by Conall Cash 

This article has been peer-reviewed by the b2o editorial board.

Review of Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (New York: Pantheon, 2019)

I.

Capitalism and religion: incontrovertible opponents, or strange bedfellows? If we understand religion as a perspective which defines mortal, temporal existence in negative relation to an eternal order of meaning, capitalism’s devotion to endless growth, and its ceaseless effort to commodify all features of the natural world and of our individual selves may seem to thwart the eternal stasis that religious life calls us towards. For a critic of modernity such as Max Weber, this conflict produces the essentially tragic nature of the modern “disenchantment of the world,” brought about by capitalism as a process which erodes the traditions that had given individuals a sense of their place in a universal, perpetual order. The loss of eternity then appears as a loss of all experience of fundamental meaning and a retreat into the throes of relativism, leaving us to live the uniquely mundane existences of those who can no longer access a realm of meaning once available to our forebears. Capitalism and modernity are from this perspective indeed defined as atheistic, and the atheism which they offer is the negative experience of losing a vision of eternity which could make us bear our mortal and limited existence.

For Martin Hägglund, in his important new book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, the perspective represented by Weber drastically fails to grasp the questions posed by modernity and secularism. Most significantly, its tragic anti-modernism fails to grasp the ways in which capitalism in fact continues to reinforce the premises which enable religion to hold traction in society and to negate the value of life itself. For Hägglund, even in our supposedly secular age we need to take seriously Karl Marx’s claim that “the critique of religion is the premise of all critique,” and to understand why Marx’s critique of capitalism “is intertwined with his critique of religion,” and why we “cannot understand one without the other.”[1] This entails a sharply distinct conception of atheism from Weber’s, which Hägglund considers in fact to be a tacitly “religious” atheism (17).

For Hägglund, capitalism and religion have one essential feature in common: they both devalue the finite time of our lives. Grasping the full meaning of this claim is the key to unlocking the profound moral and political inspiration of this far-reaching book, which moves across its 400 pages from a defence of “secular faith” as an alternative to religious faith, to a defence of “democratic socialism” as the necessary form of economic organisation in which the value of our finite lives can be respected. Rather than condemning either religion or capitalism on the abstract grounds of moral utopianism – or the abstract rationalism of the ‘new atheism’ – Hägglund carries out what he calls an immanent critique of both, working from an analysis of what they themselves claim to value, so as to show that they require upholding contradictory beliefs and are incapable of providing us with the things we profess to care about.

The religious devaluing of our finite lives demands a deeper critique than the one made by traditional atheism. As we have just seen with Weber, such atheism considers the absence of God as something realistic which we must have the “courage” to accept (17), but remains a devastating loss, damaging our sense of ourselves and the meaning of our lives. Already in his 2008 book, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Hägglund proposed an alternative philosophical understanding of the premises of atheism. While traditional atheism has “limited itself to denying the existence of God and immortality,” thus conceiving of mortality as “a lack of being that we desire to transcend,” what Hägglund calls radical atheism involves showing that such immortality, such fullness of being, is not only inexistent, but undesirable.[2] It is undesirable because there could be no experience of life, or care for anything at all, for an immortal being. To want to keep on living is to want to remain in the mortal condition of someone who cares about what they do with their time, not to be relieved of this condition in immortality.

As Hägglund remarks by way of Derrida, it is not that “God is dead,” but rather, “God is death”: the idea of a being that lives without the ineradicable danger of its own destruction undermines itself from within, since such a life would have no reason to desire, strive, or care for anything, and would thus be indistinguishable from death.[3] The desire to “live on” after one’s death is inconceivable as a desire to escape mortal finitude, since nothing that could ever belong to life could ever be experienced by a non-temporal, non-mortal being. For example, as Hägglund explores in the first chapter of This Life, the lover who mourns their dead beloved and dreams of being together with them again after death is dreaming not of immortality, but of a prolongation of mortal existence. Love comes into being, and is sustained, insofar as I care about my life, what I do with it, and who I spend it with – a care that would be meaningless if life were without end. The desire I express in wanting to be reunited with my beloved is not a desire for eternity, but a desire to prolong our finite time together, to keep this fragile thing, our love, together for a while longer, in the mortal condition that is the only one which could ever give it any sense or any life.

This Life expands upon the idea of radical atheism by developing an alternative foundation for ethics on the basis of our recognition of the fragility of mortal survival. Hägglund calls this “secular faith,” a practice of keeping faith with the finite and fragile things we value as ends in themselves, rather than seeing finitude as something which limits them. Once we recognise that immortality is a non-category — because God, or any immortal force however defined, doesn’t just not exist, but is a concept in complete contradiction with that of existence — we can start to recognise what we are truly doing when we engage in ethical reflection and action. Ethics is in fact always about striving to preserve the things we value within the mortal realm of finitude, and implicitly recognises that these things are fragile and that their survival is not guaranteed. For this reason, ethics as such contains an implicit critique of religion, and secular faith would make this critique explicit.

Religious faith fails to do justice to ethics by devaluing mortal life, positing immortality as the realm wherein everything lost will be redeemed, and purporting to save us from the fragility and uncertainty of mortal commitments. In doing so, it makes ethics in principle impossible, by undermining any reason to care about the things and people of this world as ends in themselves. As Hägglund argues, the deepest level of religion’s undermining of the true basis for ethical life is its effort to transcend the temporal basis of existence, instead of recognising that existence, and ethics, are incoherent without such a temporal condition. For it is only by being subject to time that I can care about pursuing things; only by being subject to mortality that I am free to choose what I value and what I am prepared to give up my time for and even risk my life for; only by being subject to a fragility without guarantees of salvation that I can care about anything or make a commitment. Hägglund’s approach to ethics in terms of a secular faith which recognises the absolute absence of guarantees calls to mind, amongst others, the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who writes of the experience of commitment that “History makes irresolute opponents possible because it is itself ambiguous.”[4]

Secular faith recognises that, in trying to act ethically, what we are doing is keeping the values we believe in alive, for they have no existence except that which is given to them by finite individuals. Thus, secular faith not only restores the value of our own ethical activity by making it an end in itself rather than a means to the end of serving God; it also restores the extreme importance and fragility of this activity. If I do not act to keep the things I believe in alive, they may cease to exist forever. As Hägglund remarks, this puts the lie to the famous declaration from Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, that if God does not exist, everything is permitted. In fact, “the truth is the other way around” (169): if God exists, everything is permitted, because everything will ultimately be redeemed and the good will never be lost. The non-existence of God means that nothing but our own efforts will stop the things we believe in from disappearing from the world, forever (and even our efforts will never provide any permanent guarantee), and thus it demands of us that we only choose actions we consider justifiable. The absence of God is thus the foundation for ethical responsibility.

Atheism is now a banal enough perspective that it may be easy to miss the significance of Hägglund’s argument. What is at stake in the dismantling of the idea of immortality, not just as empirically unjustifiable but as logically contradictory, is more than the sober recognition that I will cease utterly to be when I die. Rather, both radical atheism and secular faith require us to recognise that everything is fragile and at ineradicable risk of extinction, insofar as it must exist in time in order to exist at all. What the idea of secular faith demands is that we recognise that, since to exist is to exist temporally, it is also to exist in a state of fragility and in constant relation to disappearance. All concepts of the eternal and the permanent, even seemingly non-religious ones, therefore have to be dispensed with.

It is possible, after all, to accept one’s own mortality without this changing the fundamentals of how one thinks about the meaning of one’s life: I can believe, for example, in the necessity of progress which will go on beyond my death, making it an iron rule equivalent to that of God. Or I may believe in the opposite, in the inevitability of destruction, in nature taking its revenge on all human projects. Hägglund’s point is that even this attitude has not decisively broken with religious faith, since it continues to deny the irreducible importance of our finite existence by appealing to something necessary, immutable, and beyond control. For much the same reason, Hägglund clearly distinguishes his own position from that of the most famous of anti-religious thinkers, Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche seeks to resolve the problem posed by mortal finitude and the fragility of life by means of “amor fati,” a love of fate or embrace of necessity, where one would accept one’s incapacity to control what happens and embrace the inevitability of death. As Hägglund points out, paradoxically, Nietzsche’s amor fati is a way of protecting oneself against suffering, because this love of fate is for Nietzsche a form of “strength” which saves one from experiencing suffering as suffering, loss as loss. “Fate” becomes another concept of the eternal, and embracing death becomes another way of denying the value of finite life, just as religion does. Secular faith, by contrast, demands that we “remain vulnerable to a pain that no strength can finally master” (49). To live according to the insight of radical atheism, that immortality is undesirable and at odds with any and every conception of life, requires taking the fragility of ourselves and of everything that we value seriously, by doing our best to preserve and extend the things we value into the finite future. It means refusing anything that dampens our experience of the fragile character of temporally bound existence, including the abandonment of freedom and risk implied by the “strength” of amor fati.

Hägglund’s distinction between ethical life as a care for our finite time and a religious thought which denies its value emerges most strongly through his analysis of Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, where the Danish philosopher affirms the faith shown by Abraham in accepting to sacrifice his son, Isaac, at God’s command. The story of Isaac is the extreme consequence of the contradiction between religious faith and responsibility to finite life. God’s command that Abraham kill his son demonstrates that the perspective of immortality “has nothing to teach you about moral responsibility,” for an immortal being would be incapable of understanding any moral question (170). To be bound to morality is to be bound to the knowledge that time, and thus our actions, are irreversible, that the risk is always there that everything may be lost, and that the lives we care for are precious because they are irreplaceable. Abraham could not love Isaac without the knowledge of Isaac’s absolute singularity and the preciousness of his unique life. In accepting God’s command, in pledging faith to one whom he believes, against all evidence and all care, must be right, Abraham renounces the entire matrix in which moral decisions can be made or conceived.

While extreme, the story of Isaac brings out a logic at work in all religious faith and all ideas of eternity: they negate the value of a life that is precious because it is finite. It is beside the point to criticise this argument by indicating, as does James G. Chappel in a review of This Life in Boston Review, that many people experience their religious faith as an enhancement of their commitment to the world we live in. Hägglund’s point is that as soon as we conceive of an eternal force such as God as a presence in our lives who helps us care for finite things as ends in themselves, as soon as we speak of God’s virtue as one which allows us to do good in this world, we are implicitly acceding to secular faith, and the idea of God or eternity does not have anything to offer our moral vision. Hägglund’s aim is to show that the best of who we are and what we do never requires the idea of eternal life, salvation, or bliss, for when we act ethically towards others as ends in themselves – rather than because we believe it will please God, or that it will help us become worthy of Him – we act according to an implicit recognition that finite life matters absolutely, because the time in which it takes place is irreversible and untranscendable, and cannot be held in any permanence even in the mind of God, since this permanence would be sheer annihilation and death.

