuses solely on its capacity to receive form, that is, the capacity of the brain to be shaped in and through its experience of the world to the exclusion of its creative, form-giving power. In other words, the reigning ideology that governs both the neuroscientific community and the broader culture substitutes flexibility for plasticity, and flexibility, Malabou warns us, “is plasticity minus its genius.” The emphasis on flexibility also fits all too neatly with the demands of capitalism under neoliberalism, which demands efficiency, flexibility, adaptability and versatility as conditions of employability in a post-Fordist economy. The creative, form-giving power of the brain—its genius—consists in its explosive capacity, a capacity that unleashes new possibilities, and herein also lies the capacity for resistance. In her conclusion, Catherine Malabou writes: “To ask ‘What should we do with our brain?’ is above all to visualize the possibility of saying no to an afflicting economic, political, and mediatic culture that celebrate

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