04/10/13

Catherine Malabou: "Plasticity, in Retrospect: Changing the Future of the Humanities": diacritics review by Tyler Williams
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Catherine Malabou
A Blog dedicated to the work of Catherine Malabou / UNDER (DE)CONSTRUCTION
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Thursday, October 3, 2013

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"Plasticity, in Retrospect: Changing the Future of the Humanities": diacritics review by Tyler Williams
PLASTICITY, IN RETROSPECT: CHANGING THE FUTURE OF THE HUMANITIES Tyler Williams a Review of SELECTED works by catherine malabou What Should We Do with Our Brain? New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. The Future of the Humanities . theory@buffalo, no. 14 (2010): 816. Ontology of the Accident: An Ess ay on Destructive Plasticity. Malden, MA: Polity, 2012. DIACRITICS Volume 41.1 (2013) 627 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Tyler Williams is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His research focuses on contemporary Continental philosophy; critical and literary theory; and the constitution of time, memory, and identity in the modern novel. He is currently finishing a dissertation entitled, Politics of Dust: Faulkner and the Legacy of Difference. Immanuel Kants famous 1784 dictum, we at present [do not] live in an enlightened age . . . but we do live in an age of enlightenment, affirms that the ideals espoused by the Enlightenment tradition need constant reaffirmation and transformation befitting the political climates in which philosophy finds itself.1 Enlightenment, Kant says, is not a finished product but a matter of process, change, and adaptability to context. The Enlightenments raising of humankind from its state of self-incurred immaturity asserts itself as a tradition founded upon the malleability of discursive borders, limits, and frontiers.2 Institutions birthed from the Enlightenments revolution (humanism and the humanities, constitutional democracy, the university, etc.) honor a certain notion of flexibility and promote the universalism of humanist ideals as formable and malleable to reason in the face of rigid discursive dogmatisms that must be resisted. The humanities, and the universities that institutionally house them and in which they thrive, according to this tradition, work as forms resistance to rigidity. Indebted as it is to the Enlightenment tradition, the legacy of the humanities has historically maintained itself as the discourse devoted to the study of frontiers and limits. A tendency to regard the humanities as an exemplary discourse, as unique among others (insofar as its very project concerns the frontiers, limits, and borders of discursivity as such), survives today and permeates discussions regarding the future of the humanities. Both Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault argue that the primary task of philosophy, and of the humanities in general, bears the responsibility of critique as expressed in the Kantian project. For Derrida, the university without condition must be a place (although, he adds, this place does not, in fact, exist) where its founding Enlightenment ideals are preserved, where Kantian critique has a future, and where rigid dogmatisms of disciplinarity find critical resistance, which is to say, deconstruction.3 Foucault agrees when he writes that the Enlightenments philosophical ethos may be characterized as a limit-attitude. We are not talking about a gesture of rejection. We have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. Criticism (critique) indeed consists of analyzing and reflecting upon limits.4 The humanities are endowed with the task of critical resistance, of analyzing and reflecting upon limits, because the humanities are not themselves circumscribed by dogmatically legislated boundaries. Instead, the humanities infinitely resist the determination of a demarcated inside or outside because the very questioning of borderlines and the power that enforces them comprises the most critical task of the humanities. No task other than the critique of and resistance to frontiers/limits; and this taskless task makes the humanities both an infinite

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Blog Archive 2013 (30) October (1) "Plasticity, in Retrospect: Changing the Future of... September (2) August (3) July (3) May (5) April (3) March (3) February (3) January (7) 2012 (42) 2011 (5)

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Catherine Malabou: "Plasticity, in Retrospect: Changing the Future of the Humanities": diacritics review by Tyler Williams

series of frontiers and limits and a discourse on frontiers and limits. The open formation of the frontier for Derrida marks a decidedly democratic condition for the humanities. Not surprisingly, therefore, Derrida frequently recognizes the shared genealogy of democracy and the humanities (as well as the university, a haven for critique unperturbed by the dogmatisms of the day) dating back to their double instantiation as institutionsin the Enlightenment.5 Without a definitively legislated inside or outside, which is to say, without predetermined and fixed content proper to it, the humanities democratic structure of critique makes their frontiers uniquely malleable and flexible. However, Catherine Malabou argues that the humanities have conceptually posited themselves since the Enlightenment according to a model that is today most keenly articulated by the sciences: plasticity. The humanities have always posited their frontiers as plastic, she says, but did not know it. With the humanities still ignorant of the plasticity they name for themselves, and with the sciences developing increased interest and research in neural and cellular plasticity, Malabou argues that today the most accurate concept of the frontier [qua plastic] is currently being elaborated and articulated by science.6 Scientific developments in plasticity have begun, according to Malabou, to threaten territory typically reserved exclusively for the humanities. Therefore, lest they wilt under the threat of becoming useless and unproductive, the humanities are compelled to dialogue with the sciences in order for them [the humanities] to avoid being swallowed, or eaten alive, by science without even being aware of it.7 Malabous work argues for a redrawing of the discursive frontiers between the humanities and the sciences in light of the new elaboration of the concept of frontiers and of limits articulated by biological discourses on plasticity. The future of any discourse or of any discursive practice, be it philosophical, literary, or scientific, is linked with the plasticity of its limits and frontiers. For Malabou, the relevancy and the future survival of the humanities depend on their plastic ability to receive new forms from the outside and also bestow new forms to other discourses. By positing relation at the heart of discursive survival, a discourses plasticity requires that its frontiers and limits be adaptable from within while also requiring the same of external discourses.8 Without such an adaptable relation, there would be no future because there would be no possibility of change. The future of the humanities as a future of plasticity, according to Malabou, is already woven into the humanities and into disciplinarity as suchfrom the start. Rooted in the Greek plassein (to mold and to model), plasticity indicates malleability, suppleness, and being susceptible to changes of form.9 Plasticity consequently serves as the exact antonym of rigidity10 insofar as it includes both the aptitude to receive form and the ability to give form.11 However, thinking plasticity only as the infinite reception or bestowal of form risks equating it with elasticity. In fact, Malabou suggests that plasticitys most decisive characteristic derives from its resistance to elasticity. While elastic matter returns (or can return) to its initial form after undergoing a deformation, plastic matter does not.12 In addition to harnessing a double sense of active and passive formation (giving and receiving form), Malabou insists on a third definition of plasticity that sharply distinguishes it from the sheer flexibility of elasticity: the impossibility of returnwhich is to say, the possibility of resistance. Plasticity productively concretizes a resilient shape, the future change of which does not elastically return but rather violently explodes.13 Plasticity productively concretizes a resilient shape, the future change of which does not elastically return but rather violently explodes. Unlike elasticitys polymorphism, plasticity is also diametrically opposed to form, which means that plasticity paradoxically includes within its creativity the destruction and the very annihilation of all form.14 Malabou thus regards plasticity as both conceptually and empirically founded upon the following paradox: it doubly stands for forms formation and forms destruction, a creativity that produces through negation. The formal contradiction woven by plasticitys etymology is most radically expressed in the example of plastic explosives, a reference Malabou frequently makes.15 Molded from nitroglycerine and nitrocellulose into a dangerous plastic material of putty-like consistency, the plastic nature of the plastic bomb makes it both formally malleable and annihilative of form at the same time.16 From the perspective of plasticitys capacity for explosion, which is the same as its capacity for reception and formation, Malabous critique of the future of the humanities concerns both a revitalization of the humanities discourse on frontiers and limits for the twenty-first century and a plastic reformation of the humanities relation to their own tradition. Not only does Malabous emphasis on the plasticity of frontiers and limits threaten the security of the humanities in the face of emerging trends of scientific research, which insist on the reformation of the frontier between the humanities and the sciences; it also suggests that the plasticity unwittingly inscribed at the heart of the Enlightenment tradition risks explosion, deformationa destructive threat to tradition without which, oxymoronically, tradition could never be instantiated as such. The earliest possibility of critique already assumes a certain explosive dynamic of frontiers and limits, and the future of the humanities must be thought by way of plasticitys constitutive capacity for explosion. At stake across Malabous growing oeuvre (nine books of which are currently available in English) is a radical reformation of those discourses rooted in the Enlightenment tradition, a reformation Malabou initiates by awakening within those discourses the