The idea of the eternal is inimical to every form of care, responsibility, and moral action, inimical to the very conditions in which these things are even comprehensible. For this reason it is misplaced to criticise Hägglund’s approach to religion as purely pertaining to Western monotheism, as Chappel also does. Hägglund’s engagement with the idea of nirvana via the Buddhist theologian Steven Collins makes additionally clear that what is at stake is not a particular way of defining the eternal, but the idea that finite life is a lack which the notion of eternity can allow us to cope with, which is equally alive in a religion without a God such as Buddhism. If a genuine counter-argument were to be made to Hägglund’s account of religious faith, it would have to respond to this general definition of the eternal and its making of finite, embodied life into a means rather than an end in itself; and it would have to respond to Hägglund’s argument that religious believers themselves misrecognise the value of their own ethical behaviour when they appeal to a transcendent force as its inspiration and justification.

It is true that Hägglund’s perspective is philosophical rather than sociological, and in a world in which persecution on religious grounds continues apace (including explicitly ‘atheistic’ oppression of religious groups, such as the oppression of the Uyghur in China), it would be immensely irresponsible to use his argument to condemn religious believers themselves, or to flatten the cultural and historical distinctions that inform the life of particular religious communities. But to do so would be to misunderstand the nature of his argument, which aims at an immanent critique showing that a secular perspective can allow us to consciously own our own care, our own ethical commitments, and calls upon religious believers to reflect on whether their faith truly allows them to affirm these commitments. When religious believers see God as virtuous because He enables them to do good in this world, they are taking this world as an end in itself and are therefore acting on secular rather than religious faith – just as, if you say that God would never command the killing of Isaac, “you profess faith in a standard of value independent of God, since you believe that it is wrong to sacrifice Isaac regardless of what God commands” (170).

II.

Hägglund’s perspective is thus diametrically opposed to that of Weber which I sketched above. For Weber, the decline of religious faith in modernity is a tragic loss of what made a meaningful life possible. What Hägglund argues by contrast is that the overcoming of religion does not leave us with a lack, but with a tremendous gain: through it, we have gained the capacity to find meaning in our lives ourselves, through the very same finite condition that threatens us with the potential loss of all meaning. Secular faith makes it possible for us to fully recognise what religion has distanced us from, namely, “the value of our finite time.”

For Weber, as Hägglund points out in his Introduction, it is precisely this experience of temporal finitude that sunders all meaning. In his lecture “Science as a Vocation,” Weber particularly emphasises that death ceases to be “a meaningful phenomenon” in modernity, because modernity’s commitment to progress means that we can no longer die “fulfilled by life,” as could the subjects of pre-modern societies who saw themselves as part of an “organic cycle” (15). Instead, once we affirm the secular project of progress, death can only be experienced as a meaningless interruption that cuts us off from access to everything we value, and whose finality renders a life devoted to this secular progress meaningless, since death will interrupt it once and for all and prevent us from ever experiencing the “end” of progress. Secular progress entails the acceptance that time is a mundane, unidirectional phenomenon in which every present passes away. It refuses the idea of organic cycles of life, instead judging each life on the basis of its contribution to something that ceaselessly outstrips the individual and is fundamentally indifferent to any individual’s intrinsic qualities.

The critique of the notion of historical progress has a strong lineage on the left. It is easy to see why: progress is a central feature of the Enlightenment conception of a gradual emancipation from irrationality, and has often been put in the service of an ideology of ceaseless development, fitting all too easily with the capitalist (and Stalinist) doctrine of perpetual growth. As Walter Benjamin pointed out in his theses “On The Concept of History,” the acceptance of such a notion of progress by social democratic parties involved a drastic depoliticisation of the workers’ movement, and an acceptance of the basic ideological features of capitalism within the oppositional movement itself.

But everything depends here on how we conceive of this progress. Progress as a necessary development implies that it will go on independently of our interference, just as Hägglund has shown that for religious faith, nothing we do impacts the object of our faith in itself. If, instead, we identify progress as a project of secular faith, we are not defending a necessary movement whose goals are pre-defined and transcendent, but our own commitment to the mortal survival and improvement of the things we believe in, to a progress towards our own chosen ends whose realisation depends on us, and which can never be guaranteed. This likewise allows us to see that the evanescence of the present is not a loss that makes fidelity to the past or to the suffering of the downtrodden impossible. It simply demands that we take seriously the weight of our own effort to keep faith with a past that is gone, aware that in keeping it alive we are also changing it, fitting it to our own context, since we are keeping it alive for us. This is not a tragedy, but a condition of relating to anything at all.

Perhaps the greatest challenge Hägglund sets himself is to rescue Marxism for what he identifies as the secular project of temporal finitude and the erasure of the eternal. This same text of Benjamin’s might be seen as a canonical expression of the view within Marxism that Hägglund’s project opposes, a view according to which Marxism needs a non-secular (what Benjamin would call theological) conception of time in order to sustain itself. Benjamin proposes here that the idea of progress entails a conception of “homogenous, empty time” which must be “filled” with a “mass of data.” He opposes to this the “now-time” or “messianic time” he associates with revolutions, an experience of time not as an empty container that is “filled” with various contents, but as an absolute present or “standstill,” qualitatively distinct from the linearity of homogenous, empty time. Benjamin argues that such a conception of time as a heterogenous field punctuated by qualitatively different moments can allow us to repoliticise the past, as the fullness of these moments or “monads” can be reawakened in the present.[5]

Concepts like “messianic time” counter capitalism’s quantifying logic with appeals to something irreducibly qualitative. But as Hägglund argues, we can affirm qualities – the things that we value – only by freely choosing them, against the backdrop of the ceaseless falling away of the present, which is what makes choosing possible in the first place, since complete self-presence would cancel out any need to choose. In other words, a genuinely qualitative experience of time does not refuse, but accepts and affirms that time entails succession without consummation, without the salvation of eternity or a fully present “now”. The “emptiness” and non-consummation of time, the fact that it makes impossible any total self-presence, any final unity of the self or of the world, because we are always falling away from and redefining ourselves, is the most basic condition of possibility for freedom. The dull feeling that sometimes hits us when we are confronted with the emptiness of a time that we no longer know how to fill with meaningful activity is a perennial risk of living a free life, the risk that we will commit ourselves to something that will fail and leave us unfulfilled, something that we will cease to find meaningful. We have to understand this risk and this challenge when we decide what to commit ourselves to, rather than imagining that this temporal condition could ever be transcended, or that we would want it to be. It is because time offers no salvation that it matters what values we choose, what qualities we affirm as our own. On a societal level, it is the way that different forms of economic organisation do, or do not, make it possible for individuals to experience themselves as free beings possessed of time of their own, which should be at the core of how we evaluate these economic systems ethically.

III.

For Hägglund, the question of capitalism’s achievements, its limitations, and the possibility of founding a post-capitalist society on the basis of an alternative conception of value, hinge directly on the question of free time. Capitalism’s lasting achievement is that it has made the experience of what it is to have free time possible on a general scale. Wage labour establishes the principle that a certain amount of my time is given over to an employer to do what they ask of me, while the rest of my time is, formally speaking, my own, to do what I like with. I as an individual am not fundamentally defined by my assigned social role, in the way that a serf or a slave is, and this allows for the experience of free time. Such an experience of time is an essential condition for individuals to be able to understand themselves as free, to be able to call into question their behaviours and their norms, and to change these norms and pursue new, self-chosen ideals. Any romantic hearkening back to a time of “enchantment” in which individuals may have experienced time “qualitatively,” in the sense that they felt themselves fully in sync with the temporal rhythms of natural cycles or the collective meaning of social rituals, is fundamentally reactionary, because such concepts of enchantment and quality depend on the unfreedom of individuals to choose these experiences or to reflect upon them. The eradication of such forms of unfreedom is the great historical virtue of capitalism, in which “all that is solid melts into air.”

But capitalism never realises the promise it offers of freeing up time to be used for pursuing self-directed ends. We know this experientially, by the fact that our dependence upon wage labour is not decreasing, that however exponential society’s technological growth, working hours do not decrease; or when they do, they produce the crisis of unemployment rather than the opportunity of increased freedom. Hägglund reconstructs Marx’s analysis of the internal dynamic of capital with admirable clarity, showing that this failure of capitalism to fulfil the promise of free time is not a contingent or historically particular limitation, but a necessary feature of it as an economic mode of production.

Under capitalism, the measure of value is the socially necessary labour time of the production of commodities. As Hägglund argues, the labour theory of value, as Marx uses it, does not involve claiming that labour is a metaphysical or transhistorical essence that creates a mystical thing called value, as if this process were a natural phenomenon outside the domain of our control. The labour theory of value explains how we value things under capitalism; but it is entirely possible that we could value things in a different way, and the possibility of democratic socialism depends above all on such a “revaluation of value”. Just as his immanent critique of religion showed that the things we affirm in religious faith can only ever be truly valued and cared for by means of secular faith, Hägglund will likewise show in his immanent critique of capitalism that capital, even while being unable to value our finite time, implicitly recognises it as what we value most fundamentally whenever we participate in economic life. This is what is at stake in the difference between the capitalist measure of value as “socially necessary labour time,” and the measure of value Hägglund argues can be the basis for democratic socialism, which he calls “socially available free time.”

Capitalism cannot value our free time, because it can only recognise human labour as a source of value, and so is compelled to exploit it and ceaselessly reduce our free time. The clarity of Hägglund’s approach allows him to provide definitive critiques of the economic theories which have claimed to overcome Marx, most notably the marginalist theory of neoclassical economics, as well as the contemporary work of Thomas Piketty. What all such theories have in common is a lack of concern for production, reducing the sphere of economy to the distribution of goods, while seeing production as something natural that cannot be questioned or changed. While theories of supply and demand like that of neoclassicism may explain the spatial dynamic of how goods circulate within an economy, they can say nothing of the temporal dynamic of how the economy grows, how at the end of the process of production and circulation there is more wealth in the whole system than there was before, enabling the increased investment of capital.

This is where the labour theory of value, provided that it is understood as a description of the internal dynamic of the capitalist process of valorisation rather than as a metaphysical and transhistorical vital force, remains valid and unsurpassed. Human labour is not innately more valuable than machine production, for example. It is simply that because under capitalism the only way to sustain the economy and keep society functioning is to increase the profit of capitalists – since these are the only people who can employ workers and thereby spread wealth under this system – the measure of value has to be a measure of growth, and this growth has to come at a cost. There is one factor in the capitalist process of production and circulation that is an absolute cost: the lifetime of those living beings who do productive work.

An economic system organised around profit and growth – not because of the individual selfishness of capitalists, but because this is the only way capitalism can sustain itself as an economic form, and the only way human society can sustain itself as long as it accepts capitalism – can only ever measure value in terms of cost, and for this reason the sustaining of capitalism will always and necessarily involve the eating up of the lifetime of workers, not for a purpose that is chosen by us as a society, but for the undemocratic purposes of an economy that rules over society itself. This is why capitalism is organised around human labour as an absolute source of value, and why no matter how much growth it produces, it will never be able to stop demanding more labour time and devouring the time of our lives. By starting from the point of view of our finite time as our most precious resource, Hägglund has reconstructed Marx’s critique of political economy with the utmost clarity, shearing it of the metaphysical trappings of so many readings.

IV.

