{"title":"Books by Catherine Malabou","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780823229536","title":"What Should We Do with Our Brain?","description":"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.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56294947062133,"sku":"9780823229536","price":22.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780823229536_e16d9b08-c341-486d-85d7-4df199961d00.jpg?v=1786015981"},{"product_id":"9780823239689","title":"The New Wounded","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis book employs a philosophical approach to the \"new wounded\" (brain lesion patients) to stage a confrontation between psychoanalysis and contemporary neurobiology, focused on the issue of trauma and psychic wounds. It thereby reevaluates the brain as an organ that is not separated from psychic life but rather at its center.\u003cbr\u003e The \"new wounded\" suffer from psychic wounds that traditional psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the psyche's need to integrate events into its own history, cannot understand or cure. They are victims of various cerebral lesions or attacks, including degenerative brain diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.\u003cbr\u003e Changes caused by cerebral lesions frequently manifest themselves as an unprecedented metamorphosis in the patient's identity. A person with Alzheimer's disease, for example, is not—or not only—someone who has \"changed\" or been \"modified\" but rather a subject who has become someone else.\u003cbr\u003e The behavior of subjects who are victims of \"sociopolitical traumas,\" such as abuse, war, terrorist attacks, or sexual assaults, displays striking resemblances to that of subjects who have suffered brain damage. Thus today the border separating organic trauma and sociopolitical trauma is increasingly porous.\u003cbr\u003e Effacing the limits that separate \"neurobiology\" from \"sociopathy,\" brain damage tends also to blur the boundaries between history and nature. At the same time, it reveals that political oppression today assumes the guise of a traumatic blow stripped of all justification. We are thus dealing with a strange mixture of nature and politics, in which politics takes on the appearance of nature, and nature disappears in order to assume the mask of politics.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56294950207861,"sku":"9780823239689","price":36.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780823239689_37be089f-24c3-47ec-a555-0bbe7a696837.jpg?v=1786015984"},{"product_id":"9780745691510","title":"Before Tomorrow","description":"\u003cp\u003eIs contemporary continental philosophy making a break with Kant? The structures of knowledge, taken for granted since Kant s Critique of Pure Reason, are now being called into question: the finitude of the subject, the phenomenal given, a priori synthesis. Relinquish the transcendental: such is the imperative of postcritical thinking in the 21st century.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eQuestions that we no longer thought it possible to ask now reemerge with renewed vigor: can Kant really maintain the difference between a priori and innate? Can he deduce, rather than impose, the categories, or justify the necessity of nature? Recent research into brain development aggravates these suspicions, which measure transcendental idealism against the thesis of a biological origin for cognitive processes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn her important new book Catherine Malabou lays out Kant s response to his posterity. True to its subject, the book evolves as an epigenesis the differentiated growth of the embryo for, as those who know how to read critical philosophy affirm, this is the very life of the transcendental and contains the promise of its transformation.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56296730198389,"sku":"9780745691510","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780745691510_aefe82e9-fcee-4c76-8f85-3c5e74a6d2a7.jpg?v=1791212760"},{"product_id":"9781474462129","title":"Plasticity","description":"Catherine Malabou is one of the foremost, most innovative intelligences working in contemporary French philosophy today. Her work articulates a coherent conceptualisation of ‘plasticity’ by merging recent neurobiology and medicinal sciences with the history of philosophy and political theory. Across the essays gathered in 'Plasticity: The Promise of Explosion', Malabou carves a philosophical space between structuralism, deconstruction, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis and speculative realism. By demonstrating the plastic transformability at the heart of these disciplines, a change that always promises future explosion, Malabou, as a female philosopher, also articulates the need to ‘change difference’ within patriarchal concepts of tradition itself.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56301047185781,"sku":"9781474462129","price":26.