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Catherine Malabou: "Plasticity, in Retrospect: Changing the Future of the Humanities": diacritics review by Tyler Williams

scientific implications of the plasticity they have historically posited at their frontiers without knowing it. The concept of plasticity is itself plastic; it is the same as its way of being.17 Whether it be the mutation of feminism in Changing Difference, the difficulty brain trauma poses to psychoanalysis in The New Wounded, the role epigenetics plays in resisting neoliberal ideology in What Should We Do with Our Brain?, or the peculiar proximity between literature and neuroscience in the recently published essay Neuroliterature, the varied focuses of Malabous engagements (the variation of which could also be called plastic) all coalesce around her abiding conviction that the stabilization of any discipline occurs only in the face of a fundamental capacity for change. Plasticity names both the stabilization and the destruction of this identity at the discursive level of the concept and at the material level of scientific empiricism. Although she contends that Derrida and Foucault recognize the plasticity of the humanities, Malabou adds that they nonetheless rigidify the plasticity of the frontiers and limits of the humanities with a determinism that silently underwrites the tradition in which they take part: right from the start the plasticity of this frontier is undermined by the fixity and determination of the spaces it is supposed to limit in a supple and malleable way.18 Science has no suppleness for Derrida and Foucault, Malabou claims, because for them science works only as the mechanical execution of a calculated program invested solely in normalization, regulation, and control. By contradistinction, Foucault and Derrida posit the humanities as supple, critical, and infinitely transgressive. Such an affirmation, though, ultimately rigidifies the meaning of the outside, and consequently of the inside as well.19 Not only does such a gesture perform the very normalization maligned by Derrida and Foucault in the sciences, it also, by ossifying the sciences as an inert discourse at the frontier of the humanities, ultimately encases and stunts the free movement of the humanities themselves. According to this model, the humanities would be as regulating, normalizing, and controlling as the sciences they purportedly oppose. Consequently, despite the fact that Derrida ascribes a crossing of disciplinary borders as the condition for the newness of the new humanities, the domains within this humanities-to-come remain entirely within the current inside of the humanities (law, literature, politics, philosophy, psychoanalysis) and, thus, continue to normalize and domesticate the interiority of the humanities as such.20 In Malabous eyes, the oppositional status through which Derrida and Foucault regard the sciences fails to thematize accurately the plasticity of the limit. For her, the philosophical problem regarding the future of the humanities resides at the limit between the sciences and the humanities. Rethinking this frontier as plastic allows the future of the humanities to be thought with the sciences without reducing the difference between them. Thinking the frontier as plastic accounts for (and makes possible) the distinction between the sciences and the humanities, but in such a way that the two discourses do not fall into a metaphysics of closed interiority and dictatorially controlled borders. A plastic frontier would be one that recognizes the rigidity of the limit concurrent with its supple capacity for change. As a result, Malabous insistence on the plasticity of frontiers and limits should not be equated with assimilation, which would indeed nullify the difference between the humanities and the sciences and consequently erase the very question of the future of the humanities. While discursive challenges to the Enlightenments critical tradition have demanded that the humanities begin today to think with the sciences, it remains necessary that a thinking with the sciences not amount to an absorption into the sciences. Contrary to critics who argue that Malabou advocates precisely such an absorption, the with in the phrase thinking with the sciences necessitates for Malabou a division from the sciences in order to relate to them. An interdisciplinary relation between the humanities and the sciences can only be thought according to the radical disciplinarity that divides discourses. The forefront of Malabous entire project concerns this dilemma: How then can a genuine dialogue take place [between the humanities and the sciences], one that would both respect the autonomy of each field and redraw its limits and frontiers?21 If the Enlightenment tradition has safeguarded its disciplines by rigidly distinguishing them from the sciences, Malabous central question concerns how the plasticity of these frontiers can be thought without reducing their constitutive differences. What change happens when the sciences are no longer thought according to regulative models of normalization and control but instead become supple and malleable in the traditional image of the humanities? That is, what happens when plasticity explodes the division between the mechanical sciences and the critical humanities, when the sciences begin to demonstrate the plastic capacity for explosion from within the program itself? In what may initially appear to be a counter-position to Malabous insistence on plasticitys redrawing of disciplinary frontiers, Rodolphe Gasch suggests that today the individual disciplines are not individual enough and a fuller, or more ample, division between them is necessary.22 Gasch argues this point in order to suggest that the sharper the divisions between disciplines, the more one can put to question their limits and to bring them into a relation with one another, a relation that is worthy of the name.23 Gasch insists on the necessity of division in order for any interrogation of discursive frontiers to be possible: Even where the limits of conceptual thought become a question, or precisely at the very moment such a question regarding the creative freedom from conceptual thought becomes an issue, the discipline of academic unfreedom, as Adorno calls the rules that govern the disciplines, becomes all the more important. Without this academic unfreedom, freedom is a sham. Or rather, the aim of questioning the disciplinarity of the disciplines is not to free oneself from all constraints and to establish an unmediated relation to what is, or a license that everything goes, a point that both Adorno and Derrida have in common. Anyway, no interrogation of the limitation of a discipline, and the limits within which it has enclosed itself, is possible without painstakingly observing the distinctions on which it is based.24 According to what Gasch calls the law of difference, disciplines derive their disciplinarity from their relation to others. The freedom of any discipline to question itself