Yet even as capitalism measures value only in terms of the cost, the loss of our finite time through socially necessary labour time, the very fact that it counts this time as a cost recognises implicitly that this finite time is what we truly value. Socially necessary labour wouldn’t be valuable if it were not defined in opposition to something positive, beyond necessity, namely the time that belongs to us to use in the “realm of freedom”: time which is valuable as an end in itself rather than as a means to the end of gaining something else. Capitalism “treats the negative measure of value as though it were the positive measure of value and thereby treats the means of economic life as though they were the end of economic life” (257). The crucial question for Hägglund’s vision of democratic socialism is, can we turn this positive value – the value of our finite time as living beings – into the economic measure of value? And if so, what would this look like?

The immanent critique of capitalism in Marx, rearticulated through Hägglund’s understanding of the finitude of lived time as the measure of all value, leads to an alternative conception of value based in exactly that which capitalism sees only as a cost: ‘socially available free time’. Democratic socialism is the name Hägglund gives to an economic form that would make socially available free time its measure of value, fulfilling the promise that capitalism presents by implicitly grasping that the time of finite life is the measure of all value, while failing to realise it. “We are already committed to the value of free time,” Hägglund writes; what we need is to realise this commitment as a society, in the way that we socially recognise what is valuable. Socially available free time is free because in it we are able to pursue ends which we choose ourselves; it is nonetheless socially available, since it is our social bonds that make this time available to us and give it meaning.

If I didn’t live in society and didn’t require recognition from others for fulfilment, free time would have no intrinsic value for me; I might use it to engage in play or rest, but I could not grasp it as my own time, to devote to commitments that I choose for myself. Such a limited experience of freedom is proper to what Hägglund calls the domain of “natural freedom” shared by all living beings, to the extent that they have a surplus of time beyond that which they have to devote to staying alive, time which can be used to freely engage in purposive activities in which they respond actively to their environment, making decisions based on their experience. However, while beings that live solely within the realm of natural freedom can question the means by which they pursue their aims (for example, by choosing to hunt in one area rather than another, on the basis of experience of their environment), they cannot question and redefine these aims themselves.

Socially available free time, by contrast, is premised on a positive conception of freedom, which Hägglund articulates as the “spiritual freedom” that human beings show themselves to be capable of. Spiritual freedom involves the capacity to bring one’s own received norms into question and to choose to pursue others of one’s own choosing. As a form of “practical self-relation” in which we are capable not just of changing our behaviour to reach our goal, but of changing what counts for us as a goal at all, spiritual freedom is only presently observable in human beings, but it does not refer to an essence. Just as with the early Marx’s notion of species being, the only “nature” implied by spiritual freedom is that “there is no natural way for us to be and no species requirements that can exhaustively determine the principles in light of which we act” (177). This definition of spiritual freedom is not necessarily limited to human beings, since it is defined as a practical form of self-relation and not as a biological or anthropological essence. If another animal, or a form of life created technologically, were to exhibit such practical self-relation, they would be included in the domain of spiritually free beings.

Spiritual freedom is directly tied to temporal finitude and the fragility of embodied life, as these are necessary conditions for our capacity to reflect on our norms and choose new ones. Human beings are spiritually free because we possess not only a surplus of time beyond that required for physical survival, but also the ability to choose what ends we will devote our finite time to pursuing. The complexity of an economy is always a reflection of spiritual freedom, as the most basic defining condition of an economy is the fact that we have a finite time of life and an interest in using that time for the pursuit of self-directed ends. Democratic socialism, then, as well as realising the implicit promise of capitalism to value our free time, will realise that which is implicit in economic life as such, namely the fact that we possess the capacity to choose what we care about and to live according to this end. The democratic part is essential because spiritual freedom can be realised only through making production subject to democratic decision, through collective ownership which organises production around the things that society collectively decides are needed, rather than what a capitalist can make profitable. Nobody can realise their capacity to choose their own ends, to own their own life in its finitude, if their choices about what to do and who to be are limited to the range of occupations that can provide profit to a capitalist. Under capitalism, even if I get to pursue a career I care about, the degree of my freedom is sustained only by the overall wealth in society, which can only be produced through exploitative wage labour in which people have to work for the purpose of capitalist profits.

Spiritual freedom makes a concrete and essential task of the popular assertion that no one is free until all of us are free, by showing that my freedom quite literally depends on the freedom of other people to recognise it. If I create an artwork and show it to you, this work cannot be recognised as the creative act of a spiritually free individual unless the viewer is free to decide for themselves whether they find it a good or interesting work. If I am your employer, and you have reason to believe that expressing a low opinion of my artwork will lead me to fire you, then I myself have lost the socially recognised freedom to be valued for who I am, rather than for the power I can wield to limit your freedom: “For any one of us to be recognized as free, others must have their own free time to confirm or challenge our self-conception” (322).

This is what is at stake in making socially available free time our measure of value: in recognising the ownership of our finite time as a democratic right, we in turn recognise this free time as something that society makes possible, and individuals are able to see their own ends, their own cares, present in the objective form of social institutions. Now that production is no longer organised on the basis of profit, social institutions see their purpose as both to free up time and to provide settings for its meaningful use through democratically chosen ends that individuals can relate to in their freely chosen ways. Once socially available free time is recognised as a social value rather than merely an individual care which we can pursue during the time that an employer doesn’t demand that we give up to them, freedom can be conceived of not only negatively but positively. “To lead a free life it is not sufficient that we are exempt from direct coercion and allowed to make choices. To lead a free life we must be able to recognize ourselves in what we do, to see our practical activities as expressions of our own commitments” (299).

The transition from socially necessary labour time to socially available free time as our measure of value is thus a new way of articulating the idea of alienation, and its overcoming. No concept in Marxism is more debated than this one, and one of the great virtues of This Life is that it helps reframe our understanding of it, by defending the need for a critique of alienation while removing it from the metaphysical and even religious framing in which both Marxists and anti-Marxists have often placed it. A certain Marxist tradition has turned human labour into a metaphysical essence, declaring that capitalism has alienated this essence by removing labourers’ control and ownership of their products, turning our creative labour into abstract, homogenous work carried out for the end of profit. This analysis, which claims (falsely, as Hägglund demonstrates) an allegiance to the young Marx’s 1844 “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,” then affirms that communism or socialism will reclaim that lost essence and allow us to relate immediately to our own innate creative capacities, our own needs and desires. On the other hand, many Marxists have been understandably skeptical about the metaphysical essentialism involved in such an analysis, and jetissoned the idea of alienation altogether. Most famously, Louis Althusser proposed that a definitive “epistemological break” took place between the early, “humanist” Marx concerned with alienation, and the mature Marx who embarked on a radically new, “scientific” project of the critique of capital. The great limitation of this position, however, was and remains its incapacity to provide any moral vision of why socialism would be a good thing. The allergic response to the theory of alienation resulted in a theory that could be highly astute in its approach to political strategy, but almost entirely empty of the emancipatory vision that could make such politics meaningful to large numbers of people, or make it even in principle democratic.

Hägglund of course refuses the traditional Marxist view of labour as a creative human essence that has to be returned to us so that we can be our true selves again, perhaps in the way that people were during the time of “primitive communism”. The concept of spiritual freedom shows that we have no true self except that which we make through a continual process of revaluing our own values, deciding for ourselves what we are through the way we live, against the backdrop of our finite limits. Likewise, the notions of radical atheism and secular faith demonstrate that the idea of a living being bearing a permanent essence is logically incoherent, for to exist and to relate to oneself and others is necessarily to be exposed to fragility and change by virtue of existing in time. But he nonetheless affirms that capitalism is an alienating form of economic life, and that democratic socialism will overcome this alienation. Capitalism is not alienating because of any particular content to what it valorises, and the particular needs or desires we experience within capitalism are not simply ‘false,’ since – as Marx already shows with the notion of species being – our needs and desires are historical through and through. Rather, capitalism is alienating because it is formally incapable of valorising our ends – whatever their specific content – as ends in themselves, but instead valorises the means of sustaining life – profit – as though it were an end in itself, while our lives appear as the means to the end of creating profit. This means that under capitalism, “we are all in practice committed to a purpose in which we cannot recognize ourselves, which inevitably leads to alienated forms of social life” (300). We do not need to make any normative claims in advance about which particular practices of contemporary society are “human” and which ones are not – an absurd and dogmatic approach that would fix post-capitalist society in our own image – in order to recognise that our life is alienated under capitalism, because by definition it does not recognise this life as valuable.

By contrast, the unalienated labour of democratic socialism is to be carried out on the basis of aneignen, Marx’s term which Hägglund translates as “making something your own.” Such a society makes it possible “to make your life your own by putting yourself at stake in what you do” (319). This is why true democracy is only possible once production is organised democratically. Otherwise, our democratic participation in public life cannot ever open up the question of what ends we as a society wish to pursue, and we cannot fully live according to our spiritual freedom. This radically new form of democracy will not get rid of socially necessary work, since our finite and embodied life will always require some amount of effort on our part to maintain it. But the work we carry out under democratic socialism will be free, since it will be valued as an end in itself, rather than as a mere means to the accumulation of profit. Even when I participate in forms of socially necessary labour that I don’t personally find fulfilling, I understand this work as contributing to the increase of socially available free time. What matters is that in such a society, “we can make sense of why we are doing what we are doing,” in a way that capitalism constitutively refuses us (308). By grasping free labour in terms of our freedom to commit to the labour we perform on the basis of who we take ourselves to be, rather than the compulsion to carry out labour as a means to the end of profit, Hägglund restores the vital importance of Marx’s critique of alienation, away from the static essentialism and normative dogmatism that both supporters and critics of this concept have ascribed to it.

Capitalism and religion, then, both produce alienated forms of life, where we are compelled to treat our own lives as a means rather than as an end in themselves. Yet they both bear the seeds of their own overcoming, if we pay attention to what those subject to religious values or capitalist imperatives actually say and do. Nothing we could ever value could ever matter to an eternal being, and what we truly desire in keeping faith is not eternity but mortal survival through the extension of our finite time. Likewise, capitalism’s own internal dynamic shows that profit is not something that living beings value in itself, but attains the form of value by virtue of how it exploits the cost that we put into it, which is the cost of our finite time that is sacrificed to wage labour. It is this finite time and our freedom to use it that is at the root of all value, and both secular faith and democratic socialism provide the normative framework for living in a way which recognises explicitly this value that hitherto existing economic and spiritual forms have only implicitly grasped.

V.

Hägglund makes clear that his concern in This Life is not to offer a political program for how we will transition from capitalism to democratic socialism, but rather to outline its possibility and its desirability, by showing how the values of democratic socialism are trapped in inverted form in the dynamic of capital itself. Nonetheless, we can consider what some political implications of his analysis may be, and where it may be worth pushing his perspective in the direction of specifically political approaches to the transition beyond capitalism. This also involves considering his perspective’s relation to those thinkers within the history of Marxism who have attempted to theorise this transition.

