Catherine Malabou’s L’Avenir de Hegel, presented here in Lisabeth During’s English version under the title The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, asks one question with an unwavering steadiness: whether the philosophy of Hegel has a future, both in the sense of a posterity and in the sense of a futurity inscribed within its concepts. The work pursues this question by elaborating, from a marginal Hegelian term, a single comprehensive concept, plasticity, capable of grasping the System whole. The result is a study whose distinctive value lies in its disciplined construction of an interpretive concept that is at once an inheritance from Hegel and a transformation of him, through which the book reorganizes the available oppositions between teleology and event, eternity and history, system and surprise.
To describe the book as it develops itself, one must take seriously the fact that its very first determination of the future is double, lexical, and self-reflexive. The French avenir, etymologized through ad-vient, designates both what is to come and the right to last. The question whether Hegel has a future is therefore the question whether his philosophy will arrive at posterity, and the question whether his philosophy contains within itself anything that one might call the futural. Malabou opens the work by presenting these two senses as inseparable. If the inner architecture of Hegel’s thought has no concept of the future—as Heidegger maintains in his lectures of 1930 on the Phenomenology of Spirit, when he asserts that for Hegel the past is the decisive character of time—then no claim about Hegel’s coming-to-be can be sustained from outside, and the conviction that Hegelianism is finished must be radicalized into the verdict that Hegel was always already finished. Conversely, if a concept of the future can be located within Hegel’s text, that concept must condition the conditions under which any later thought might receive him. Malabou treats this circularity not as an obstacle to her project but as its motor: the future of Hegel will be demonstrated only through the elaboration of a Hegelian concept of the future, and the philosophical viability of that elaboration will, in turn, decide whether his philosophy has any future at all.
The famous closing passage of the Phenomenology of Spirit—Spirit appears in time as long as it has not grasped its pure concept; when it grasps itself it sublates its time-form; time appears as the destiny and necessity of spirit not yet complete in itself—is the hinge on which contemporary suspicion has settled. Malabou repeats the standard reading: time is for Hegel a passing moment to be left behind, dialectically suppressed at the threshold of Absolute Knowledge; what remains is the parousia of spirit, the perpetual present of self-enclosed identity. Heidegger, in this familiar account, identifies Hegel’s understanding of time as the most radical conceptual form of the vulgar understanding, an Aristotelian sequence of nows perfected as the Pünktlichkeit—punctuality, being-as-point—of the instant. The cumulative effect of this reading is to make the System into an enclosure: spirit recognizes itself in everything in heaven and on earth, no absolute alterity remains, no event is admitted, the future has been confiscated because everything has already taken place. The book’s first analytic gesture is to acknowledge the rhetorical force of this picture and to take it as an objection that any defense of Hegel’s future must face on its own terms; she does not minimize the Heideggerian challenge, and she insists that the success of her project depends on remaining open to the very arguments that oppose it. This is one of the work’s earliest methodological wagers: to refuse a reactionary, nostalgic tone, to grant the indictment its full sharpness, and to seek in Hegel resources that the indictment itself has not seen.
The concept of plasticity is not, however, lifted onto the page as a hermeneutic tool external to the text. Malabou borrows from Georges Canguilhem the formula according to which to elaborate a concept means to vary its extension and its intelligibility, to generalize it by incorporating its exceptions, to export it beyond its initial domain, in short, to give to it, by ordered transformations, the function of a form. The Canguilhemian protocol is itself an interpretive operator that governs the work’s whole bearing. The substantive plasticity (in French plasticité, in German Plastizität) and its older companions plastic (the adjective plastisch) and plastics (the substantive die Plastik) all derive from the Greek plassein, to mould. Across its lexical range, the term holds together two opposed capacities: to receive form, as clay receives the impress of a hand, and to give form, as a sculptor transforms the matter she works. Yet plasticity is also distinguished from polymorphousness: the plastic preserves its shape once given, like marble that, having been carved, cannot be recovered as the block. Plasticity therefore designates that which lends itself to formation while resisting deformation. From this primary anchorage in the field of art, the term has migrated into pedagogy (the plasticity of the child’s character), into biology (the plasticity of the brain, of plant and animal life, of tissue able to repair itself), and into the technology of modern materials and explosives—plastic surgery and plastic explosive sit at opposite ends of the same lexical reach. Malabou retains all of these registers because the plasticity of plasticity will be the very thing the book wishes to test, and because her concept is meant to span the polarities between solidified form and the annihilation of form, between the statue and the bomb.