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Catherine Malabou: "Plasticity, in Retrospect: Changing the Future of the Humanities": diacritics review by Tyler Williams

and its relation to others works within the unfree boundaries of each disciplines most minimally distinguished disciplinarity. Consequently, the boundlessness (or seeming boundlessness) of a discipline like philosophy comes only from within the strictures of its own defined discipline. Interdisciplinarity is possible only as it is radically disciplined; philosophys thinking with the sciences requires that philosophy and the sciences relate to each other only through their constitutive differences. Gasch does not argue that disciplines are incommensurate with one another. Rather, each disciplines openness to the other necessitates the divisibility, difference, and distinction that at once constitutes each discipline and makes the relation of disciplinary frontiers possible.25 Gasch shows that philosophys distinction, its disciplinarity, derives from a minimal condition of relation that is not philosophys own but rather a threshold that communicates between entities, or domains, that are all in the position of others among each other.26 He develops this notion of disciplinary contamination from Derrida, who notes that within this logic of hospitality, the threshold distinguishing the home from the outside remains always a site of transgression.27 The identity of the home (of the humanities, for example) is constituted by its exposure to the intrusion of the foreigner (science), and this intrusion is made possible by the fact that the home is always already exposed to the foreigners entry and that mastery over ones home can be thought only from the perspective of the foreigner who threatens that mastery.28 And yet, despite their inevitable contamination and exposure to the other, these distinctions must be rigorously upheld in order for there to be any relation, or hospitality, at all. As a result, the autonomy of the humanities could never be respected because the metaphysics of self-sufficiency within the notion of autonomy (the sovereign immunity to the exteriority of the other by being closed in within the borders of itself ) comprises the annihilation of the humanities and of disciplinarity in general. Autonomy can be thought only according to the ruptures that invade and ruin autonomy; and this ruination names the very possibility of the humanities. For Gasch, if it is as necessary to redraw the boundaries between the humanities and the sciences as Malabou says it is, this redrawing can happen only through ever-deeper lines that mark the disciplinarity of individual disciplines, dividing and distinguishing them but also putting them in relation. While these lines may be plastic according to Malabou, Gasch warns that they cannot be shallow. It must be noted that Malabou does not reduce the difference between the sciences and the humanities by insisting on a new thinking of the plasticity of frontiers. By claiming that science allows the humanities to think the necessity of a doubly plastic and rigid frontier, Malabou shows that the limits of the humanities and the sciences are intimately shaped by developments within the boundaries of each respective field. Malabou therefore shares Gaschs insistence on difference as a condition for disciplinary relation; but she adds that discursive mutations within a disciplines deeply drawn divisions necessarily impact the frontier of those other disciplines it borders. If the humanities are constituted by their difference from the sciencesdifferences that are as sharply and deeply drawn as Gasch arguesMalabous call to think with the sciences simply shows that scientific discourses provide new avenues to think these differences within respectively circumscribed fields. What changes at the frontier of one discipline necessarily changes the frontiers of those discourses it borders. The distinction between frontiers is thus preserved, but in a new way: to be able to change difference while respecting the difference of change.29 To translate Malabou into Gaschs parlance, it is not that plasticity makes disciplinary unfreedom free; rather, the freedom at work within the rigid unfreedom of a disciplinary programmatic ultimately transforms the boundaries of that unfreedom from within. Malabou and Gasch agree on the impossibility of any disciplines closed relation to itself and on the necessity that any discipline remain open to and constituted by its exposure to others. However, for Malabou, the philosophical tradition that, since Kant, has equated the task of the humanities with the democratization of their disciplinarity and argued for the necessity of a disciplines openness to its others has also rigidly protected those frontiers, the fortification of which undermines the very suppleness of the frontier.30 For this reason Malabou argues in Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing that the hospitality Gasch privileges as an emblem of disciplinary relation proves an insufficient model for thinking the plasticity of the frontier. In Derridas formulation of the threshold, the site of confrontation between host and guest (both of whom are ambiguously subsumed under the same French signifier: hte), no formation takes place, both the host and the guest are rigidly dissociated and plasticity is foreclosed.31 For Malabou, the task remains to think the frontier in such a way that accounts for its plasticity without abandoning the difference that marks the threshold of disciplinarity. One has to think rigidity and flexibility together in a democratization faithful to the Enlightenment instantiation of the humanities critical project. The problem for Malabou, however, is that the humanities have not yet been able to articulate adequately the inextricability of rigidity and flexibility. Each attempt, as she says of Derrida and Foucault, immobilizes discursive boundaries in a manner antithetical to the humanities plasticity. Malabous famed turn toward neurobiology is less a heretical provocation than an indication that neuroplasticity currently demonstrates more adroitly than the humanities both the empirical and the discursive means by which a rigidly closed program harnesses within it the critically explosive capacity for destruction and transformation. Furthermore, in her most ambitious books like What Should We Do with Our Brain? and Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, Malabou argues that the scientific advancements in neuroplasticity are structurally instrumental to a

