Malabou: "So in Butler again we find something meant to deconstruct the original copy model. ... Art ... has become the paradigmatic expression of all nonessentialist conceptions. ... Such an understanding of the absence of essences is catastrophic for women. Because it is highly repressive and normative."
amazing talk. One thing I am left off wondering is, what exactly does Malabou mean when she talks about a legitimate feminine metaphysics? Who exactly can do this? Can a male do a "feminine metaphysics", or is that impossible due to his being male? Doesn't that sound like a sort of biological essentialism?
This is a great question; I'm incidentally writing my bachelor's thesis about it. It's a subtle and complicated issue, and I'm left with questions myself, so keep in mind that the following perfunctory answer can't really do justice to Malabou's discussion of the problem. You are right that it is related to a sort of essentialism, but this has to be understood in the context of the argument that she makes about essence. The part where she reads Hegel is very hard to understand, but key to her idea of a specifically feminine metaphysics. She writes about it in Changing Difference, and it took reading it about 6 times and a lot of rumination to grasp what it means in this context. The upshot is that essence is past Being, so that femininity, understood as the essence of woman, is what woman has been. This means that to speak of a feminine metaphysics, it has to be a metaphysics to which women have had an originary relation - a metaphysics that could not have existed without the specific efforts of women. Additionally, if it is to be understood as a concept with any specificity compared to metaphysics in general, it must somehow differ from the metaphysics that have been handed down to us through an almost exclusively male tradition. The being-woman of the feminine metaphysician must distinguish her work somehow. As for the question whether a male could do feminine metaphysics, I think there are two points. First, once the field of such a metaphysics has been broken, once it exists, then it is possible for men to engage in it and with it. In the same way, women may do metaphysics that are completely, uncritically steeped in "phallogocentrism." However, it must be women that establish it, and for a man following in their footsteps, the practice will in a sense always be "borrowed." Secondly, though such feminine metaphysics must be established by "women," remember that what it means to be a woman is not fixed for Malabou. Essence is plastic, it is transformative. The essence of femininity is, in fact, change. (Since this is the essence of all Being.) So while one might charge herwith essentialism, in response there is the question whether there still is some problem with essentialism, when essence is conceived in this way. It also doesn't matter whether we conceive of this essentialism in biological or metaphysical terms, since sex too is plastic and transformable for Malabou, as is gender. I hope I managed to help understand this line of thinking. If you have any questions I'd gladly try to answer them :)
uliekmudkipz I need someone like you to talk to! I am also working on my bachelors thesis that doesn't have to do with '"feminine metaphysics" per se but has to do with constructing a political ontology that identifies the feminine with the Marxist concept of the proletariat, in order to synthesize Deep Ecology, Marxism and Feminism to overcome what I call Phallocratic Economy. Please email me at krayhan@mica.edu!
I feel like this idea that women have not had any hand in metaphysics in the past, thus, making metaphysics inherently masculine, seems a bit short sided. I mean Daoism (Taoism) is considered very "feminine." Nietzsche's Apollonian and Dionysian has in it a feminine force especially if you look back at the Bacchus. I fear as time goes on we are only serving to create a dichotomy by continuously critiquing and redefining concepts that didn't really suggest it wasn't masculine or feminine, as such a worry wasn't really at the heart of it's conception. How much of this are we reading into it? You should check out humoralism, it's fascinating how it studied the human body (not that it's very relevant, just interesting how they worried that a woman's penis might come out if their bodies got too hot, that is male centric obviously but still fascinating how plastic they considered the human body and gender even back then).
I would question the problem that a strictly feminine metaphysics poses for transgender politics. Is Malabou's position the basic foundation for positions like J. K. Rowling's dismissal of transgender categories--that making "woman" a performance a la Butler means effacing struggles women have faced? Is this a reactionary position to the attack on essence that comes out of continental philosophy? I've always found Malabou builds her arguments out of bad faith readings of the people she targets for critique. This is not necessarily a bad thing, if we see this as her attempt to overturn the dominance of an entire discursive regime, but it always makes me feel she's creating a false nostalgia for old concepts (but then is this only the case if we look at things from within the regime itself?). What does this produce? Well, I sat in on a Malabou reading group and the group was excessively resistant to accepting critiques of Malabou's work. Her adherence to essence recreated the problem of ideological thinking. A transgender figure poses a real problem for this type of thinking since it requires no adherence, only acceptance, because, one could argue, someone wrestling with a transgender identity is dealing with something that sits outside thought or at least points to something irreducible to easy categories (or dialectical binaries). I worry that a return to essence might require obliteration of that which sits outside thought or at least sits at its margins.
She reads Derrida in bad faith since simulacrum/style is precisely something which is capable of mutation either by violence done to it or by self-determination (plasticity). Derrida wants to say that dissimulation dissolves the distinction between (ready-made) identities (for man or woman) held as "true" and "artificial" identities. Derrida doesn't use "essence" because of its teleological and inflexible connotations which are the characteristics she also criticizes. Her faithfulness to hegelianism is stopping her from seriously engaging with new philosophical discourses.
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Malabou: "So in Butler again we find something meant to deconstruct the original copy model. ... Art ... has become the paradigmatic expression of all nonessentialist conceptions. ... Such an understanding of the absence of essences is catastrophic for women. Because it is highly repressive and normative."
