ABSTRACT
All of Catherine Malabou's recent books — including Auto-Affection and Emotional Life, You Be My Body for Me: Corporeity, Plasticity in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Changing Difference (all in translation and/or forthcoming) — enter into cutting edge debates in contemporary social and political thought. Specifically, Malabou invigorates debates concerning the relationship between event and law, between sovereign power and biopower, between neuroscience and the humanities, the new materialism, and so on by way of her signature term — plasticity — what she calls the triple movement of receiving, giving and destroying the form. This essay fleshes out Malabou's contribution to the question of history and its possible ends, by focusing on the way she uses plasticity to read Hegel's understanding of time, of temporality and the future. Against the generation of French philosophers before her — most notably, her teacher and mentor, Jacques Derrida — Catherine Malabou does not read Hegel's speculative system as omnivorous, committed to conserving against all loss. Rather than wondering if Hegel's death-knell has rung (as Derrida did in Glas), or imagining that Hegel, in his prescience, already foretold the future that we are, enfolding us into the always/already of his thought, she proposes instead that Hegel enjoins us to think the future as neither “absolutely visible,” nor as absolutely open, but rather as what we “see without seeing” (voir venir) (Malabou 2005). 1