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781474462129_ef4fd301-0bb4-41db-ae09-e4f91c309fec.jpg?v=1786034615"},{"product_id":"9781509549931","title":"Pleasure Erased: The Clitoris Unthought","description":"The clitoris was absent in anatomy books, in paintings and sculptures, absent in spirit and even body; it has long been the organ of erased pleasure. We assume that this oversight has been repaired in our times: today, the clitoris is not forgotten but honoured. Conferences, books, manifestos, works of art are all devoted to it. The autonomy of clitoral jouissance is recognized. The boundaries of feminism have also moved: queer, intersex and trans approaches claim that the clitoris is perhaps no longer the exclusive preserve of the woman. And yet, there remains a wounded space. Because genital mutilation is still common practice. Because millions of women are still denied pleasure. The clitoris continues to mark the enigmatic space of the feminine. Constrained by the extreme difficulty and the extreme urgency of returning to this scorched earth, it is time to give voice to an organ of pleasure which has still not become an organ of thought.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56312510316917,"sku":"9781509549931","price":15.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509549931_2f7cf752-ae65-414b-bbf2-09975e2fcb8e.jpg?v=1786021935"},{"product_id":"the-future-of-hegel","title":"The Future of Hegel","description":"Published in English for the first time, this is one of the most important recent books on Hegel. Seeking to restore Hegel's concepts of time and temporality, it is essential reading for those interested in contemporary continental philosophy.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57481708568949,"sku":"9780415287210","price":43.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780415287210.jpg?v=1786090014"},{"product_id":"stop-thief-anarchism-and-philosophy","title":"Stop Thief! – Anarchism and Philosophy","description":"Many contemporary philosophers – including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben – ascribe an ethical or political value to anarchy, but none ever called themselves an “anarchist.” It is as if anarchism were unmentionable and had to be concealed, even though its critique of domination and of government is poached by the philosophers.    Stop Thief! calls out the plundering of anarchism by philosophy. It’s a call that is all the more resonant today as the planetary demand for an alternative political realm raises a deafening cry. It also alerts us to a new philosophical awakening. Catherine Malabou proposes to answer the cry by re-elaborating a concept of anarchy articulated around a notion of the “non-governable” far beyond an inciting of disobedience or common critiques of capitalism. Anarchism is the only way out, the only pathway that allows us to question the legitimacy of political domination and thereby wfree up the confidence that we need if we are to survive.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57484346229109,"sku":"9781509555239","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509555239.jpg?v=1786266409"},{"product_id":"formations","title":"Formations","description":"\u003cp\u003eCatherine Malabou’s elaboration of the concept of plasticity has made her one of the most innovative philosophers working today. \u003ci\u003eFormations \u003c\/i\u003ecollects eighteen of Malabou’s early writings, spanning 1986 to 2003, within which her initial articulations of plasticity take shape. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThough Malabou might be most famous for bringing neurobiological discourse into conversation with continental philosophy, she has always maintained, as the essays in \u003ci\u003eFormation \u003c\/i\u003emake clear, that \"\"plasticity\"\" circulates dynamically within the history of philosophy. Across readings of Hegel, Marx, Derrida, Rousseau, Heidegger, Ricoeur, Plato, Aristotle, and many others, these essays highlight the deep entrenchment of plasticity within the history of philosophy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eFormations \u003c\/i\u003eputs on full display Malabou’s associations with deconstruction, her negotiations with structuralism, her interdisciplinary investments in philosophical calibrations of literature, and the unique form of dialectics that will shape her later thought. A critical introduction by Adrian Johnston situates these essays within the contexts of French Hegelianism and Marxism, showing both the continuity of these early essays with Malabou’s later work as well as their singular contributions to the development of these still-relevant critical fields. An afterword by Malabou herself offers a biographical and bibliographic retrospective to these essays.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNever just an archive of precursory traces of a later project, \u003ci\u003eFormations\u003c\/i\u003e exhibits the plastic metamorphosis of Malabou’s own thought by revealing any oeuvre, including any translation or editorial arrangement of that oeuvre, to be a product constituted by its ongoing formations. In this sense, the title reflects one of the most enduring features of Malabou’s thought: \"\"formation\"\" stands doubly for the rigidity of an identity and the processes by which that identity changes and takes shape.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57502207279477,"sku":"9781531513764","price":26.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781531513764.jpg?v=1786781027"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-catherine-malabou.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}