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Catherine Malabou: "Plasticity, in Retrospect: Changing the Future of the Humanities": diacritics review by Tyler Williams

future thinking of humanisms critical and democratic resistance to institutional dogma. In short, the disciplinary question regarding the limit between the sciences and the humanities for Malabou is realized in the scientific work on cellular plasticity, which, in turn, also expresses the means by which a rethinking of critiques political resistance must take place. For Malabou, as for Georges Canguilhem, the plasticity of the brain opposes the mechanical theory of the organism, which imposes rigidity upon lifes dynamism by seeking to explain the structure and function of the organism on the basis of the structure and function of an already-constituted machine.32 Such a mechanical view of the organism has dominated the history of science as biological dogma but has today become recognized as a narrow and insufficient point of view.33 This persistent dogma analogizes the brain to a mechanical homeostatic hub equipped with a series of fixed, indeed genetically programmed, entities, without any suppleness, without any improvisational ability34 that commands the body schema and its motor systems according to what iek calls blind biological processes.35 Within the rigidity of genetic mechanics, plasticity asserts itself as a strictly a-mechanical operation of the brain. Plasticity (for Malabou the dominant concept of the neurosciences36) therefore names a tension between the genetic machine and its explosive counterpart. The plastic freedom of the brainits transformative, reparative, improvisational, and non-deterministic openness to being formed by experiencemust be thought alongside, or in relation to, the rigid unfreedom it exceeds. Plasticity explodes the centralization of the machine metaphor through a radically democratic model of networked, delocalized power. The epigenetic, Malabou writes, is not a dogma and should never become one.37 To explain the relationship between plasticity and the genetically mechanical system it explodes from within, neurobiologist Jean-Pierre Changeux argues that the variability of the human brain can only be marked within a certain genetic horizon, what he calls a genetic envelope.38 For example, the determinism of neurogenesis provides a human fetus with a jungle of . . . 100 billion nerve cells after nine months of gestation, but what the brain does with these billions of genetically determined nerve cells defies predetermination or programmed expectation.39 The brain organizes these cells into neural connections through its perceptive and experiential interaction with the world, losing some while allowing others to grow. The plastic formation of neural organization includes the deformation of unused connections: a productively negative process of variation and selection, of establishing strong connections strengthened by use and allowing weaker ones to be reorganized across ever-mutable internal neural borders.40 In short, Changeux tells Paul Ricoeur, the brain cannot be viewed as a strictly genetic machine; it incorporates, within a defined genetic envelope peculiar to the species, a series of nested epigenetic imprints that are established by variation and selection. Another way of stating this hypothesis is to say that evolutionary (epigenetic) competition inside the brain takes over from the biological (genetic) evolution of species and creates, as a consequence, organic links with the physical, social, and cultural environment.41 Changeuxs basic point is that the plasticity of the brain operates within the genetic envelope and, improvising an opening of the envelope with increasing variation, explodes the machine-metaphor. While certain functions and compositions of the brain are mechanically programmed, the brains plasticity exceeds the closed structure of programmatic mechanization. Malabou takes Changeuxs description of the brains ability to respond to and be shaped by outside stimuli to argue that the plastic brain must be thought as delocalized rather than as a nucleic control center.42 Because synaptic efficacy grows or declines under the impact of strictly individual experience that progressively erase[s] any semblance of an original model or standard, plasticitys delocalization of cerebral activities both biologically and ideologically (which is to say, politically) resists the power that enforces a hierarchized concept of the brain.43 Arguing that any vision of the brain is necessarily political, Malabou claims that colloquial commitments to thinking the brain as a centralized control-machine expose a governmentality of the brain ideologically situated according to specific notions of hierarchized power.44 Put otherwise, Malabou recognizes a correlation between the enforcement of rigid frontiers within the mechanical vision of the brain and the determination of science as a regulative program of normalization thoroughly antithetical to the humanities freedom. Although the brain certainly constitutes a central position within the human nervous system, neurobiology has shown that the plasticity of the brain resists ideologies of centralization through decentralized processes of individuation. The brain and its diverse functions operate not from the delegation of a single panoptical source but from a dispersed communalism that undermines the traditional normalization of biological, political, and discursive frontiers: Opposed to the rigidity, the fixity, the anonymity of the control center, writes Malabou, is the model of suppleness that implies a certain margin of improvisation, of creation, of the aleatory. . . . The representation of the center collapses into the network.45 As much as plasticity resists encasement within an immutable structure of rigid mechanization by exposing its radical transformability, it equally resists the nihilism of ceaseless change.46 Returning to her distinction between plasticity and elasticity, Malabou notes that plasticitys resistance to power politically includes a resistance to the flexibility demanded by neoliberal capitalist society. Malabous politicization of neurobiology is largely influenced by Luc Boltanski and ve Chiapellos book, The New Spirit of Capitalism, which argues that new management strategies of contemporary capitalism have followed neurobiological discourses away from the centralized brain-machine to endorse the adaptability and flexibility of both its workforce and its management in order to delocalize top-down bureaucracy and replace it with networks of flexible teams within a company. Capitalisms neoliberal efficacy, according to Boltanski and Chiapello, and likewise according to Malabou, derives from its delocalization of power into flexible networks that, qua flexible, have no rigidly determined role exclusive or proper to them.