Specifically, his critique of many forms of “traditional Marxism” bears a certain relation to the thought of Moishe Postone, whom Hägglund references with some admiration, but also criticises significantly. What Hägglund and Postone share is that, in identifying human labour-power as the source of value within capitalism only, rather than as the transhistorical source of all value, they both sharply criticise the idea of ‘emancipated’ proletarian labour as the source of value within a post-capitalist society, often entailed in ideas of socialist society as a “workers’ state”. In Hägglund’s case this allows for an extremely clear-sighted critique of all twentieth century forms of actually existing socialism as the antithesis of Marx’s vision of the overcoming of capitalism, writing that, “Under Stalinism, the state effectively becomes one giant capitalist that wields its power over the citizens by forcing them to do proletarian labor in order to survive” (273). This is because the ceaseless compulsion to increase proletarian labour and its exploitation is intrinsic to a mode of production which sees human labour-power as the source of value, and no redistribution of this wealth via a universal state which has overtaken the role of private capital will change this basic condition. For Postone, the conclusion to draw from the fact that the valorisation of proletarian labour is not the source of emancipation from capitalism, but of our subjection to it, is that “the working class is integral to capitalism rather than the embodiment of its negation,” and that struggles for proletarian emancipation are not even in principle a tool for capitalism’s overcoming.[6]

It seems unlikely that Hägglund would agree with this final claim. In his critique of Postone, Hägglund recognises that Postone’s perspective, which sees the dead labour of technology as “the key to emancipation,” is insufficient, because it does not grasp that the transition to socialism “requires a transformation of our normative understanding” of what we as a society produce things for (276). In Postone’s account, “historical agents do not have the power to change anything,” whereas Hägglund emphasises that it is up to us to transform our concrete understanding of our own ends if we are to overcome the capitalist valorisation of labour-power: no level of accumulation of technological dead labour will do it for us, since dead labour has no normative ends in itself.

Hägglund nonetheless agrees with Postone that the aim of a post-capitalist society “is not to glorify proletarian labor but to overcome it” (276), and his arguments to this effect are convincing, for reasons already outlined. This does however provoke the question of who specifically is to see their own interest in carrying out the overthrow of capitalism and the transition to socially available free time as the measure of value. As Hägglund shows only too clearly, within capitalism the proletariat is as dependent on the system of wage exploitation as employers are, since avoiding economic collapse requires that the purchasing power of the overall population is sufficient to pay for the commodities sold on the market, so as to generate capital for further investment in the form of the employment of labour-power. Redistributive mechanisms such as a Universal Basic Income do nothing to counteract this dependency, because “only wage labor in the service of profit can generate the wealth that is distributed in the form of a UBI” (287). For this reason, “it does not make sense to argue that the problem is capitalism and at the same time argue that the solution is the redistribution of capital wealth” (383). Under such a system, time not spent producing profit for a capitalist is still considered wasted time, even if the amount of this waste is distributed somewhat more evenly; but the compulsion to economic growth through wage exploitation as the only means of generating wealth under capitalism means that systemic pressures will continue to undermine even this degree of redistribution, which can never be won definitively within a capitalist system.

Thus the objective interest of workers overall within capitalism is to continue working for a wage. To the extent that democratic socialism would get rid of the means of fulfilling this objective interest, it is unclear how the majority of actually existing workers are to see it concretely as the fulfilment of their own freedom. Hägglund does state, in This Life’s moving conclusion on the thought and political practice of Martin Luther King, that the general strike is a vital political tool which, “more than any other form of collective action, … makes explicit the social division of labor that sustains our lives” (378). One cannot imagine Postone making such a statement, and this difference reflects Hägglund’s far greater grasp of politics as the sphere in which the transition to democratic socialism must be fought out. Still, the “making explicit” proposed here as the major import of the general strike seems to imply that this political work is done for a viewer, who will be made to see what the nature of our economic system is, compelling them to act in order to change it. While this viewer may include individual workers themselves, in the way Hägglund articulates it there is not a privileged role for the working class in this process of political change, since the general strike in and of itself doesn’t change things but only makes explicit what is already there, and since within a capitalist framework it appears simply as an effective tool for the improvement of wages and conditions, rather than the overthrow of capitalism and of labour-power as the measure of value.

Hägglund certainly does not reduce workers to the status of objects, and grants an important place to their struggles. But he does not here articulate the general strike in terms of the power of those who strike, the power to shut down capitalist self-reproduction which results from their power to make this process function in the first place, and which they themselves attain greater consciousness of through striking. If looked at in this light, the working class can be understood as the concrete subject of human emancipation from capitalism: but this requires granting that this class will retain its value-producing role during a transitional period where some form of workers’ self-organisation will take charge of production, since there would otherwise be no compelling social basis for them to transition away from proletarian labour, towards an economic form that would rid them of their specific power as a class – a power that is of course tied to their exploitation. Hägglund does not want to argue this, because it appears to be an example of the ‘traditional Marxism’ criticised by Postone, which turns proletarian labour from the means of our subjection to capital into the means of our emancipation from it, a perspective whose ultimate consequence is seen in the Stalinist regimes, where an oppressive state compelled an intensification of proletarian labour, completely abandoning Marx’s vision of democracy through collective ownership and decision-making about the production process itself. But it is unclear how his agreement with Postone on the question of emancipation from proletarian labour is to accord with his political assertion, in disagreement with Postone, that concrete human subjects living within capitalist societies will bring about the transition to socialism through a transformative practice that they see is in their own interest.

To be clear, I believe that these two propositions can be brought into accord, and that the way to do so is to grant a transitional role to the proletariat as proletariat, meaning that their labour-power will continue to be valorised during such a period, during which the proletariat’s attainment of political power will allow it to direct its own production. Hägglund may disagree with this, but whatever his answer may be, an important question left open by This Life is to articulate which concrete subjects will carry out the transition to socialism, and how their interest in doing so is to be understood. Hägglund should hardly be faulted for not providing such an articulation in This Life, for his book’s universal moral force, showing that capitalist society as a whole is self-contradictory and prevents the social realisation of freedom (which would also be the basis for its individual realisation), does not itself require a more specifically political account of how particular social groups are to recognise the transition to democratic socialism as their own task to be carried out in their own interest. But the perspective opened up by Hägglund ultimately requires a further interrogation of these questions.

A second and related political question emerges with regard to Hägglund’s conception of the state. Hägglund argues, with Hegel and against many of Marx’s statements, that a free society will not eradicate the state, but will be one in which this state will persist while being subordinated to society, made to serve our interests, such that “the laws of the state… are seen as contestable and transformable by us” (232). Hägglund thus defines the state in the most general sense as “some kind of collective self-legislation” (267). Given that who we are only ever makes sense in light of our spiritual freedom as social beings, in which we make our own commitments the object of questioning, rather than subordinating ourselves to them as to an iron law, our freedom cannot entail taking leave of any “collective self-legislation,” as this would be to return to a level of merely negative liberty as the absence of coercion, without any positive institutional context for us to seek recognition of ourselves as social actors. In this regard, some form of state in a post-capitalist and truly democratic society is both possible and necessary, since it is only through the “reinvention” rather than the abolition of the state that such a society can attain “any determinate form” (267).

A question emerges, though: where are the borders of this state to be drawn? Hägglund writes that, “since capitalism is global, the overcoming of capitalism ultimately requires a global alliance of democratic socialist states” (268). Yet we may ask, what would be the political function of such a division between states (even if “allied”), if these states are not each organised around the control of territory for the purpose of the control of profits? If one state possesses the technological means to reduce socially necessary labour time and thereby increase socially available free time in a particular sphere which other states don’t possess, will this not be experienced as an advantage for the citizens of that state? If this technological means is enabled by a particular natural resource within the borders of this state, will its administrators not see reason to protect that resource as their own property, and will other states not see reason to infiltrate it in order to gain access to it, and ultimately to take some form of control over that state’s territory? It is hard to imagine a reason for the existence of a global system of states except as a reflection of competition for territory and resources as inputs for the accumulation of profit.

What of the alternative, of a single, global, democratic socialist state? Insofar as a society in which spiritual freedom is recognised will require “some kind of collective self-legislation” so that we can recognise ourselves in our institutions and democratically enact their evolution, such a form of state seems to make sense. But what remains unclear is how such a state would be administered and how it would be made democratic. Collective ownership of the means of production will not cancel out the existence of institutional forms in which we participate, such as an institution of laws or of justice; and the familiar Marxist response which brushes off these particulars by saying that the community will resolve such questions organically is crude and unacceptable, exemplifying the ‘religious’ version of the theory of alienation and the myth of “primitive communism” as the basis of what we will ‘return’ to. But collective ownership will surely cancel out the need for a distinct social layer of state administrators. Certain individuals may be assigned the role of organising different institutional functions, but these assignments would be democratically shared, and a limited part of any individual’s practical identity, thus not allowing administrators to form into a group whose control of the mechanisms of the state leads them to think of it as their own instrument, and to wield it to their own ends, or to the end of private profit.

The question is whether the idea of the state remains coherent if there is no longer a particular social group, with particular privileges and particular powers, that administers it. Inasmuch as the spiritually free individuals living under global democratic socialism have a democratically shared power over the institutions in which their free projects can be recognised and debated, what need could there be for any overarching social apparatus to organise these democratic institutions? I would suggest that a state in this sense only has a social basis as a mechanism for maintaining the power of a ruling social group, while complementarily increasing the privilege and influence of this state apparatus itself and its functionaries. A democratic socialist society founded on the basis of democratic control of the economy would thus not require a state, and this overcoming of the state is thinkable without lapsing into the fantasies of immediacy and final reconciliation of the community with itself, which Hägglund is rightly opposed to because of their fundamental basis in unfreedom.

This may seem a semantic concern, but I believe it has relevance to the question raised earlier, that of the political process of transition away from capitalism. A way in which this process was articulated in the Marxism of figures such as Lenin was with the idea that a socialist “workers’ state” would intrinsically give way to communism as the “withering away of the state.” This argument may be debated, but its advantage is that it grasps the seizure of the state as the political act of particular social groups who recognise their own power to seize it and their own interest in doing so, and then tries to argue that genuine democracy will emerge (leading the state to wither away) after the exploitative class has been defeated politically through the expropriation of the power that it has held through the state. In other words, it provides a logic for how the specific and limited class interests of groups within capitalist society can transition to a democracy of collective ownership, otherwise known as a “society without classes,” and it does so by positioning the state as an object of political struggle for the power of mutually hostile social groups over each other, and hence as something that will have no function in a society of the kind Hägglund describes as democratic socialist. The danger of this approach to the state as an instrument of potentially impartial, democratic administration, rather than as intrinsically an instrument of rule, is that it can lead to envisioning that society as a whole is to be the subject of the transition to socialism, as though “we” (a word which, in keeping with the compelling and electrifying moral call to arms of This Life, appears often in its pages) as a society would decide to redefine our measure of value, and thereby pass from a capitalist to a democratic socialist state.

