Thinking Catherine Malabou - by Thomas Wormald & Isabell Dahms (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

This volume contributes to the growing body of literature exploring the work of contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou. Through its fifteen contributions, including two previously untranslated essays by Malabou, the volume explores the various ways in which Malabou's thought both performs and furnishes resources for the negotiation of philosophy's attachment and detachment from itself and other disciplines. What kind of interaction can philosophy have with either science or politics without conquering them? How does one carry out philosophy while subverting it, changing it, directing it on or opening it up to different pathways?

The chapters explore the detachment of Malabou from her own philosophical training in deconstruction, the theme of habit and the question of new attachments, detachments through the relation of Malabou's thought and science, and the detachments that transpire through philosophy's confrontation with politics. In order to have a future, philosophy must detach from its own tradition and passionately confront questions of race, gender, and colonialism.

Review Quotes

"Containing two previously untranslated essays by Malabou, Thinking Catherine Malabou deepens our understanding of this important, contemporary French philosopher. This is an invaluable collection of essays. The scholars assembled here clearly understand Malabou's work and its impact on philosophy today. By showing us how Malabou's thought detaches itself from philosophy, Thinking Catherine Malabou points the way in which philosophy must be reconfigured in the future." --Leonard Lawlor, Sparks Professor of Philosophy, Penn State University

"Ever since Catherine Malabou dropped the bombshell of her first book on The Future of Hegel in the midst of the dominant anti-Hegelian consensus, she has continued to rise to the very top of the list of today's most creative and daring French philosophers. The present collection offers a complex and varied account of Malabou's passionate attachments to and detachments from deconstruction, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, materialism, and dialectics. Giving voice to a new generation of scholars and students of Malabou's work as well as her long-time translator, the volume also includes a fascinating original essay from the author about Heidegger and Lévi-Strauss. This collection is bound to become a standard reference work." --Bruno Bosteels, Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Columbia University

"This volume offers a uniquely comprehensive engagement with Malabou's philosophy and the multiple relations it opens up through its "passionate detachments". Posing the question of the status of philosophy today and its relation to other disciplines such as science and politics, the essays collected here represent an indispensable contribution to the reception of this most exciting and important contemporary thinker." --Ian James, Reader in Modern French Literature and Thought, University of Cambridge

About the Author

Isabell Dahms is a graduate student in the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, UK.

Thomas Wormald is a graduate student in the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University, Canada.