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Such a model is not unlike how neural efficacy derives from its openness to formation, how different zones of the brain can be co-opted for various uses, and how the oncerigid borders of these zones improvisationally mutate in response to environmental developments from outside. However, Malabou notes that treating brain plasticity as employable capital reduces the plastic functioning of the brain to elasticity. To be employable in todays job market means to be pliable, elastic, flexible, adaptableand therefore passive and conciliatory. But as Malabou frequently points out, plasticity also resists elasticity and threatens it with explosion. If the new spirit of capitalism expresses itself in conjunction with the plasticity of the brain, as Boltanski and Chiapello suggest, then Malabou shows that capitalisms structure must include its own explosive resistance, its critique, from within. And no effective power from outside could dogmatically impinge upon plasticitys right to resistance; its right, as it were, to put everything into question, to unconditional resistance, to civil disobedience, to say everything or anything critically and with impunity.47 From within the flexible networks of neoliberal capitalism, plasticityas something that gives, receives, and explodes formincludes the following political defensive: the ability not to replicate the caricature of the world and to say no to an afflicting economic, political, and mediatic culture that celebrates only the triumph of flexibility, blessing obedient individuals who have no greater merit than that of knowing how to bow their heads with a smile.48 Malabou sees plasticity as an inherently excessive dynamic that overflows legislated boundaries, dogmas, and demarcations that seek to encase it within an anticipatable definition or regulative law. At the same time, it also sternly opposes conciliatory assimilation. Plasticitys resistance and flexibility therefore work together to disobey (or exceed) the authority of a legislated program by insisting on the individuality of difference (of identities and unique brains; as well as the individuality of disciplines, as Gasch notes above) and on the difference of individuality (the ability to be reshaped, mutable, contingent, and explosive). Hence Malabous titular question: if the brains synaptic plasticity actively sculpts itself unique to each individuals experiences and in response to outside stimuli, and if this sculpting power bears political consequences, then what should we do with our brain? As Daniel Smith notes, Malabous question returns her analysis of plasticity to its Kantian legacy. The condition of Kants critical question proposed in the Second Critique (what should we do?), Smith claims, has indeed changed greatly since Kants time. While Kant urgently sought to identify freedom within the determinism of a Newtonian and Galilean universe, science has today issued the need to flip Kants project by suggesting that we live in a world that seems to have been re-injected, as it were, with certain degrees of freedom.49 By inverting the Kantian paradigm, Malabou suggests that the time has come for critique to reinvent itself. The time has come, in other words, to stop seeking a priori human freedom within a deterministically mathematized universe and instead start questioning the foundation of limits and frontiers instituted in the face of the indeterminacy of the universe and its biological organisms. Smith explains, physics has become nondeterministic; genetics emphasizes the role of chance in biological mutations; capitalism, for all its repressive recodings, is also, in Deleuzes parlance, a vast enterprise of decoding (in neo-liberal language, it is the freedom to choose); and neuroscience itself emphasizes the fundamental plasticity or freedom of the synaptic connectivity of the brain. Put schematically, one might say that the question of freedom has been inverted since Kant. The question is no longer, How can we consider ourselves to be free in a deterministic world?, but rather, Why are we not free in a world in which science itself seems to see indeterminacy, stochastic processes, chance, and randomness at the most basic levels of physical, chemical, biological, and neurological events?50 If the brain operates in an auto-mutable synthesis of world and biology, and if this auto-mutation not only invalidates the mechanical associations with the brain but also addresses a certain vitality of individualism and practical responsibility (our brain is in part essentially what we do with it51), then the brain opens itself as the very site of freedom from within the program itself. The inversion of Kantian freedom at the heart of Malabous interest in the future of the humanities does not dismiss Kantian critique but instead, by remaining indebted to the plastic model of the critical tradition, asks it to reinvent itself in response to emerging neuro-political contexts, asks it to do exactly what critique has always claimed to do since the Enlightenment: to transform itself, to redraw its frontiers and limits, to be plastic, adaptable, democratic, and resistant to self-incurred immaturity. Of course, the injunction that the humanities reinvent themselves coincides, for Malabou, with the fact that the concept human, on which the universalization of the humanities was founded centuries ago, has itself been reinvented today by the sciences.52 Malabou argues for a movement away from classically Cartesian treatments of the human ego as a self-contained entity separated from the world (despite the fact that it also works as a synthesis of the noumenal and the phenomenal), and toward a necessary connectivity between the phenomenal and the neural. The assertion of the self is no longer the cogito ergo sum, but rather the brain that changes itself, which, Malabou says, is exactly what I am.53 Malabou defends the human subject as divided, different from itself; and she adds that this difference must be thought as being different even from the frontiers that mark difference because those very frontiers, sharp as they may be, are already plastic and therefore open to a future indeterminable mutation. In short, the plasticity of these frontiers indicates that the inside/outside paradigm of the Cartesian ego no longer holds. The self for Malabou is nothing other than the plastic frontier between the inside and the outside, which ruins the normalized stability of this frontier as Foucault envisions it on a discursive level. For Malabou, the brain serves as the image of a new frontier of difference, a cerebrality that names both the constitution of the affective psyche and its exposure to an inassimilable wounding.54 The brains synaptic connectivity does not divide inside/outside, does not differentiate the neural subject from the world, but also does not homogenize or assimilate this difference. Difference is the condition of plasticity insofar as a brain considered entirely itself could not be plastic,