To be clear, Hägglund does not harbour any illusions that this transition will not involve painful struggle and hostile reaction, or that capitalists will simply give up their social position through appeals to their spiritual freedom. But his approach does not always show the theoretical tools required to overcome politically the perspective which would see actually existing society as a whole as the subject of transformation. The limitations of his accounts of the state and of the transition to democratic socialism are related, in that both show a limitation in his conception of who, as really existing actors within capitalist society, will see this transition as something they both can carry out and desire to carry out. The ultimate question – which no one has yet been able to answer adequately, but which the history of Marxism has posed and can still help us to think through – is how to square the recognition that a democratic society must be one that is emancipated from human labour as our source of social value, with the equal recognition that the achievement of such a society is impossible without the political activity of the proletariat as proletariat, in forms such as the general strike, whose political efficacy is a result of that group’s social power and their threat to capitalist rule. Responding to this requires developing a theory of transition, a theory which could add to what, already in Hägglund’s work so far, stands as one of the most morally and politically compelling intellectual projects of our time.

Conall Cash is a PhD candidate in French at Cornell University, with a research attachment to the Laboratoire Sophiapol at the University of Paris – Nanterre. He is writing a dissertation about Merleau-Ponty and French Marxism.

[1] Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (New York: Pantheon Books, 2019), p. 329. Subsequent citations given in text.

[2] Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 1.

[3] Hägglund, Radical Atheism, p. 8.

[4] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem (Beacon Press, 1969), p. 78.

[5] Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Concept of History.” Selected Writings Volume IV (Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 389-400.

[6] Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 17.

by Tyler M. Williams

Review of Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou (Durham: Duke UP, 2015)

Catherine Malabou’s pioneering philosophical conceptualization of plasticity has attracted a recent surge of critical attention, yet she rejects any suggestion that plasticity is her own, signature idea.[1] Malabou instead argues that plasticity, unattached to the singular identity of an author, circulates dynamically within the history of philosophy and gains its conceptual shape from the rich heritage that has unwittingly played host to it. Plasticity, Malabou says, is “trapped within the movement of contemporary philosophy itself” (Malabou and Williams 2012: 4). Although the vast majority of Malabou’s work since the publication of her first book, The Future of Hegel, highlights the debt that key philosophical periods and figures owe to plasticity’s power (a quiet tradition that spans from antiquity through poststructuralism and into the current vogue of new materialism), she consistently adds that plasticity also exceeds any strict disciplinary circumscription. Indebted as much to biology as to philosophy, and then onward to psychoanalysis, gender studies, literature, and anthropology, to name a few, plasticity by Malabou’s account always pushes at philosophy’s limit as philosophy’s unassimilated, supple remainder. Equally at home inside and outside philosophy, giving philosophy its shape while simultaneously exposing it to adaptation and change, plasticity challenges the very possibility of a rigid distinction between conventional notions of “inside” and “outside.”

Derived etymologically from the Greek plassein, meaning both “to give” and “to receive” form, plasticity expresses the malleable condition of anything subjected to changes in form. Critics have often misconstrued Malabou’s understanding of plasticity’s transformability by treating it as a nihilistic ceaselessness or “perpetual change” that never stays in one place long enough to stand for anything.[2] This misreading reduces plasticity to an infinite production of the new by synonymizing plasticity and elasticity, two terms Malabou repeatedly distinguishes from each other—particularly in What Should We Do With Our Brain? but also in Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing and Ontology of the Accident, to say nothing of her many essays and interviews. Although elasticity and plasticity both give and receive form, elasticity retains the ability to return to a form prior to its transformation. Elasticity’s polymorphism thus amounts to a state of infinite variability and ceaseless change, but plasticity “cannot return to its initial form after undergoing deformation” (Malabou 2008: 15). Plasticity envelops the capacity for transformation and the rigid solidity of “a certain determination of form” (15).

Almost paradoxically, then, plasticity’s resistance to elasticity comprises its most dynamic aspect. As much as plasticity changes form, it also preserves a shape, marks a point of resistant stability, and concretizes itself while retaining the mobility that threatens the concrete with destruction, which is why Malabou describes plasticity as terroristic in Ontology of the Accident (5). Taken as a whole, Malabou’s work shows that the philosophical tradition operates according to this dialectic. When she writes in Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing that plasticity’s “range of meanings” continues “to evolve with and in language” so much that “the very significance of plasticity itself appears to be plastic,” Malabou suggests that plasticity is doubly responsible for solidifying tradition and for maintaining that tradition’s suppleness (2010: 67). Its “significance” forms and reforms itself into the future like a type of auto-inheritance that shapes and preserves the legacy through the dynamic processes of heredity itself. The “significance” of plasticity therefore cannot be confined to the specific domains of Malabou’s study. Similar to Derrida’s insistence that deconstruction is “at work in the work” (1986: 124), plasticity for Malabou names a general logic that remains irreducible to any particular discourse, which is why she rejects a proprietary claim on the concept.

The practical question of what to “do” with plasticity is thus both urgent and irresolvable. Urgent because, in addition to mobilizing innovations within neurobiology and epigenetics, plasticity’s dialectic of change and resistance constitutes, according to Malabou, the most adequate model for democratic opposition to hegemonic structures of global power. Irresolvable because plasticity is not an abstract transcendental concept, so the “doing” of plasticity will always be a matter of plastic materialities—of the brain (What Should We Do with Our Brain?), of gender (Changing Difference), of the subject (Self and Emotional Life), of trauma (The New Wounded), and so on. Yet, when following Malabou, a major interpretive error is to mistake the forest for the trees, as it were, and to restrict plasticity’s general movement to the specific contexts via which Malabou happens to articulate it. Plasticity is itself plastic and thus constitutes a generalizable “motor scheme,” a “metamorphic structure,” rather than a given technique, tool, or circumscribed topic (2010: 12, 27). As an interdisciplinary project, Malabou’s work demands a disciplinary responsibility to the intractably philosophical “motor” of plasticity’s “structure.”[3]

Highlighting plasticity’s transformational role at the heart of the philosophical tradition, but paying particular attention to the interdisciplinarity Malabou draws from philosophy’s mutability and variability, Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller present Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou, the first book of collected essays to be devoted entirely to Malabou’s growing oeuvre.[4] The volume includes three previously unpublished or thoroughly revised essays by Malabou herself, a brief interview conducted with her by Bhandar and Goldberg-Hiller, and nine critical essays that address Malabou’s work from a variety of disciplines including psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies, aesthetics, epigenetics, Marxism, biopolitics, critical race theory, entomology, and war studies.

Plastic Materialities commendably demonstrates the vast applicability of Malabou’s thought. Unsurprisingly, the distinction between the volume’s stronger and weaker essays falls along lines of interdisciplinary responsibility. Chapters that remain attentive to the disciplined stakes of Malabou’s interdisciplinarity are most at home in a book of this sort, since they avoid the aforementioned trap of essentializing the scientific contexts in which Malabou articulates plasticity’s general “scheme.” Weaker chapters commit this essentialist error by ignoring the philosophical discipline of Malabou’s project, treating it instead as an easily transplantable index of interdisciplinary terms.[5] Rather than catalogue these merits and shortcomings in each chapter, what follows is a general account of how this distinction relates this volume to Malabou’s project as a whole.

As the editors remark in their introduction, Plastic Materialities wants to identify how plasticity shapes a political itinerary (15). The volume thus addresses directly a debate that has trailed Malabou at least since the arrival of What Should We Do with Our Brain? in English translation in 2008: whether her account of plasticity necessarily entails the inherent political resistance she identifies with it. Much of Malabou’s short book argues for this necessity by calling for a shift in our “neuronal consciousness,” a shift that amounts to recognizing the brain as plastically adaptable to environmental input rather than conventionally programmatic and mechanical. She argues that a major consequence of this shift from neural preformationism to adaptability includes the abandonment of corporate, imperial, social, economic, and biopolitical structures of sovereignty predicated on neuronal ideologies of a rigidly centralized brain. Moreover, if many structures of power today already appear to work plastically, then, like its biological counterpart, this plasticity logically includes within it a foundational and unassailable resistance. Precisely what this resistance entails remains mostly unclear in Malabou’s work. The task of this volume therefore seeks to clarify the stakes of this resistance. In light of global neoliberalism’s wholesale reliance on corporate-capitalist models of flexibility and elasticity, for example, the editors, following Malabou both to the letter and toward new horizons, target the implications of plasticity’s “use” to “disrupt these structures” (2).

At least two major considerations follow from the project Plastic Materialities sets for itself. The first, which Alberto Toscano most directly articulates in his chapter, concerns this fundamental question about the adequacy of plasticity with politics. Toscano argues that Malabou’s use of plasticity to “rethink the dialectical character of contemporary social forms,” particularly the “neoliberal formatting of change under the imperatives of flexibility, adaptability, and employability,” remains too philosophical (91, 97). He claims that Malabou’s philosophical recourse to neurobiology preserves the traditional image of philosophy as a discipline responsible for “providing a conceptual synthesis for other disciplines and practices” (93). As a result, this traditionalism only enables Malabou to link neuroplasticity and political resistance analogically: the brain is like the social, biological resistance to neural order is like political resistance to hegemony, plastic matter works like philosophical critique, and so on. Yet, Toscano concludes, “To think the social is like the brain is no more enlightening today than to think that the economy was like a large organism in the nineteenth century or like a hydraulic machine in the twentieth” (105). Unlike some essays in Plastic Materialities that uncritically accept and then reapply Malabou’s politics elsewhere (those by Carotenuto, Shapiro, Grove, Bhandar and Goldberg-Hiller all trend in this direction), Toscano’s essay remains skeptical of whether Malabou’s politicization of plasticity is sufficiently—or even necessarily—political.

The second consideration concerns the volume’s isolation of “destructive plasticity” as a privileged concept. According to Malabou, “destructive plasticity” coincides with the productive work of “positive” plasticity. For example, in a synthesis of production and destruction, the brain abandons unused synaptic connections to build ones that are more efficacious. The priority Plastic Materialities places on “destructive plasticity” removes it from the broader context of Malabou’s work, thereby reducing it to a simple synonym for “resistance” and thus to some sort of tool or “resource” that can be “used” in the process of realizing some sort of intentional outcome (2, 20). However, as she makes clear in her own contributions to this volume, Malabou expressly rejects this teleology. Characterizing “destructive plasticity” as an apparatus that can be applied to whatever disciplinary field skews the dialectical symmetry of Malabou’s work and overlooks the contexts in metaphysics and ontology in which Malabou first formulates this concept. Moreover, insofar as Malabou’s later work radicalizes destructive plasticity beyond the productive/destructive binary, the very possibility of destructive negativity remains for her an ongoing question.

In the paragraph that opens the final chapter to Ontology of the Accident, her “essay on destructive plasticity,” Malabou is still asking if “destructive plasticity is possible” (2012c: 73). Although the untitled preface to this short book clearly asserts that, yes, destructive plasticity is indeed possible and this possibility is evident biologically, the type of destruction that interests neurobiologists is ultimately productive. This productive destruction works as a “sculptural power that produces form though the annihilation of form” (Malabou 2012b: 49). (To reuse the example provided earlier, a process of “cellular annihilation” destroys certain components of an organism to enable that organism to grow, develop, and survive.)[6] However, although current biological discourses recognize the productive work of destructive negativity, Malabou’s interest in the possibility of a more radical destructibility in Ontology of the Accident and The New Wounded goes beyond this productive, positive function. Malabou wants to think the possibility of a negativity that remains exclusively or absolutely negative. A negativity unadorned, as it were, with a complimentary, positive, or redeeming teleological function.

