In Body if not in Spirit: Butler and Malabou on Hegel

In the history of philosophy there are some texts that are difficult to say anything new about. These texts are so dominated by one influential reading that it becomes difficult, even impossible, to say something new. Paradigmatic in these respects is the brief section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit known as the “master/slave dialectic” or “dialectic of lordship and bondage”.This section is so dominated by Kojeve’s canonical reading that is almost as if his words were already there on the pages of Hegel’s text.

This is one reason why Judith Butler and Catherine Malabou’s exchange on “Domination and Servitude” published in French as Sois mon corps: une lecture contemporaine de la domination et servitude chez Hegel is engaging. It is a reading of this all too well known section of Hegel’s text, but one that dispenses with the preoccupations of a previous generation in order to reread Hegel. Butler and Malabou each address Hegel from their particular philosophical commitments and engagements: Butler’s intervention is framed by her reading of Hegel in The Psychic Life of Power and Malabou continues her development of plasticity in her reading of Hegel. Which is not to say that the concerns of Kojeve are entirely absent. He is mentioned not just in name, but also in general orientation. His reading, which influenced Lacan, Bataille, etc., made this particular passage not just the genesis of self-consciousness, but an anthropogenesis, the constitution of the human as such.

In Butler’s reading in particular, this passage from animal to human becomes about attachment to the body. The title would translate into English as “Be my body,” which is the masters injunction to the slave. The slave will work and toil and the master will consume the fruits of the labor. It is worth noting, and this is something that comes up in both Butler and Malabou’s intervention, that Hegel does not speak of the body as such. Any attempt to comprehend “the body” would have to be framed by the discussion of “life” that precedes the section, and the intersections of fear, work, death, consumption, and consciousness that punctuate the passage. It is on this point, on their attempt to not just read the body, but read it through death, work, and fear, that Butler and Malabou’s intervention joins what Negri describes as a post-humanist anthropology.

Although it remains to be seen how post-humanist this anthropology is, how much it can work through the defining aspects of human existence, construed as practices and relations, without relying on a concept of the human, constituted as an essence. This problem is especially vexing given the role death, the fear, or death or finitude plays in this text, and Kojeve’s reading. Death in post-Heideggarian thought, functions as a kind of finite transcendence: it is finite, being death and all, but it avoids whether or not there might be other ways of figuring finitude and, more importantly, it functions as a kind transcendent condition, as that which exceeds and structures all experience. This is of course, Kojeve’s contribution to Hegel, of his radically interrupted reading that makes death the “absolute master,” failing to notice that it is not Hegel’s last word on finitude or negativity. This is both the challenge and the limit of their project: in some sense a post-humanist interpretation of “Domination and Servitude” is nearly impossible because it is precisely placing this section, with its drama of death, work, and desire, at the center of Hegel’s thought that constitutes the humanist reading.

Malabou and Butler both focus on the impossibility of actualizing the injunction, the separation of subjectivity from the body. The master still needs to eat, to consume, and is thus confronted by the very object that he sought to avoid. The same could be said of the slave’s encounter death: the slave flees death in the struggle for recognition only to find it again waiting, in the fear of the master. Complete detachment from the body is just as impossible as complete surrender to the demands of life, a purely animal existence, physicality and negativity, determination and intederminacy, are equally unavoidable aspects of human life. There is nothing terribly new to this reading, but it perhaps has the merit of avoiding “recognition” as its central concept.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Malabou and Butler’s confrontation is the way in which it pits their particular conceptual innovations, plasticity in the case of Malabou and subjection/attachment in the case of Butler, in relation to Hegel’s text. In each case the concept in question is developed in relation to Hegel’s thought, albeit differently. To start with Malabou’s reading of Butler, Malabou poses the question as to what extent Foucault’s problematic of subjectivity/subjection, especially once understood as an attachment and detachment to a particular kind of power differs from a dialectic, countering Butler’s Foucauldian reading of Hegel with a Hegelian reading of Foucault. The slave's subjection is nothing other than a kind of attachment, the attachment to simply living, to the body as given, and mastery is a kind of detachment, an active constitution of the self as something other than this particular life, this body.What makes this possible is her concept of plasticity, the capacity to give and receive form, which cuts through dialects and subjection/subjectivity, to think the interconnection of passivity and activity.

