At the center of Catherine's Malabou's study of Hegel is a defense of Hegel's relation to time and the future. While many readers, following Kojbe, have taken Hegel to be announcing the end of history, Malabou fnds a more supple impulse, open to the new, the unexpected. She takes as her guiding thread the concept of "plusticity, " and shows how Hegel's dialectic-introducing the sculptor's art into philosophy-is motivated by the desire for transformation. Malabou is a canny and faithful reader, and allows her clussic "maitre" to speak, if not against his own grain, at least against a tradition too attached to closure and system. Malabou's Hegel is a "plastic" thinker, not a nostalgic metaphysician.
Translated by Carolyn Shread That a resistance to what is known today as biopower-the control, regulation, exploitation and instrumentalization of the living being-might emerge from possibilities written into the structure of the living being itself, not from the philosophical concepts that tower over it; that there might be a biological resistance to the biopolitical; that the biomight be viewed as a complex and contradictory authority, opposed to itself and referring to both the ideological vehicle of modern sovereignty and to that which holds it in check: this, apparently, has never been thought. Philosophy's Antibiological Bias What am I saying? It's a fact that in our time we have witnessed the definitive erasure of the limit between the political subject and the living subject that for centuries was believed to be secure. Michel Foucault illuminated magnificently the erasure of this limit, an erasure that marked the birth of the biopolitical and acts as the characteristic trait of modern sovereignty: "For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with 2 the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question." 1 These celebrated remarks define biopower as the means by which life is introduced "into political techniques." On the threshold of modernity, power was exercised over "life processes and undertook to control and modify them" (HSI, p. 142). In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben returns to the analysis of this undifferentiated zone between biological life and political life that defined the space of community from that point on. 2 The living being entered politics once and for all. And yet we have to admit that this "entry" is unilateral, nondialectical, unreciprocated. The "double and crisscrossing politicization of life and the biologization of politics" take place without tension because the biological is deprived of the right to respond This essay was originally published in French as Catherine Malabou, "Une Seule Vie:
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