Of course, one could suggest (as Malabou does) that this questioning of possibility already assumes a position of affirmation, since possibility “designates what one is capable of” or “what may come into being” (2012c: 73). To question the possibility of anything asks for the affirmation of that thing’s production. In this sense, questioning the possibility of destructive plasticity’s negativity finds itself wrapped tightly in contradiction; the premise of the question compromises the possibility of a non-productive negativity from the start. From the metaphysical tradition that positively binds possibility to actuality, the possibility of an unproductive negativity would seem logically impossible. Malabou therefore demands a new understanding of possibility as such, an ontology that could account for a possible negativity that is not already affirmative. In other words, unlike Hegel’s dialectically productive negativity, Malabou seeks a possibility that would not be possible, a no that refuses a silent yes, a possibility that would not be tethered to the affirmation of a creativity. The most destructive force in Malabou’s renegotiation of possibility is its impossible demand, or rather its demand for impossibility. The “ontology of the accident” thus names the impossible possibility of the absolutely impossible.

Malabou’s own contributions to Plastic Materialities address these two considerations together—as if the two are actually one. Across her three essays, Malabou argues that attention to the ontology of plasticity demands a specific politics. Her contributions to this volume investigate the chance of this onto-political relation and the (im)possibility of its future shape. Plastic Materialities makes an impactful contribution to the growing field of interest in Malabou’s work precisely because Malabou here provides perhaps her most thorough account of the relationship between plasticity’s ontological critique and its political import.

In “From the Overman to the Posthuman: How Many Ends?” Malabou revisits the conclusion Derrida reaches in his famous essay “The Ends of Man.” There, Derrida remarks that the history of nonhumanist philosophy—including Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger—ultimately reconstitutes an essentialist concept of the human. Derrida argues that a grand repetition is at stake, since early attempts outside humanism retain and repeat the premises of that same humanism. The “end” (closure) of humanism carries an essentialist “end” (telos) of the human. And yet, at the end of Derrida’s text, which Malabou argues is a sort of beginning, a passing reference to Nietzsche leaves open an opportunity to rethink repetition and, thus, to renew a thinking of the possibilities and impossibilities of humanism. Is there a chance for nonhumanist thought, Malabou asks, that does not fall victim to this essentialist repetition?

Malabou points out that Nietzsche’s sense of repetition is related directly to revenge, since “revenge” names the memory (what Nietzsche calls the “inability to forget”) essential both to the human and to the structure of temporal succession. Redemption from the repetitions of humanism would thus be tantamount to a redemption from revenge, a yes-saying that can embrace repetition without relying on the retention of a pre-constituted essence. To account for this refined sense of repetition, Malabou turns to recent biological research into reparative stem-cells, which can renew (i.e. repeat) themselves and thus forge new bodies or parts of bodies without recourse to a structure of “revenge.” A repetition that does not simply fulfil a program but produces itself from out of itself. The possibility of the non-human, or of “the non-humanist tradition,” for Malabou amounts to thinking repetition beyond the vicissitudes of this essentialist revenge. Here and in her other two contributions to Plastic Materialities, Malabou argues that these innovations in biological research create new philosophical horizons—not simply within the applicative domains of “philosophy of science” or “bio-philosophy” but, more specifically and significantly, within the traditions of metaphysics and humanism writ large.

By thinking plasticity as both a thing and a process, that is, as an object of scientific research and as the transformation of philosophical concepts of essence, life, being, the human, etc., Malabou identifies an impasse at the heart of biopolitical and poststructuralist confrontations with “science.” In her essay, “Will Sovereignty Ever Be Deconstructed?” she specifically targets the tendency for thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, and Agamben to regard science as a rigidly mechanical counterpart to the critical dynamism of the humanities.[7] (Here, one might think of Heidegger’s famous statement that science does not think, although Malabou does not include Heidegger in her list of interlocutors in this particular essay.) Philosophy’s rigid characterization of science, Malabou argues, commits biopolitics to an unwitting preservation of the very structure of sovereignty it claims to deconstruct.

Malabou analyzes previous attempts to deconstruct sovereignty’s relation to biology by claiming that for Foucault, Agamben, and Derrida, “even in different ways, biology is always presented as intimately linked with sovereignty in its traditional figure” (38). That is, even Foucault’s famous theorization of “biopower” beyond or outside the specter of monarchical structures of state sovereignty, preserves a rigidified notion of biology as a “regulatory law” that operates teleologically within an organism. From this perspective, the organism will have always retained “the form of a micro-Leviathan” and will thus never be distinguishable from more traditionally minded and monarchically guised structures of power. Unsurprisingly, for Malabou, Foucault typically regards biology as “the ally of sovereignty” (42) and biopolitics generally treats the biological as that which legitimizes the transformation of the “floating signifier” into a fixed, rigid, and centralized motif (e.g. “blood and sex”). Lastly, Malabou claims, “biology always appears, for philosophers, as an instrument of power, never as an emancipatory field or tool” because the biological is always treated as a “secondary phenomenon” to the primacy of “the symbolic” (38, 42).

In short, Malabou’s critique is that these thinkers too often treat biology as a rigid mechanism that simply services the whims of biopower. Not only does this mechanization preserve traditional models of centralized authority and sovereignty, it also denies any “biological resistance” to this mechanization. Ultimately, Malabou wants to argue that plasticity constitutes this biological resistance from within the confines of sovereign mechanization. Put otherwise, plasticity transgresses restrictive understandings of “biology” as a “political force” (40). The motor behind this plastic capacity is epigenetics, which accounts for either the activation or inhibition of certain genetic factors in an individual’s biological makeup. This process is significant for Malabou because it describes a transformability that is itself non-genetic. For example, within the genetic determination of the brain, the synaptic formation of neural connections depend upon a constellation of non-genetic—yet nonetheless determinative, that is, epigenetic—influences such as experience, learning, and environment:

Plasticity is in a way genetically programmed to develop and operate without program, plan, determinism, schedule, design, or preschematization. Neural plasticity allows the shaping, repairing, and remodeling of connections and in consequence a certain amount of self-transformation of the living being. (Malabou 2015: 43-44)

This epigenetic structure signals for Malabou the “becoming obsolete of the notion of program in biology,” an obsolescence that “opens new conditions of experience, new thresholds of rationality, as well as new philosophical and theoretical paradigms” (44). For example, according to Malabou, epigenetics allow us to think “history” and “biology” as a “dialectical couple within biological life itself,” which allows us in turn to abandon the classic desire to “survey the biological from an overarching structural point of view” (44). Plasticity would thus name the role that “the symbolic” (the empty signifier devoid of meaning and thus capable of renegotiating its meaning ad infinitum) traditionally plays, except now this “symbolic” resides within the plastic formation of the biological itself: the ability of life to transform itself “without separating itself from itself” (45).

Malabou concludes that any discourse founded upon this reliance on the “symbolic”—as a “surplus or excess over the real”—ought to be renegotiated via this plastic transformation of the empirical/transcendental relation that epigenetics calls into question.[8] Entirely opposed to transcendental structures of meaning, Malabou claims that it is now no longer the case that a “gap between the structural and the material” is required to “render the material meaningful” (45).

Both Alain Pottage and Fred Moten offer captivating challenges to Malabou’s conclusions. Pottage claims that the role “environment” plays in biological discourses highlights the “autoplastic” process of a structure that structures itself, a “system that is its own product,” a self that produces itself by fashioning the equipment that mobilizes itself (89). Recognizing that this auto-generative capability is central to Malabou’s own thinking of plasticity, Pottage also notes that this process is exactly what Foucault describes as “ethopoiesis.” Foucault is actually a thinker of plasticity, Pottage argues, despite Malabou’s dismissal of him. Similarly, Moten takes issue with Malabou’s insistent need to “deconstruct biopolitical deconstruction,” a gesture that, he argues, ultimately reconstitutes very thing it claims to deconstruct. Doesn’t locating sovereignty within the materiality of the brain just relocate in tact what had previously been confined to symbolic life? And doesn’t this relocation ultimately just make the brain a new version of the old sovereignty (283)? Contrary to Pottage’s reliance on the autopoiesis of an internally self-transformative and auto-corrective system, Moten wants to preserve the possibility of a rupture from outside, a rupture that might critique sovereignty beyond a simple relocation.

Although Pottage and Moten both contest the impetus for Malabou’s investigation into plasticity’s politics, they do not challenge the ontological foundation for her investment in this materialism or the currency this ontology has within the sciences (not just neurosciences). This relation between ontology, politics, and science comes into full focus in Malabou’s essay, “Whither Materialism? Althusser/Darwin.” Here, Malabou argues for an intractably political understanding of how Darwinism collapses transcendence into a strict materialism.

If “materialism” is understood simply as the “name for the nontranscendental status of form,” where “matter” is understood as a self-formation that produces “the conditions of possibility of this formation itself,” then any materialism worthy of the name cannot legitimately be considered transcendental, since “transcendental” indicates “a position of exteriority in relation to that which it organizes” (48). As a result, following Althusser, Malabou claims that the history of philosophy has described this relationship between materialism and transcendence in two main ways.

The first is “dialectical teleology,” which describes an internal tension toward a telos governs “the formation of forms.” Althusser and Malabou both reject this form of materialism because it ultimately abides a fundamentally transcendental structure. In this configuration, an anterior structure of meaning precedes form and governs its formation.

The second is “materialism of the encounter,” which regards form as being governed by “the non-anteriority of Meaning.” According to this configuration, form is “form” only as the result of an “encounter.” As Malabou puts it: “forms are encounters that have taken form” (49). According to Althusser, this “materialism of the encounter” entails a rethinking of “necessity.” For him, necessity ought to be thought “as the becoming-necessary of the encounter of contingencies” (qtd. by Malabou 2015: 49). One cannot conceive “necessity” as a rigid, transcendental priority if meaning is not anterior to the formation of forms and if form is the result of an encounter. “Necessity” would be a formation itself, a “becoming-necessity” formed by the encounter between contingencies whose meaning is constituted ex post facto rather than being transcendentally anterior to it. For Althusser, this formation works biologically just as much as it does historically and politically: a species, a people, or a historical movement “gels at certain felicitous moments” and means what it means because of this gelling.

Malabou’s essay calls into question the legitimacy of Althusser’s homogenization of the political, historical, and biological into a single, unifying process of plastic formation. She asks, “Can we transpose what happens at the level of nature to that of the political and of history?” Is the “encounter” of natural selection in biology comparable to socio-political encounters? To address these questions, Malabou uses Darwin as a route back to Althusser by noting that plasticity “constitutes one of the central motifs of Darwin’s thought” and situates itself “effectively at the heart of the theory of evolution” (50). As Malabou sees it, Darwin describes the evolutionary idea of natural selection precisely as “plastic,” specifically in terms of the relationship between the “variability of individuals within the same species and the natural selection between these same individuals” (50).