In the end plasticity, as the simultaneity of shaping and being shaped of consciousness, and performativity, as constraint and action, circle around the same fundamental problem: as Spinoza perhaps was the first to note, every finite thing, which is to say everything, is simultaneously determined and determining, affected by other things around it and striving to act on the world. Thinking the specific conjunction of these two aspects is to some extent the task of any materialist philosophy, which is to say any philosophy that is not hopelessly caught up in a metaphysics of freedom and freewill. Malabou and Butler’s argument about Hegel has the merit of putting some of these different concepts of servitude and mastery in relation, most notably Hegel and Foucault, but, despite itself, it also indicates the limit of a purely philosophical investigation. If Foucault’s problem of subjection, the fact that we are always saying yes and no to power, can itself be understood as a restaging of the dialectic of attachment and detachment that defines servitude and domination, then wouldn’t it be possible to say the same thing about performativity and plasticity? My point is not to confirm Foucault’s nightmare in which Hegel subsumes all attempts to escape his influence, but to pose the question of a reorientation of thought. Perhaps the task is not to conceptualize this relation, to rigorously isolate the point where passivity becomes activity, but to think the materiality and specificity of different ways in which one becomes the other. What is perhaps important is not the general dimension of the concept, but the specific modality of the encounter. This maybe the reason that Hegel’s little narrative draws us back again and again: it offers us not the general figure of negation but something of the specific contours of domination and struggle.

The Brain that Would Not Die: Between Caricature and Creation

In Multitude Hardt and Negri write that “Each [historical] period is characterized by one or several forms that structure the various elements of social reality and thought.” They argue that the contemporary form is the network: everything from technology, to society, to the environment, to the brain itself is envisioned as a network. Networking is our word for friendships and machines alike. Hardt and Negri’s thesis, a thesis that I am tempted to sum up with the formulation “every mode of production imagines the world in its own image,” even though they are making an argument that is derived more from Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari than Marx, raises interesting questions. It is easy to see this in retrospect, to see the persistence of mechanistic modes of thinking in the seventeenth century, and a general problematic of thermodynamics of heat and pressure in the nineteenth century. (What is class struggle but the engine that drives history?) What remains to be seen, however, is what this means for us in the present? What do we do with a concept, or an image of thought, that would seem to be part of this general social structure. What do we do with these forms of thought? Do we dismiss them as the ideological residue of the existing social order?

This question is one of the central questions of Catherine Malabou’s What Should We Do With Our Brain? At the outset the central concern of this book is to bridge a gap between continental philosophy and neuroscience, but this is ultimately secondary to Malabou’s interest in the dominant image of the brain in neuroscience. “Plasticity” is the concept underlying each of these problems. Plasticity, the capacity to both give and receive from, to be formed and formative, is the link between Malabou’s earlier work on Hegel and the current work on neuroscience. Recent developments in neuroscience suggest that the brain is less hardwired than constantly rewiring itself: as new memories are formed, new pathways and connections are formed. We form our brain, our neural connections, as it forms us.

“Plasticity, between determinism and freedom, designates all the types of transformation deployed between the closed meaning of plasticity (the definitive character of form) and its open meaning (the malleability of form). It does this to such a degree that cerebral systems today appear as self-sculpted structures that, without being elastic or polymorphic, still tolerate constant self-reworking, differences in destiny, and the fashioning of a single identity.”

It is this idea of plasticity, of a brain that is less a sovereign instance of command than a decentered network of connections, that brings us back to the specific image that Hardt and Negri cite, as well as the general problem of the image of thought. As Malabou argues, the modern decentralized and plastic brain is in many respects the image of contemporary capitalism, which is governed less by central command, the central nervous system, than by the imperatives of flexibility, decentralization, and connection. The image of the contemporary brain is the image of the neoliberal world.

One could use this to dismiss these discoveries, to see them as another instance of neoliberalism making the world in its own image. One could view the plasticity of the brain like evolutionary psychology, which makes the neoliberal subject, homo economicus as entrepreneur of himself, the image of subjectivity itself: we are all investors in our genetic material, seeking the best return on our investment. This is not Malabou’s conclusion. She seeks to draw a line of demarcation between science and the spontaneous ideology of the scientists, to use Althusser’s terms, or between the caricature and the possibility that it conceals, her terms. As Malabou writes, “Not to replicate the caricature of the world: this is what we should do with our brain.” The line of demarcation between the caricature and possibility hinges on the distinction between flexibility and plasticity. Flexibility is a management watchword that stresses the ultimate ability for employees to constantly be remolded and shaped according to the demands of the labor market. As such it only captures half of what it as stake in plasticity, which is both a being molded and activity molding. Flexibility is plasticity refigured as passivity. In some sense flexibility is less than half, it is not just the active component that flexibility overlooks, but also the fact that the reshaping and being reshaped is not a smooth process. We are constantly transforming ourselves and being transformed, but this does not take place without tension and crisis. As Malabou writes, “Paradoxially, if we were flexible, in other words, if we didn’t explode at each transition, if we didn’t destroy ourselves a bit we could not live. Identity resists its own occurrence to the very extent that it forms it.”

What is intriguing is that Malabou offers an interesting case study in how to think through the image and the caricature of the world. It almost goes without saying that any image that we have of the world, whether it is produced by science, technology, or politics, is going to be something of a caricature. It will be a product of the dominant institutions (plasticity itself will demand it) but it will not be just that (plasticity once again). The trick is drawing the line of demarcation, of extracting creativity from the caricature.