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could not change or respond or transform in the future. Plasticity preserves difference as a necessary condition, but threatens any structure of its normalization with explosion.55 Plasticitys critical resistance to capitalist power and its radically democratic decentralization of governing hierarchy concerns, quite literally, the realization of the transcendental. Although Malabou does not phrase it in these terms, it is clear that for her there could be no transition from the biological to the cultural or from the strictly natural base of the mind to its historicaland thus also, necessarily, its political and socialdimension without positing a material realization of the transcendental.56 The infinity of critiques tasklessness and the transgression of borders, thresholds, and limits, according to Malabou, has been imminently realized in the (plastic) materiality of the brain. For the brain to become a real model of socio-political, cultural, and historical discoursesand not just a metaphor for themand additionally to expose the plastic element of critique latent in those discourses, Malabou must ultimately cast suspicion upon the rigidified border between the empirical and the transcendental. What interests me in this remarkable phenomenon is that this self-transformation of the brain, the modifiability of its circuitry and organization renders forever improbable the limit between the transcendental and the empirical. Neuroplasticity is an empirical fact. . . . Biology deals with materiality and raw facts. At the same time, however, because the very meaning of our biological being is indeterminate and consequently free, we can also say that the brain is made of a transcendental material and that as such, it is perfectible, meaningful, auto-organized, and open to the future. Because the organization of the brain is affected by experiencea process that must be exercised, a process with which it is necessary to experiment we ourselves are constantly being rewired and reorganized.57 Malabou does not do away with the transcendental; nor does she argue for its dissolution. She claims that the frontier between the empirical and the transcendental has been deconstructed within the materiality of the brain. Deconstruction, for Malabou, no longer has to be contained within Derridas structure of the promise because, following a linearly epochal model of scientific enlightenment, Malabou sees deconstructions insistence on the transgression of borders and its untamable right to critique at work in the brains immanence.58 The empirical body (of the brain) materializes the transcendental critique historically reserved for the humanities. In what she concedes may be her own dialectical stubbornness, Malabou argues that transcendental structures of pure dissymmetry, like otherness, alterity, diffrance, the limit, etc., take shape and formwhich is to say that these transcendental dissymmetries work empirically (and are inseparable from this empiricism)in the flexibility and explosion of the organisms plasticity.59 Plasticity does not conceptually replace deconstruction; it clearly inherits deconstructions legacy of difference. Malabou maintains that plasticity is deconstructions form; plasticity preserves and conserves the difference of alterity and the unanticipatable coming of the future, but according to a materialism that explodes the limit between the empirical and the transcendental. If the transcendental can only be thought today via the transformation of its material body, and if this transformation is indeed unavoidable, then Malabou suggests that there can be no securely determined frontier between the inside and outside. Science has begun to show that the self is nothing but the neural mutability of this frontier, the collapse of an irruptive transcendence, or pure event, or messianism. Because the transcendental has been transformed into a plastic material by the sciences, which threatens the humanities traditional abode, Malabou argues that one need not wait messianically for the new humanities Derrida calls for because the future of the humanities has already begun to take shape within the sciences.60 Nevertheless, the assurance of plasticity can only be thought retrospectively, in response to, or at least inseparably from, a minimal structure of the promise. While Malabou posits a becoming-empirical of the transcendental as the primary facet of plasticitys materialism, a becoming-transcendental of the empirical comprises an equally constitutive dynamic without which plasticity would be unable to recognize its own transformation, the duration of change, or the effect of its explosion. Plasticitys unpredictability, the time that transformation takes, the accidents it risks, exposes plasticity to an uncertainty that cannot be separated from its promise. Even the most radically destructive of plasticitys explosive capabilities could not be exempted from this quasi-transcendental structure. In Ontology of the Accident Malabou theorizes a phenomenology of the power of ontological and existential explosive plasticity, which has been neglected by psychoanalysis, ignored by philosophy, [and] nameless in neurology because it attempts to account for the complete evacuation of a subjectivity transformed by a surprised event of destruction.61 But even in this extreme caseof a break that does not coincide with the positively reparative sense of plasticity but instead marks the abrupt discontinuity between a pre- and post-traumatic subjectit is clear that the recognition of this transformation as plastic requires a relation to the promise of plasticity as a quasitranscendental concept. The new post-traumatic subject, differentiated entirely from an old, pre-traumatic self, is recognizably new only in relation to the old. The hermeneutics of this transformation (of a destruction that will have already happened) only makes sense as plastic insofar as the past-promise of plasticitys destruction is remembered in the future. Plasticity, therefore, may never conceptually coincide with the real it imminently realizes; in a gesture of retrospection, it will only ever be able to respond to or answer for the plasticity that, it promises, will have already happened. Plasticitys empiricism must thus retain a becoming-transcendental in order for it to be conceptualized in the first place. While Malabou argues that this becomingtranscendental would also be a plastic transformation unto itself,62 one can further assert

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Catherine Malabou: "Plasticity, in Retrospect: Changing the Future of the Humanities": diacritics review by Tyler Williams

that the ultra-transcendental structure of the promise that plasticitys materialism is supposed to ruin cannot be ruined without also ruining the possibility of thinking plasticity. 63 Plasticity will always be thought after plasticity, that is, according to a conceptual delay that divides plasticity from itself and makes it dependent on the promise of its explosion. The disciplinary relation between the sciences and the humanities at the heart of Malabous work makes the necessity of this delay clear: the humanities, divided disciplinarily from the sciences, can only ever recognize plasticity retrospectively, which is to say, never with the sciences in the concurrence of a discovery but in response to a promise. The epochality of Malabous call for the humanities to redraw their discursive frontiers and limits vis--vis the sciences is already, first, a response to discoveries already made within scientific discourses and, second, the recognition of a promise issued by the Enlightenments critical (i.e., plastic) resistance to dogmatisms of self-incurred immaturity. It is precisely because of this delay that both the division and relation between the humanities and the sciences are necessary and unavoidable; but it is also because of this delay that any thinking with the sciences unavoidably submits itself, as a promise, to the realm of the possible, to which Malabou relegates literature.64 It is no mere coincidence that, after announcing the neurological problems of destructive plasticity, the major course of Ontology of the Accident comprises sustained readings of Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Marguerite Duras, Thomas Mann, Maurice Blanchot, and Ovid. While an analysis of the literary dimension of Malabous work would require more attention than offered here, one can ultimately discern a literary facet endemic to plasticitys explosive force. This literary facet would comprise the promise of plasticitys transformation as well as the promise that has sustained the Enlightenments tradition up to the epochal moment in which, today, it can come to realize, retrospectively, that it has been plastic all along. While Malabou asserts that plasticity will only last the time of its forms and cannot therefore be subsumed under an empty, transcendental instance,65 the promise of plasticitys future, which is also a memory of its prior transformations, nonetheless relies on a quasi-transcendental structure that conditions the future of the humanities as being inseparable from a thinking with the sciences. 1 Kant, What Is Enlightenment?, 21. 2 Ibid., 17; translation modified. 3 Derrida, The University Without Condition, 204. 4 Foucault, What Is Enlightenment?, 45. 5 See Derrida, The University Without Condition. For Derrida, the irresponsible tasklessness of the humanities should not be read as an idealism that ever fully exists in itself. Instead, the freedom of the humanities in each instant of its actualization is also limited by the contexts of its institution. That is why Derrida argues that an actual university without condition could never in fact, exist. The humanities are never just this excessively democratic capacity for critique; they are also always institutionally and juridically contextualized within a phenomenal horizon, which, from the start, divides the work of the humanities from within. In other words, the transgressively critical task of the humanities would never be perceptible without the rigidity of a horizon to transgress. 6 Malabou. The Future of the Humanities, 8. 7 Ibid., 9. It is not entirely clear in Malabous text what this swallowing would entail. On the surface, it suggests that unless the humanities become aware of their discourses own plastic construct, they risk being surpassed by the sciences as a dominant discourse on the thinking of frontiers and limits. But such a surpassing hardly constitutes being swallowed or eaten alive. Evoking incorporation, assimilation, and, obviously, ingestion, these terms suggest that the humanities themselves risk becoming scientific (without being aware of it) unless they reconstitute their frontiers for a new age in which scientific plasticity has become a prominent motor scheme. Certainly, Malabou is more interested in the necessity of the humanities reconstitution than she is in the characterization of the threat they face, but her essay remains vague on the latter point. If the humanities do not reconstitute themselves, what is the actual threat to the humanities? What is the connection between the humanities potential irrelevancy (being surpassed by) and their being swallowed by (being incorporated into) the sciences? And by what measureaccording to what programwould the relevancy of the humanities be decided vis--vis the sciences? 8 Ibid., 8. 9 Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, 67. 10 Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 5. 11 Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, 87n13.