As a thinker of the formation of form, Darwin notes that, to use Althusserian language, variability comprises the “void” or “nothing” from out of which form forms. The possibility of variation is nothing other than the potential within a species for transformation: “the quasi-infinite possibility of changes of structure authorized by the living structure itself” (50). More specifically, this variability is “quasi-infinite,” Malabou claims, again in Althusserian language, because the possibility of variability does not depend on the rigidity of a predetermined, “anterior” criteria or “meaning.” Instead, form is formed “when variability encounters natural selection,” when selection renders the contingency of variability into a necessity. As such, Malabou concludes, “the materialism of the encounter thus pertains to a natural process that assures the permanent selection and crystallization of variations” (51). In this sense, the structure of the encounter Althusser describes has a clear biological component to it since the process of Darwinian natural selection occurs ateleologically, without intention, as a promise, to-come.

It would therefore be misleading to think of “evolution” as a linear sense of progress and perfectibility. Even though Darwin would use language of “improvement” and “betterment” to describe the adaptability of a species via the processes of natural selection, Malabou cautions that one should not mistake this sense of perfectibility as a teleological “finalism” (52). Instead, thinking natural selection as plastic highlights that the “survival of the fittest” is not a simple elimination of the quantitatively weak in favor of the endurable strong. It is instead a dynamic process of openness to possibility, to adaptability, to complexification, a horizon of potential devoid of predetermination, intent, criteria, and linearity.

Since “social selection” appears to be precisely the opposite of this unintentional (or non-intentional) structure of natural selection, it would seem as though social and natural selection have no significant overlap. One works automatically, absent of predefined criteria, while the other is a social decision intentionally made according to precise, predefined criteria. Furthermore, given the devastating history of ascribing social functions to natural selection in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (under the guise of so-called “Social Darwinism”), Malabou notes the sensitive need to proceed with caution when claiming that natural processes might possibly undergird social processes. However, she also notes that the ateleological plasticity of natural selection undermines Social Darwinism’s conflation of natural selection with social selection from the start. Precisely because natural selection is not a rigid sorting of weak versus strong traits according to an intentional and decisive rubric, the racist and supremacist taxonomies of Social Darwinism have no justifiable basis in biology whatsoever. The biological dynamism of natural selection—and of plasticity more generally—demonstrates from all sides the restrictive and repressive outcomes inherent in any attempt to assert “Social Darwinism” as the “social destiny” of biology.[9]

Yet, the possibility of locating a more authentic connection between natural and social selection, between the biological and the political, will require that the same “void” that constitutes the ateleological structure of biological formation also operates politically. Malabou locates this social plasticity in Althusser’s reading of Machiavelli, who describes the Prince’s virtue according to “his ability to select the best possibilities fortune [contingency] offers, yet a selection made with no intention to do so” (53). How could something like this work, and what could possibly account for the “void” from out of which the encounter forms? “There seems to be no void in our societies,” Malabou states, since, everywhere around us, processes of social selection of aptitudes ultimately select according to a candidate’s conformity to the selective criteria rather than exceptional distinction/difference from them, thus “ensuring the perpetuation and renewability of the identical […], never the emergence of singularities out of nothing” (54).

From a Marxist perspective, this emphasis on the functionary’s conformity and obedience seems to account for the closure of the possibility of a plastic social selection. From a Bourdieusian perspective, this same degree of acquiescence to the norm precludes the dynamism of plasticity’s social selection—except this time in the name of “privilege,” which, Malabou notes, is “the most predetermined selective criterion ever” (55). The outcome is the same from either perspective: “social selection has the goal of reproducing order, privilege, or the dominant ideology.” It praises conformity, obedience, compliance, and acquiescence to the dominance of the selective criteria. “Who has never had the feeling,” Malabou asks, “that social selection was, in effect, a program and never a promise and that the morphological transformations of society were, deep down, only agents of conservation” (55)?

Does this mark a limit of social selection? Since social selection always seems to retain this intentional sense of sorting desirable traits, will social selection always lack plasticity? Will “the materialism of the encounter always [be] doomed to be repressed by that of teleology, anteriority of meaning, presuppositions, predeterminations” (52)? Will social selection always be the rigidity that undermines the plasticity of natural selection? Can there be a formative plasticity of social selection? In short, Malabou wants to know if social selection can “join in any way the natural plastic condition,” understood specifically as “the promise of unexpected forms” (55).

The only way to account for this encounter between the social and the biological would be to recover a “plastic” condition in which both regimes operate according to “criteria that do not preexist selection itself” (56). Here, Malabou is not too far from her earlier desire to uncover a repetition without revenge in her reading of Nietzsche, or her general project of thinking “possibility” beyond the positivity of a preconstituted affirmation. Such a thinking must avoid insisting too soon on difference, since “selection in the order is always an act that confers value and therefore creates hierarchies and norms” (56). Malabou here describes an anarchic ontology, a structure of difference that forms itself and its meaning from an encounter that itself has no predetermined, anterior “meaning.” In Deleuzian language, Malabou summarizes this anarchy as a “selection that produces its own criteria as it operates” (56).

The void from out of which selection and its criteria form themselves constitutes the possibility of the promise. It is from out of this void (which Malabou also calls an “anonymity”) that “new forms can emerge” as “singular, unpredictable, unseen, regenerating” (57). In a slightly different language, Malabou calls this void “the originary deprivation of ontological wealth” (59). This elegant description highlights the core political thrust of how Malabou envisions plasticity’s radicalism, contrary to Toscano’s earlier accusation that Malabou’s politicization of plasticity proceeds only analogically. To think this “void” emptied of teleological determination and constriction, to uphold a commitment to the “non-anteriority” of its meaning from out of which the formation of form emerges via the materiality of the encounter, is “the most urgent ethical and political task” for a “global world” in which “every place is assigned,” regulated, owned, accounted for (58). This commitment would amount to a renewed call to the subversion of capitalist ideology and to the promise of politics.

Tyler M. Williams is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Midwestern State University.

References

Boever, Arne De. 2016. Plastic Sovereignties: Agamben and the Politics of Aesthetics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Burdman, Javier. 2016. “Necessity, Contingency, and the Future of Kant.” Diacritics 44, no. 1: 6-25.

Derrida, Jacques. 1986. Memoires: For Paul de Man. Translated by Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava. New York: Columbia University Press.

Galloway, Alexander. 2010. “Catherine Malabou, or The Commerce in Being.” French Theory Today: An Introduction to Possible Futures Pamphlet 1. New York: TSPY/Erudio Editions.

Malabou, Catherine. 2008. What Should We Do With Our Brain? Translated by Sebastian Rand. New York: Fordham University Press.

— — —. 2010. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing. Translated by Carolyn Shread. New York: Columbia University Press.

— — —. 2012a. “Following Generation.” Trans. Simon Porzak. Qui Parle 20, no. 2: 19-33.

— — —. 2012b. The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage. Trans. Steven Miller. New York: Fordham University Press.

— — —. 2012c. Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity. Translated by Carolyn Shread. Malden, MA: Polity.

Malabou, Catherine and Tyler M. Williams. 2012. “How Are You Yourself? Answering to Derrida, Heidegger, and the Real.” theory@buffalo 16: 1-22.

Schwartz, Jeffrey and Sharon Begley. 2002. The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force. New York: Harper Perennial.

Williams, Tyler M. 2013. “Plasticity, in Retrospect: Changing the Future of the Humanities.” Diacritics 41, no. 1: 6-25.

Notes

[1] In his preface to Malabou’s Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, Clayton Crockett suggests that “the concept of plasticity” comprises Malabou’s “original, signature idea” (2010, xi). Malabou disputes this claim in an interview by suggesting that plasticity does not belong to her as some sort of proprietary concept; it exists within the circuitry of philosophy’s relation to itself and to others (Malabou and Williams 2012, 4).

[2] For an example of this misrepresentation of Malabou’s plasticity, particularly its misconstruction as a type of elastic flexibility, see Galloway 2010, 15.

[3] For more on the relationship between disciplinary rigor and interdisciplinary range in Malabou’s work, particularly regarding the long history of exchange and dissociation between the humanities and the sciences, see Williams 2013, 10-13.

[4] The second book, published just this past year, is Thinking Catherine Malabou: Passionate Detachments, ed. Thomas Wormald and Isabell Dahms (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

[5] In similar terms, though admittedly in an entirely different context, Michael Clune has recently characterized this distinction as “good” versus “bad interdisciplinarity.” See Clune 2018.

[6] Two examples of this positive role that destruction plays biologically ought to suffice. First, Malabou cites Jean Claude Ameisen: “the sculpting of the self assumes cellular annihilation or apoptosis, the phenomena of programmed cellular suicide: in order for fingers to form, a separation between the fingers must also form. It is apoptosis that produces the interstitial void that enables fingers to detach themselves from one another” (2012c, 4-5). A second example, given by Jeffrey Schwartz, explains how the brain modifies itself in response to either the lack or the abundance of external stimuli, particularly regarding the loss of synaptic efficacy that allows unused neural functions to ‘make room’ for the growth of highly used functions. In this example, the unused visual cortex of a blind person’s brain is recruited for tasks typically resigned solely to the somatosensory cortex. Schwartz describes how the visual cortex of blind patients’ brains activates while reading Braille, to suggest that the visual cortex, receiving no visual stimuli, destroys its previous function to adopt a new one (2002, 198).

[7] For more on this distinction and Malabou’s critique of it, particularly with regard to the role the sciences play within the humanities, see Williams 2013. Additionally, for a thorough discussion of Malabou’s relation to the tradition of what she calls “biopolitical deconstruction,” particularly at the intersection of aesthetics and politics, see De Boever (2016).

[8] For a thorough reading of Malabou’s treatment of transcendence and materialism, particularly in her readings of Kant and her engagement with Meillassoux, see Burdman (2016).

[9] “Social destiny” is a phrase Malabou uses in an earlier version of this essay, which was published in theory@buffalo in 2012 as “Darwin and the Social Destiny of Natural Selection.” In fact, pages 50-56 of Plastic Materialities previously appeared as pages 144-147, 149-151, and 151-153 of theory@buffalo vol. 16 (2012), having been translated from the original French by Lena Taub and Tyler M. Williams.

a review of Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (University of Minnesota Press, 2016)

by Justin Raden

In a recently translated interview, Bernard Stiegler makes a strong appeal for an unlikely partnership between technical knowledges and philosophy. Stiegler chides and ventriloquizes “academic philosophy” for its proud negligence when it comes to technical knowledge. “As if,” he says, “we could ever feel proud of not understanding how a system functions.” He continues: “How can we claim to understand anything about Hegel if we do not feel capable of understanding the functioning of a diode? Hegel, who himself wrote on electricity, would have undoubtedly found this ludicrous.”^[i] Such an appeal is typical of Stiegler, whose opus, the three-volume Technics and Time, begins by claiming that the history of philosophy is the history of the suppression of technics. But what do diodes have to offer philosophy or any discipline outside of electrical engineering? How is it, exactly, that no reading of Hegel can reasonably avoid a prerequisite course of study in circuit diagrams?

