Catherine Malabou. The future of Continental philosophy. 2014

http://www.egs.edu/ Catherine Malabou, philosopher and writer, presents a critical engagement with a question posed by French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux. Meillassoux proposes in his book, After Finitude, that we must relinquish the transcendental which would also mean a break with Kant. This break, for Malabou, also brings us to a larger question which deals with the future of Continental philosophy. Can we continue to do Continental philosophy, which essentially begins with Kant and therefore hinges on an acceptance of the transcendental; or, if we assent, must we begin to move towards the Analytic tradition? Malabou lays out and critiques the arguments of Meillassoux, shows existing critiques of Kant and the transcendental which have come from the Continental tradition, then reveals how she would answer this question which has been put forward. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe. 2014.

Catherine Malabou, Ph.D., is an important contemporary French philosopher. Catherine Malabou was born in 1959 and is a former student at the École normal supérieure (ENS) of Fontenay-Saint-Cloud in Lyon, France. ENS schools are regarded as some of the most prestigious French schools for humanities studies. Before that Catherine Malabou was educated in Paris at the renown Sorbonne University.

Catherine Malabou passed her agrégation in philosophy (French University high-level competitive examination for the recruitment of professors and often the gateway to Ph.D. study). Catherine Malabou wrote her dissertation on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) under the direction of the critical French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), completing it on December 15 1994. The thesis was published in 1996 under the title “L’Avenir de Hegel, plasticité, temporalité, dialectique” and was prefaced by Derrida with a text entitled “Le temps des adieux: Heidegger (lu par) Hegel (lu par) Malabou” (“A time for farewells: Heidegger (read by) Hegel (read by) Malabou”). Catherine Malabou’s doctoral dissertation was eventually published in both Japanese and English (2005, “The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic”).

More recently, Catherine Malabou published with the eminent American critical thinker Judith Butler (1956-) a book in French entitled “Sois mon corps” (2010), not yet published in English but which can translate as “Be My Body”. The two thinkers give us a contemporary reading of domination and servitude in Hegel. They ask about who has not ever dreamed or feared, desired or dreaded to delegate one’s body? That is to say, asking or ordering someone else: be my body, carry it in my place, feed it, cultivate it, shape it. According to Judith Butler and Catherine Malabou such request and order are those which the master gives the slave in Hegel’s “The Phenomenology of Spirit” (1807). In this way, the dialectic of domination and servitude must be understood as a scene of delegation and denial of the body. But they also want to ask two opposite and yet inextricable questions: do we ever manage to completely detach oneself from one’s body? And on the contrary, are we ever completely attached to it? From Hegel to Michel Foucault (1926-1984), Jacques Derrida and Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968), these issues are tackled in all their modalities.

Видео Catherine Malabou. The future of Continental philosophy. 2014 канала European Graduate School Video Lectures