Could you please activate auto-generated subtitles? Tnx for sharing this.
sorry, there doesn't seem to be an option for that..
amazing talk. One thing I am left off wondering is, what exactly does Malabou mean when she talks about a legitimate feminine metaphysics? Who exactly can do this? Can a male do a "feminine metaphysics", or is that impossible due to his being male? Doesn't that sound like a sort of biological essentialism?
This is a great question; I'm incidentally writing my bachelor's thesis about it. It's a subtle and complicated issue, and I'm left with questions myself, so keep in mind that the following perfunctory answer can't really do justice to Malabou's discussion of the problem.
You are right that it is related to a sort of essentialism, but this has to be understood in the context of the argument that she makes about essence. The part where she reads Hegel is very hard to understand, but key to her idea of a specifically feminine metaphysics. She writes about it in Changing Difference, and it took reading it about 6 times and a lot of rumination to grasp what it means in this context. The upshot is that essence is past Being, so that femininity, understood as the essence of woman, is what woman has been. This means that to speak of a feminine metaphysics, it has to be a metaphysics to which women have had an originary relation - a metaphysics that could not have existed without the specific efforts of women. Additionally, if it is to be understood as a concept with any specificity compared to metaphysics in general, it must somehow differ from the metaphysics that have been handed down to us through an almost exclusively male tradition. The being-woman of the feminine metaphysician must distinguish her work somehow.
As for the question whether a male could do feminine metaphysics, I think there are two points. First, once the field of such a metaphysics has been broken, once it exists, then it is possible for men to engage in it and with it. In the same way, women may do metaphysics that are completely, uncritically steeped in "phallogocentrism." However, it must be women that establish it, and for a man following in their footsteps, the practice will in a sense always be "borrowed."
Secondly, though such feminine metaphysics must be established by "women," remember that what it means to be a woman is not fixed for Malabou. Essence is plastic, it is transformative. The essence of femininity is, in fact, change. (Since this is the essence of all Being.) So while one might charge herwith essentialism, in response there is the question whether there still is some problem with essentialism, when essence is conceived in this way. It also doesn't matter whether we conceive of this essentialism in biological or metaphysical terms, since sex too is plastic and transformable for Malabou, as is gender.
I hope I managed to help understand this line of thinking. If you have any questions I'd gladly try to answer them :)
uliekmudkipz I need someone like you to talk to! I am also working on my bachelors thesis that doesn't have to do with '"feminine metaphysics" per se but has to do with constructing a political ontology that identifies the feminine with the Marxist concept of the proletariat, in order to synthesize Deep Ecology, Marxism and Feminism to overcome what I call Phallocratic Economy. Please email me at krayhan@mica.edu!
I feel like this idea that women have not had any hand in metaphysics in the past, thus, making metaphysics inherently masculine, seems a bit short sided. I mean Daoism (Taoism) is considered very "feminine." Nietzsche's Apollonian and Dionysian has in it a feminine force especially if you look back at the Bacchus. I fear as time goes on we are only serving to create a dichotomy by continuously critiquing and redefining concepts that didn't really suggest it wasn't masculine or feminine, as such a worry wasn't really at the heart of it's conception. How much of this are we reading into it? You should check out humoralism, it's fascinating how it studied the human body (not that it's very relevant, just interesting how they worried that a woman's penis might come out if their bodies got too hot, that is male centric obviously but still fascinating how plastic they considered the human body and gender even back then).
I would question the problem that a strictly feminine metaphysics poses for transgender politics. Is Malabou's position the basic foundation for positions like J. K. Rowling's dismissal of transgender categories--that making "woman" a performance a la Butler means effacing struggles women have faced? Is this a reactionary position to the attack on essence that comes out of continental philosophy? I've always found Malabou builds her arguments out of bad faith readings of the people she targets for critique. This is not necessarily a bad thing, if we see this as her attempt to overturn the dominance of an entire discursive regime, but it always makes me feel she's creating a false nostalgia for old concepts (but then is this only the case if we look at things from within the regime itself?). What does this produce? Well, I sat in on a Malabou reading group and the group was excessively resistant to accepting critiques of Malabou's work. Her adherence to essence recreated the problem of ideological thinking. A transgender figure poses a real problem for this type of thinking since it requires no adherence, only acceptance, because, one could argue, someone wrestling with a transgender identity is dealing with something that sits outside thought or at least points to something irreducible to easy categories (or dialectical binaries). I worry that a return to essence might require obliteration of that which sits outside thought or at least sits at its margins.
She reads Derrida in bad faith since simulacrum/style is precisely something which is capable of mutation either by violence done to it or by self-determination (plasticity). Derrida wants to say that dissimulation dissolves the distinction between (ready-made) identities (for man or woman) held as "true" and "artificial" identities. Derrida doesn't use "essence" because of its teleological and inflexible connotations which are the characteristics she also criticizes. Her faithfulness to hegelianism is stopping her from seriously engaging with new philosophical discourses.
I really didn’t understand the first 5 minutes….at all
holy fuck I understood nothing....shame on me
Yeah... Would be nice to have some "intermediate stuff" tbh, its all either for total noobs or incomprehensible walls of unexplained jargon
Not a fucking clue
a lot of jargon