Stiegler’s polemic points in two directions: at a misrecognition in the contemporary discourse about our own technological landscape, and at an inability to discover in the history of philosophy precursors to this discourse. In the 1990s, when Stiegler’s work first appeared, critical and social theory in the Anglo-American scene was little interested in emerging frameworks for conceiving of changes in the social fabric. Mark Poster complained that in spite of “alternative rubrics” like “postindustrial society, information society, the third wave, the atomic or nuclear or electronic age” we continued to rely on the perceived power of old explanatory models.^[ii] In the meantime, the intellectual scene Poster bemoaned has been replaced with a fervor of interdisciplinary activity in which a number of fields in the humanities have rushed to upgrade the critical apparatus by adopting epistemological and methodological frameworks from elsewhere. The most notable in the field of literary studies are the appropriations of aspects of Latourian “science studies” and the computational and media theory that has coalesced into the ambiguously circumscribed discipline of digital humanities. And yet Stiegler’s early work, while it might appear as a radical innovation in philosophical thought, is partly premised on a return to a lesser known French thinker whose work problematizes both of these disciplinary orientations: Gilbert Simondon. Indeed, Simondon (and Stiegler in turn) troubles the logics which partition and predicate the newness of the new and the oldness of the old.

The long overdue English translation of Simondon’s Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects), originally published in 1958, provides an opportunity to reflect on the protean terrain of the human sciences as they struggle to account for ever more rapid technological change and its relation to ecological, economic, and political crises. Simondon’s interventions are manifold and the consequences of these are only just beginning to be appreciated and interrogated for their contemporary relevance. His principal objective is the reintegration of the philosophy of technology with philosophy in general, or more exactly with culture in general. This as yet unrealized ambition produced, for Simondon, a social imaginary of technology that, if anything, is more entrenched today: the mythologizing of robotics, the errant belief that automatism signals the highest level of technical development, the experience of alienation as non-knowledge of the machine.

Tracing the disaggregation of techne or technics (or sometimes “the mechanical arts”) from what he calls “noble thought” or “the noble arts” back to ancient Greece, Simondon describes the consequences of this division through the twentieth century. Doing so allows him to provide a corrective to a mode of thought that cannot think the intervention of the technical object “as mediator between man and the world” (183) in the sense that it directs or determines the form of the detachment from the prior unity into nature and culture. The division of thought as Simondon describes it originally occurs because of a devaluation of technics––especially technics that employed tools––due to its association with slavery. This process is then periodically reduplicated: “there is, in each epoch, a part of the technical world that is recognized by culture, while other parts of the technical world are rejected” (104). As a result of this series of expurgations, we become, beginning especially in the nineteenth century, alienated from the world of machinery such that by the mid-twentieth-century we experience a “disjunction of the conditions for the intellection of progress and for the experience of the internal rhythms of work” (132).

Despite the affective registration of this disjunction––psychological alienation from the technical world––the lesson has continued to evade Western thought. Looking back on Simondon’s legacy in 1997, Régis Debray lamented that “Those who did develop an attentive, informed criticism of technological filiations and breaks, from Bertrand Gille to George [sic.] Simondon, were confined to a good deal of intellectual isolation [… As a consequence of] the denegation of material mediations we are paying for a long ancestral heritage of neglect.”[iii] It’s unclear whether things have improved much on this front.

One site of this problem’s legibility has been the reaction in media-technical oriented literary criticism against the work of Friedrich Kittler. Technological determination is out, we are told. This position seems similarly premised on a misunderstanding, or worse: on the kind of deliberate disinterest in understanding described by Stiegler. In a sense, Kittler’s work traces media-aesthetic histories that appear as a function of the suppression of technics within culture as described by Simondon. The aphoristic opening shot of Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter––“Media determine our situation”[iv]––gestures toward the realization of Simondon’s ambition to combine philosophical and technical thought. His work provocatively traces the media-technical bases of discursive production in the spirit, if not the letter, of Simondon’s own project. Technological or media determination refers to the conditions of the appearance of these media-aesthetic histories, not to some revived naturalism. In this way, Kittler’s work is tracing an insight of Simondon’s that appears threatening to scholarly fields that remain essentially Schillerian in their promotion of aesthetic education. The ultimate goal of philosophical thought, as described by Simondon in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (hereafter Mode)––a philosophical thought which does not elide technics––surpasses aesthetic thought which is, pace Schiller, “a reminder of the rupture of unity… as well as a reminder of the search for its future unity” (173).

But this does not invalidate aesthetics for Simondon. In a letter to Jacques Derrida, he proposes a “techno-aesthetics” which, as the neologism suggests, he conceives as an imbrication of technics and aesthetics: “It’s technical and aesthetic at the same time: aesthetic because it’s technical, and technical because it’s aesthetic. There is intercategorial fusion.”[v] Techno-aesthetics is not reducible to an ideology of “form follows function” but instead proposes that aesthèsis––as the production of culturally shared “fundamental perceptive intuition”––is subtended by a technical mediation of sensation equally operant, in some of the examples Simondon provides, in the successful loosening of a bolt with a well made wrench as in the “perceptive-motoric” action of painting. Aesthetics as techno-aesthetics must consider mediation by technical objects in its contemplation of both the aesthetics of nature (as the medium or media of its perceptibility) and the “illusory” aesthetics, to borrow Adorno’s characterization, of art.

Such a project necessarily relies on taxonomies generated as much out of engineering and mechanics as out of philosophy,^[vi] and this leads to some difficulty in navigating Mode. “Essence,” to take a familiar example from philosophy and one which is implicated in Simondon’s techno-aesthetics is just as as much in dialogue here with the phenomenological understanding of a genesis of scientific concepts as it is with the history of the development of the already-mentioned diode. Simondon asks whether the diode can be considered the “absolute origin” of its subsequent elaborations in the triode, tetrode, and pentode. As it turns out, two technical conditions precede the diode and, according to Simondon, constitute its essence, an “absolute beginning, residing in the association of this condition of irreversibility of the electrodes and of this phenomenon of transfer of electric charges through a vacuum; it is a technical essence that is created. The diode is an asymmetrical conductance” (44-45, original emphasis). Beyond merely helping us to better understand the diode, and thereby escaping Stiegler’s scorn, Simondon is applying a complex and original ontology equally to the histories of technical objects and of concepts: an ontology consisting of morphological evolution, which starts with a process Simondon calls “individuation.” Mode applies this ontology, which is more fully explicated in Simondon’s primary doctoral thesis, L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et de l’information^[vii] (Mode is his secondary thesis). Elizabeth Grosz has nicely summed up the crucial concept of individuation:

Simondon is interested in understanding how pre-individual forces, the forces that constitute the condition for both natural and technological existence, not yet individuated, produce individuals of various kinds… This process for the elaboration and emergence of individuality or being from becoming or the pre-individual is an ontogenesis: that is, “the becoming of the being insofar as it doubles itself and falls out of step with itself in the process of individuating.”^[viii]

It is the shared participation in this ontology by both organic material (e.g. man) and inorganic material (e.g. technical objects) that constitutes the relation that Simondon is exploring.^[ix]

Simondon’s work is concerned with the appearance of technological novelty, with what makes a technology present itself as new and under what conditions we can experience the progress of technical development. Written before the advent of the internet and at the dawn of the computer, cybernetics, and information theory, his two doctoral theses provide a completely different framework for thinking the effects that would follow from these events than the ones provided by their own founding figures. From the beginning of M​ode​, Simondon is working to countermand the machine idolatry of modernism. His understanding of the relationship between humans and machines is an even more complex version of the thesis advanced by his dissertation advisor, Georges Canguilhem, wherein the development of machinery advanced according to a biological principle, namely the prosthetic extension of organs. From this vantage point, the process of advocating for the inclusion of technics in culture (an exclusion which Stiegler radicalizes by prioritizing technics over culture in claiming that technical prosthesis is the condition of possibility of the human as such), requires the development of a “general organology” as a kind of study of the relation between these machinic prostheses and the normative understanding of the organs they extend.

Until the present decade, Simondon’s work was relatively unknown to Anglophone readers. An unofficial, partial translation by Ninian Mellamphy of Part 1 of Mode had been in circulation since 1980, but it’s unclear what kind of audience it would have reached until a revised portion appeared in 2011 in Deleuze Studies, two years after the online, open-access journal of critical philosophy Parrhesia devoted a special issue to Simondon. In the intervening years, a number of Simondon’s books and essays have been translated and his direct influence has appeared in fields as diverse as political science, psychology, literary studies, and philosophy. To be sure, in France theorists like Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Francois Lyotard, and Bernard Stiegler have continued the legacy of Simondon’s work, attempting to reintegrate technical thought into philosophy proper. The first volume of Stiegler’s Technics and Time trilogy contains lengthy readings of Simondon’s work. But Technics and Time vol. 1 was translated in 1998, and it doesn’t seem to have been broadly taken up until the publication of Mark Hansen’s influential essay, “The Time of Affect,” in 2004.

Reading Simondon is a difficult endeavor. This is not least because of his mesmeric pendulations between technical descriptions of engine types and articulations more recognizably philosophical. That is, of course, the point: in addition to describing the relationship between technical objects and man, and tracing the history of that relationship’s mystification, Simondon is performatively integrating two formerly separate modes of thinking to show how an ontology emerges from the genetic imperatives of technical objects. Mode demands of its reader not just that she apprises herself of its taxonomies, its rhythm and structure, which makes progress through the text slow (and summary impossible). It also demands that she do the thing it claims is demanded of thought; to (re)integrate technical/technological thought with philosophy and culture.

____________

Justin Raden is a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Notes

[i] Bernard Stiegler, Philosophizing by Accident: Interviews with Élie During. Ed. and trans. Benoît Dillet. Edinburgh University Press, 2017. 32

[ii] Mark Poster, The Mode of Information, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. 21.

[iii] Transmitting Culture. Trans. Eric Rauth. New York, Columbia University Press, 2000. 212.

[iv] Gramophone, Film Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. xxxix.

[v] “On Techno-Aesthetics.” Trans. Arne De Boever. Parrhesia, no. 14, 2012. 2.

^[vi] Many of Simondon’s most important terms have been elucidated by Jean-Hugues Barthélémy. See his “Fifty Key Terms in the Works of Gilbert Simondon”, trans. Arne De Boever. In: Boever, Arne De, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe, and Ashley Woodward, eds. Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. 203-231.

^[vii] The second part of his primary thesis, L’Individuation psychique et collective, is forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press as Psychic and Collective Individuation. No official translation exists of the first part, L’Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique, but Taylor Adkins has published an unofficial translation on the blog “Fractal Ontology” — https://fractalontology.wordpress.com/2007/10/03/translation-simondon-and-the-physico-biological-genesis-of-the-individual/.

^[viii] Elizabeth Grosz, “Identity and Individuation: Some Feminist Reflections.” In: Boever, Gilbert Simondon, 38-40.

^[ix] One can also glimpse here an important influence on Gilles Deleuze’s own attempts to think the relation between being and becoming in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense; it is largely Deleuze’s own work that has generated interest in Simondon in the U.S.