Counterpath is a collaborative work by Catherine Malabou and Jacques Derrida that answers to the gamble inherent in the idea of "travelling with" the philosopher of deconstruction. Malabou's readerly text of quotations and commentary demonstrates how Derrida's work, while appearing to be anything but a travelogue, is nevertheless replete with references to geographical and topographical locations, and functions as a kind of counter-Odyssey through meaning, theorizing, and thematizing notions of arrival, drifting, derivation, and catastrophe. In fact, by going straight to the heart of the Derridean idea of "spacing," she finally makes it seem as though Derrida has never written about anything but travel. Malabou's text is punctuated by a series of postcards received by Derrida from destinations such as Istanbul and Porto, Laguna Beach and Athens, which are inspired by his reading of her evolving discussion. Writing in a familiar and unguarded manner, as if he were "on vacation" from his own writing, Derrida still remains totally faithful to that work and invites the reader to reflect on much of what haunts his texts as well as his daily life, questions of distance and death, the relation to the other, and exile..

Counterpath

Jacques Derrida

Catherine Malabou

David Wills

Reference

Stanford University Press

What Should We Do with Our Brain? (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

Recent neuroscience, in replacing the old model of the brain as a single centralized source of control, has emphasized “plasticity,” the quality by which our brains develop and change throughout the course of our lives. Our brains exist as historical products, developing in interaction with themselves and with their surroundings. Hence there is a thin line between the organization of the nervous system and the political and social organization that both conditions and is conditioned by human experience. Looking carefully at contemporary neuroscience, it is hard not to notice that the new way of talking about the brain mirrors the management discourse of the neo-liberal capitalist world in which we now live, with its talk of decentralization, networks, and flexibility. Consciously or unconsciously, science cannot but echo the world in which it takes place. In the neo-liberal world, “plasticity” can be equated with “flexibility”―a term that has become a buzzword in economics and management theory. The plastic brain would thus represent just another style of power, which, although less centralized, is still a means of control. In this book, Catherine Malabou develops a second, more radical meaning for plasticity. Not only does plasticity allow our brains to adapt to existing circumstances, it opens a margin of freedom to intervene, to change those very circumstances. Such an understanding opens up a newly transformative aspect of the neurosciences. In insisting on this proximity between the neurosciences and the social sciences, Malabou applies to the brain Marx’s well-known phrase about history: people make their own brains, but they do not know it. This book is a summons to such knowledge.

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Fordham University Press

From the editors' introduction: Refusing to oppose truth to semblance, psychoanalysis models its utterances on their alliance. If Freud creates a number of 'scientific' myths that continue to elicit derisive laughter from modern psychologists - Oedipus, the primal father - it is for no other reason than that psychoanalysis emerges at the point where this repressed myth must return in the guise of rationalism itself in order to combat the fierce dialectic of obscurantism and rational atheism... Rather than unmasking the deception of the signifier, psychoanalysis produces this deception in its emptiness, indirectly revealing its semblance and separating off its illusory mystifications without sacrificing the singular jouissance it marks... Far from distancing itself from semblance, by making it into an everyday object against which one can do battle, psychoanalysis should maintain the possibility that this semblance of being might be our only chance to decide, to intervene politically.

Umbr(a): Semblance

Henry Corbin

Russell Grigg

Kōjin Karatani

Joan Copjec

Jelica Sumic

Gerard Wacjman

Bernard Baas

Oliver Feltham

The Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture

Product Description The present issue of Umbr(a) aims to provide a space for the elaboration of the often-uninterrogated relation between writing and psychoanalysis. For, inasmuch as psychoanalysis is inextricably linked to the speaking subject, it nevertheless finds its origins and future firmly grounded in writing. Every psychoanalyst whose training is informed by Freud's writing, every psychoanalytic critic who takes writing as his object of study, and anyone in any discipline who reads or writes in the name of psychoanalysis must eventually account for the following -- deceptively simple -- question: If psychoanalysis can rightly be called the talking cure, then why should it have anything at all to say about writing? The answer to this question will dictate not only why psychoanalysis can be brought to bear upon the question of writing -- what, for example, characterizes writing as distinct from speech or even the mark -- but also what psychoanalysis enables one to think about writing, as distinct from any other possible discipline, method, or apparatus. Or, to put it another way, when choosing to bring the concepts, structures, and operations of psychoanalysis to bear upon writing, one must be prepared to account not only for the choice of psychoanalysis -- Why psychoanalysis? -- but also for the admissibility and relevance of the object -- Why writing? Indeed, if there is anything that makes psychoanalysis today uniquely situated to approach the question of writing it is the way in which it inherits -- in a structurally irrevocable way -- the distinction between speech and writing. Writing has been fundamentally, but almost paradoxically, implicated in psychoanalysis from the very outset. Freud became convinced of the existence of the unconscious through direct and repeated experience of its manifestations in the speech and acts of his analysands. However, in order for his singular discovery to be useful and convincing to others who had not had the benefit of direct experience he was compelled to write. This point cannot be emphasized enough: Psychoanalysis, as it exists today, is a direct consequence of the manner in which Freud translated and transmitted his clinical experience through the fundamentally incompatible register of writing. In his case histories, for example, Freud makes it abundantly clear that what he has written is by no means a wholly accurate or linear representation of the course of the analysis in question. What the reader experiences will not be identical to what Freud experienced. Yet Freud nevertheless writes with the expectation of producing the same effect in his reader: a repetition of his inaugural experience of the unconscious. As readers of Freud, we inherit a very specific relation to repetition, and that repetition cannot be unbound from the writing of which it is a consequence. In this sense, Freud's writing has served, and continues to serve, as the base case for a peculiar sort of mathematical induction. Every reader must repeat the discovery of the unconscious and reinvent psychoanalysis, as if for the first time, while being constrained by nothing but the economy of Freud's writing. This is the Freudian wager: that the psychoanalysis we invent by reading what he has written will be, somehow, the same psychoanalysis. About the Author LUCIE CANTIN is a psychoanalyst, psychologist, and co-director of training at Groupe Interdisciplinaire Freudien de Recherches et d Interventions Cliniques et Culturelles (GIFRIC) in Québec. She has published numerous texts on a wide variety of psychoanalytic topics. In English, she has published (with Willy Apollon and Danielle Bergeron) After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious (State University of New York Press, 2002). SIGI JÖTTKANDT is a lecturer in the School of Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales in Australia. She is the co-founder (with Dominiek Hoens) of S: Journal of the Jan van Eyck Circle

Umbr(a): Writing

Pierre Klossowski

Alenka Zupančič

Jean-Michel Rabaté

Sigi Jöttkandt

Lucie Cantin

Tracy McNulty

Catherine Millot

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Books by Catherine Malabou