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Catherine Malabou: "Plasticity, in Retrospect: Changing the Future of the Humanities": diacritics review by Tyler Williams

12 Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 15. 13 For all its mutability, plasticity preserves itself and stands steadfast as a resistance to the nihilism of ceaseless flexibility. The structural resistance to dynamism at the heart of Malabous conception of plasticitys dynamic features exposes Alexander Galloways mischaracterization of her work. Galloway assimilates plasticity with elasticity when he considers plasticity a voracious monster of infinite variation and ceaseless production and thereby overlooks the critical resistance that makes plasticity as equally inert as it is adaptable (Catherine Malabou, or The Commerce in Being, 15). Galloway even goes so far as to ascribe to plasticity the status of a proto-nihilism, a position premised upon this misunderstanding of plasticitys dual dynamics. Plasticity could only be nihilism or nihilistic if its capacity for change allowed it to change ceaselesslya feature Malabou consistently attributes to elasticity alone. 14 Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, 67. 15 Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 9; What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 5; The New Wounded, 17; Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, 67; Ontology of the Accident, 5. The specific example of the plastic bomb does not appear directly in Ontology of the Accident, but Malabou does refer to this necessarily destructive component of plasticity in this book as terrorist (5). 16 Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, 67. In his review of What Should We Do with Our Brain?, Pete Mandik writes that he finds this connection between plasticity and plastic explosives hard to swallow because, as he claims, not even the plastic in plastic explosive means explosive. Its the explosive in plastic explosive that means explosive. Mandik wants to argue that the annihilative function of form inscribed into the concept of plasticity is not as radically annihilative as Malabou suggests because the explosive nature of plastic explosives has nothing to do with their being plastic except as a metaphor. However, as Carolyn Shread succinctly points out, A closer reading of Malabous translated text, a more attentive awareness to its status as a translation, would have revealed [to Mandik] the close association in French between plastique (plastic) and plastiquer (to explode), with nothing but an r between the concept and its explosive connotations (The Horror of Translation, 8283). 17 Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 186. 18 Malabou, The Future of the Humanities, 10. 19 Ibid. 20 Derrida, The University Without Condition, 230. Derrida has elsewhere argued that domestication the circumscription and recognition of identifiable limitsalready begins the process of normalization. Without calling attention to this point, Malabou suggests that the repeated inclusion of the old humanities within the new humanities begins again the process of domesticating the humanities within a secure tradition, which, in turn, operates according to the same normalizing impulses typically prejudiced against the sciences. (See Derrida, Points, 386.) 21 Malabou, The Future of the Humanities, 9. 22 Gasch, One More Division, 34. 23 Ibid., 35. 24 Ibid. On the necessity of difference as a minimal condition for relation, see Gaschs earlier text, Of Minimal Things: Studies on the Notion of Relation, especially pp. 412, for a concise elaboration of the problem. 25 Gasch, One More Division, 37. Similar to Gasch, Samuel Weber notes that the intellectual division of labor across the modern university system has, for at least three centuries, since the Enlightenment, made possible the universitys ideal of comprehensive, total knowledge, by increasingly distancing the different divisions and disciplines from one another. Gaschs double insistence on the relation and the difference of disciplines is in accord with Weber who calls the demarcations made in the humanities the ambivalence of demarcation: the humanities are

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Catherine Malabou: "Plasticity, in Retrospect: Changing the Future of the Humanities": diacritics review by Tyler Williams

posited as an inclusive discipline, but this inclusivity is distinguished against the sciences, which makes the demarcations proper to the humanities inclusive only by way of their exclusivity. (See Weber, Institution and Interpretation, 240, 138.) 26 Gasch, Of Minimal Things, 11. The journal Labyrinthe published a 2007 issue La fin des disciplines?, which largely takes up institutional relations within the humanities under the ubiquitous title, interdisciplinarity. See in particular Laurent Dubreuils essay, Dfauts de savoirs, which engages in part with the collaborative differences at work within the hard sciences versus those of the humanities. 27 Derrida, Of Hospitality, 75. 28 Ibid., 5, 61, 12527. In his essay LIntrus, Jean-Luc Nancy argues that the intruder (lintrus) must be thought as a stranger who enters ones home by surprise. The connection between the strangers surprise and his/her strangeness is necessary insofar as a stranger who already has the right to enter and remain loses any semblance of strangeness and therefore ceases to be a surprising intruder. Because intrusion always surprises, a preemptive protection against intrusion is fundamentally impossible. 29 Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 79. 30 Malabou, The Future of the Humanities, 10. 31 Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, 73. 32 Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, 7576. 33 Ibid., 75. 34 Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 4. 35 iek, The Parallax View, 214. 36 Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 4. 37 Malabou, Darwin and the Social Destiny of Natural Selection, 156. 38 Changeux, Neuronal Man, 212. 39 Schwartz and Begley, The Mind and the Brain, 112. 40 On the social implications of plastic selectivity, see Malabou, Darwin and the Social Destiny of Natural Selection. Plasticitys balance between production and negation is addressed throughout Malabous work, but perhaps most prominently in What Should We Do with Our Brain? and Ontology of the Accident. In the former, Malabou addresses plasticity as a dynamic that uses negativity as a productive process of formation while in the latter Malabou entertains the possibility of a purely negative plasticity that would have no productive or reparative outcome proper to it. Such a destructive plasticity also serves as the foundation for Malabous interest in brain damage in The New Wounded. 41 Changeux and Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think?, 6. 42 Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 33. 43 Ibid., 6, 44. 44 Ibid., 52. See also The New Wounded, xvi. 45 Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 35. 46 On accusations of nihilism within Malabous formulation of plasticity, see note 13 above. 47 Each of these rights are also outlined in Derridas comments on the unconditionality of the university as a site of critique in The University Without Condition (2048). 48 Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 78, 79; emphasis added. 49 Smith, What Should We Do with Our Brain?: A Review Essay, 2324. 50 Ibid., 24. 51 Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 30. 52 Ten years before Malabous call to redraw the frontier between the humanities and the sciences, Weber argued (also in an essay titled The Future of the Humanities) that the future of the humanities has found itself threatened in the midst of economic crisis. Is there a future left for the humanities, Weber asks,

