View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Scholarship@Western Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 8-22-2014 12:00 AM Sculpted Selves, Sculpted Worlds: Plasticity and Habit in the Thought of Catherine Malabou Thomas Wormald The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Chris Keep The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in Theory and Criticism A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Master of Arts © Thomas Wormald 2014 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Recommended Citation Wormald, Thomas, "Sculpted Selves, Sculpted Worlds: Plasticity and Habit in the Thought of Catherine Malabou" (2014). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 2398. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/2398 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. SCULPTED SELVES, SCULPTED WORLDS: PLASTICITY AND HABIT IN THE THOUGHT OF CATHERINE MALABOU (Thesis format: Monograph) by Thomas Wormald Graduate Program in Theory and Criticism A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada © Thomas Wormald 2014 Abstract One of the contemporary trends marking our current moment in theory is the call for the elaboration of ‘new’ materialisms. The new materialisms, however, have taken two principal articulations: a Neo-Spinozist materialism read through the work of Gilles Deleuze, represented by thinkers such as Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Bennett and William Connolly and a Neo-Hegelian materialism read through Jacques Lacan, represented by figures Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek and Adrian Johnston. Concomitant with this return of materialism has been a resurgence in the topic of habit as a topic worthy of philosophical investigation. There is, however a division in the treatment of habit between the two camps. Habit is deemed positive by the vitalist materialisms influenced by Spinoza and Deleuze – illustrating the self’s continuity and openness to the outside – but neglected by the Neo-Hegelian materialisms of Badiou, Žižek and Johnston as an instance of the political quietism of the ‘micropolitical’. Contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou, typically associated with the figures of the Neo-Hegelian camp, elaborates a different materialism based on the principle of plasticity developed through not Hegel and Lacan, but Hegel and Heidegger and thus sits liminally between the two dominant materialist orientations. This thesis will elaborate Malabou’s ontology of plasticity and argue how a reading of habit through Malabou’s plastic rapprochement of Hegel-Heidegger offers a different perspective on habit as a critical ethico- political modality that can helpfully negotiate some of the binaries or impasses that mark contemporary ongoing debates in the interrelated fields of ontology and political theory Keywords Catherine Malabou, plasticity, habit, materialism, ontology, Hegel, Heidegger, subjectivity, politics, affect ii Acknowledgments To the Centre and SSHRC, I am grateful for the faith you have shown in me, providing me with the opportunity to pursue my research. Melanie, thank you for everything you do. You make many of our lives so much easier, often at the expense of making yours harder for you. To Elaine, thank you for making me first realize that thinking matters and that the distance between the page and one’s life does not have to be a distance at all. But, it is precarious and infinitely difficult task to take care of keeping that space as small as one can. I’ve tried, remembering you, to do that here. To Chris, I thank you for your guidance, seemingly endless encouragement and for your patience in our conversations throughout this process. When I wanted to try and do everything, you gave me the rope to do so. When I tangled myself up with it and felt lost, you told me I could find my way out. Thank you for insisting that what I most needed to do was get out of my own way. Hopefully this bears out that I have – at least a little bit. To my friends, if you read this, and see yourselves here, it’s because you are: much of this was written in conversation with – and, probably to my fault, more accurately, speaking at - all of you. For every graciously lent ear over every bent elbow, I’ve been inspired, grateful and lucky to spend my time. Mom and Dad, I could try to say thank you, but it would never be enough. And, lastly, to Sea: your patience with me borders on beatitude. iii Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgments.............................................................................................................. iii Table of Contents ............................................................................................................... iv List of Abbreviated Titles ................................................................................................... v Introduction ........................................................................................................................ vi Chapter 1 ............................................................................................................................. 1 1 Plasticity ......................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Catherine Malabou Beyond Neuroplasticity ........................................................... 3 1.2 Malabou’s New Materialism: Against Transcendent(s) ....................................... 11 1.3 ‘The Systemic Law of the Deconstructed Real’: Plasticity as the Sublation of Material Being ...................................................................................................... 18 1.4 Neuroplasticity as Expression of the Ontological Real ........................................ 38 Chapter 2 ........................................................................................................................... 48 2 Habit ............................................................................................................................. 48 2.1 Habit as the Sculpting of Plasticity ....................................................................... 50 2.2 Habit in Philosophy of Mind: Passive Reception of Form in the Habituation of the Body ...................................................................................................................... 54 2.3 Hegel, Heidegger and the Passive Reception of Social Form: Habit and World . 60 2.4 Habit in the Active Sculpting of Self and World: Putting Plasticity to Work ...... 70 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 83 Works Cited ...................................................................................................................... 90 Curriculum Vitae .............................................................................................................. 94 iv List of Abbreviated Titles Catherine Malabou: Changing Difference: The Feminine and the Question of Philosophy – CD “Conversation with Catherine Malabou” (2008) – “CWM” Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity - OA Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction – PDW Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience - SEL The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectic – FH The Heidegger Change: On the Fantastic in Philosophy – HC The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage - NW What Should We Do with Our Brain? – WB G.W.F. Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit - PS The Philosophy of Mind - PM The Philosophy of Right - PR v Introduction One of the contemporary trends marking our current moment in theory is the call for the elaboration of ‘new’ materialisms. If Edmund Husserl’s famous dictate was a return to things themselves, the mid to late twentieth in France a return to language itself, the call to return to culture itself in the eighties and nineties in North America, the present moment is punctuated by exhortations to return to the world or matter itself. This turn is precipitated by a uniformly admitted exhaustion with previously existing dominant textually and culturally oriented theoretical practices that failed to, as proponents of these new paradigms suggest, sufficiently attend to the agency or independence of materiality itself. It is also arguably occasioned by the slow-setting melancholia of processing the various deaths we have witnessed in the past century: the death of God, the death of the Subject, the death of Metanarratives, the death of Communism. The return to materialism occurring today may be an indication of our actual acceptance, registering and working through how to adequately conceptualize existence in an immanent real bereft of transcendent certainty. The twofold difficulty that accompanies such a characterization is, however, the rather conflicting array of claimants propounding their own specific variety of ‘materialism’ and, attendently,