Dan Ross, Author of Violent Democracy and Director of the phenomenal film The Ister and translator of several of Bernard Stiegler’s books, has been tweeting some snippets from Stiegler’s recent book États de choc and from his 2013 lectures at Goldsmiths. I have concatenated the split quote and reproduced it here, as an aide de memoire as much as anything…
First, from États de choc:
“Catherine Malabou makes plasticity Hegel’s major concept. But plasticity is possible only by passing through its solidifying and fixing exteriorization. Plasticity is possible only by passing through the fixing that is writing, without which there can be no reading. By passing through writing, which is a specific moment of technics-become-grammatization process. Hegelian, or post-Hegelian, plasticity is CONSTITUTED (and destituted) by its ‘inorganic moment’, as Hegel says.” Bernard Stiegler, États de choc, pp. 189–90, note 2.
This was split across six tweets, here: 1 2 3 4 5 6.
Second, Dan’s précis of a key point from Stiegler’s Goldsmiths lectures:
Bernard Stiegler at Goldsmiths 2013, disagreeing with Catherine Malabou’s “no justification for separating mind and brain”. Malabou’s discourse completely ignores the fact that knowledge is not simply cognitive. Knowledge presupposes social circuits of transindividuation through which a form of knowledge is constituted. Malabou’s discourse is regressive in relation to what Freud taught us, that libido is irreducible to the drives. What Catherine Malabou ignores is that the brain harbors drive-based automatisms or compulsions. These automatisms or compulsions can become object investments of desires and idealizations. But they can do so only because the non-organic recoding of the cerebral organ meant that the instincts were replaced with the drives, thereby becoming (thanks to this recoding) educable.
Split across eight tweets, here: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8.