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Catherine Malabou: "Plasticity, in Retrospect: Changing the Future of the Humanities": diacritics review by Tyler Williams

in a world progressively dominated by an economic logic of profit and loss? The human has been traditionally thought according to productive labor, as self-producing and self-realizing, but todays economy sees a rapid division between productive labor and the accumulation of wealth to such a degree that those who have to work for a living have seen themselves increasingly marginalized in large parts of the world. If to be human no longer means to be selfrealizing according to productive labor, Weber asks, what is the future of the humanities? Webers analysis makes an important argument that his essay does not explicitly take up but that should nevertheless be commented upon: namely, that outside (i.e., scientific) discourses like economics dramatically shape the manner in which the humanities think their own disciplinarity. Economic crisis provokes a transformation of the human, which in turn demands that the future of the humanities be rethought as a discipline (Weber, Institution and Interpretation, 236). 53 Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, 82. 54 Cerebrality is a term Malabou coins as a substitute for Freuds sexuality. While Freud regards sexuality as a causality of sexual behavior, Malabou designates cerebrality as the governing of psychic life by the brains cerebral functions. This is the reason Malabou is so interested in brain damage: if the psyche is now subordinate to cerebrality, then any wound inflicted upon the brain, and any subsequent transformations this trauma provokes in the victims emotional life, poses serious hermeneutic problems to the discourse of psychoanalysis. This hermeneutic problem, for Malabou, derives from the fact that the event of the brain damage always comes from outside and, entering the inside only upon the event of its wounding, is never internalized by the psyche it wounds. It remains constitutively inassimilable and without reason because the psyche cannot stage this knowledge for itself (The New Wounded, 5, 9). 55 On the relationship between preservation, conservation, and the memory of difference inscribed in plasticity, see Malabou and Williams, How Are You Yourself?, 15. 56 Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 56. 57 Malabou, The Future of the Humanities, 15. 58 Malabou and Williams, How Are You Yourself?, 1617. 59 Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, 40. 60 Malabou, The Future of the Humanities, 14. 61 Malabou, Ontology of the Accident, 5, 6, 30. 62 Malabou, Changing Difference, 65. Earlier in the chapter Grammatology and Plasticity, Malabou makes this same argument about Derridas generalization of writing from its exoteric sense of notation to its esoteric sense of the trace. She argues that the possibility of transforming the exoteric into a generalized esoteric concept already assumes a certain plasticity of the concept. 63 Derrida describes diffrance as an ultratranscendental structure in order to account for its originary sense without sacrificing it to the idealism of a Kantian idea (Of Grammatology, 61). 64 In a recent interview, Malabou claims, The future of the deconstructed real is an issue, not deconstruction of presence. What Derrida calls literature does not necessarily coincide, as you know, with literary texts, but corresponds to the structure of the promise, as opposed to that of program. Literature is the realm of the possible, a possible that wont and doesnt need to become actual (Malabou and Williams, How Are You Yourself?, 17). 65 Malabou, Changing Difference, 66, 65. Boltanski, Luc, and ve Chiapello. The New Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Gregory Elliott. New York: Verso, 2005. Canguilhem, Georges. Knowledge of Life. Translated by Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Changeux, Jean-Pierre. Neuronal Man. New York:

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Pantheon, 1985. Changeux, Jean-Pierre, and Paul Ricoeur. What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. . Of Hospitality. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. . Points . . .: Interviews, 19741994. Edited by Elisabeth Weber. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. . The University Without Condition. In Without Alibi, translated by Peggy Kamuf, 20237. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Dubreuil, Laurent. Dfauts de savoirs. Labyrinthe 27, no. 2 (2007): 1326. Foucault, Michel. What Is Enlightenment? Translated by Catherine Porter. In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 3250. New York: Pantheon, 1984. Galloway, Alexander R. Catherine Malabou, or The Commerce in Being. In French Theory Today: An Introduction to Possible Futures, pamphlet 1. New York: TPSNY/Erudio, 2010. Gasch, Rodolphe. Of Minimal Things: Studies on the Notion of Relation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. . One More Division. CR: The New Centennial Review 11, no. 3 (2011): 3144. Kant, Immanuel. An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? In Practical Philosophy, translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor, 1122. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Malabou, Catherine. Changing Difference. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011. . Darwin and the Social Destiny of Natural Selection. Translated by Lena Taub and Tyler Williams. theory@buffalo, no. 16 (2012): 14456. . The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic. Translated by Lisabeth During. New York: Routledge, 2005. . The Future of the Humanities. theory@buffalo, no. 14 (2010): 816. . Neuroliterature. Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious (2010): 11726. . The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage. Translated by Steven Miller. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. . Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction. Translated by Carolyn Shread. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. . What Should We Do with Our Brain? Translated by Sebastian Rand. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Malabou, Catherine, and Tyler Williams. How Are You Yourself? Answering to Derrida, Heidegger, and the Real. theory@buffalo, no. 16 (2012): 122. Works Cited Plasticity, In Retrospect >> Tyler Williams 25 Mandik, Pete. Review of What Should We Do with Our Brain?, by Catherine Malabou. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. April 27, 2009. http://ndpr. nd.edu/news/23992/?id=15887. Nancy, Jean-Luc. LIntrus. Translated by Susan Hanson. CR: The New Centennial Review 2, no. 3 (2002): 114. Schwartz, Jeffrey M., and Sharon Begley. The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Shread, Carolyn. The Horror of Translation. theory@ buffalo, no. 16 (2012): 7795. Smith, Daniel W. What Should We Do with Our Brain? A Review Essay. theory@buffalo, no. 16 (2012): 2336. Weber, Samuel. The Future of the Humanities: Experimenting. In Institution and Interpretation,

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expanded edition, 23652. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. iek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Posted by Michael O'Rourke at 6:32 PM
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