The Hegelian deposit of plasticity is at first restricted. The term and its cognates appear with notable economy in Hegel’s text and chiefly in three regions: in the Aesthetics, where sculpture is named the plastic art par excellence; in the descriptions of those plastic individualities who, exemplified for Hegel by Pericles, Phidias, Plato, Sophocles, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Socrates, embody the ideal Greek synthesis of universality and singularity; and in the methodological remarks of the 1831 Preface to the Science of Logic, where Hegel demands of philosophical exposition that it be plastic, requiring a plastic sense of receptivity and understanding on the part of the listener. To these three sites Malabou adds, by way of programmatic extension, a fourth, latent locus, namely the very logic of the speculative proposition announced in the Preface to the Phenomenology, where Hegel writes that only an exposition that rigidly excludes the ordinary relation of subject and predicate could reach the goal of plasticity. The book’s first interpretive thesis emerges here: in each of these registers the plastic is what both gives and receives form, and this twofold character is precisely the structure required to think Hegel’s idea of substance. To be substance for Hegel is to be the form-activity (Formtätigkeit) that Hegel calls the Absolute Relation; substance is plastic because it can fashion its own content while being fashioned by it. Plasticity is therefore not a regional aesthetic notion to be harvested for use elsewhere; it is the ontological signature of substance itself, the way the substance-subject can both withdraw into itself and enter its own particularity, the way it can resolve into the unity of resistance (Widerstand) and fluidity (Flüssigkeit). The dialectic, by Malabou’s recurrent description, is plastic because the operations that make it up—seizure of form, annihilation of form, emergence and explosion—are at once contradictory and bound to one another, and because the whole that they compose holds together what would otherwise fall apart.
Around this single concept Malabou organizes a triadic problematic indicated already in the subtitle: plasticity, temporality, dialectic. The middle term plasticity is to mediate between future and temporality, with the result that the relation between time and the future will not be conceived as the relation of a continent and one of its dimensions, but as a dialogical relation governed by plasticity itself. The future will not name a region of the time-continuum; it will name an excess of the future over the future, just as temporality, in the speculative sense, will name an excess of time over time. This pair of formulations is one of the work’s earliest and most consequential conceptual inventions, for it permits Malabou to turn the apparent insufficiency of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature account of past, present, and future—where time appears, on the standard reading, as the ordered passage of nows, as the very Aristotelian sequence Heidegger ascribes to him—into the demand for a different scene of analysis. If the future cannot be approached at the level at which it is normally posed (as a region within an ordered series of moments), then the inquiry must displace itself onto a structure capable of generating such a series. That structure, Malabou will argue at every register of the book, is plasticity.
The displacement is then anchored in a French phrase whose translation into English is itself a small philosophical event in the book’s mediation. Voir venir, rendered by During’s translation as to see (what is) coming, names the structure of an anticipation that is at once a watchful waiting and a probing of intentions. To see what is coming is to be sure of what is coming and not to know what is coming; it is to expect on the basis of patterns and to be surprised by an event that escapes them. The parenthetical (what is) in the English version retains the ambivalence Malabou wants. Voir venir names neither pure foresight nor pure passivity; it is what occurs in the interval between teleological necessity and surprise. Malabou makes it the operative concept under which she places the synthesis between the Greek and modern moments of subjectivity, between teleology and representation. The Hegelian system, on this account, sees itself coming in two distinct modalities, and these two modalities are at once logical and chronological. The locution is faithful to Hegel’s injunction to philosophize in one’s own idiom—an injunction the book takes seriously not only as a hermeneutic recommendation but as a substantive philosophical commitment. The work’s whole exposition will exhibit voir venir as the structure of speculative anticipation, the energy that runs through the substance-subject as it differentiates itself in time without being reducible to any one of its temporal positions.
It is essential that voir venir be related to plasticity asymmetrically. The future, conceived as plasticity, is displaced from its usual definition as a moment of time. The titular pairing—future, plasticity, temporality, dialectic—therefore announces a movement of progressive thickening rather than a simple list of subjects. To posit the future as plasticity is to refuse the immediate, ordinary connotation of the future as a tense, and to demand that the meaning of time itself be opened. By plasticity, Malabou writes, she will mean first of all the excess of the future over the future, while by temporality, in the speculative sense, she will mean the excess of time over time. Each formulation is intended to be reflexive: the concept exceeds its own initial determination and so generates new constraints upon itself.
Within this double frame, Malabou clarifies the methodological situation of her own project. She declines to follow the path opened by Alexandre Koyré and Alexandre Kojève, who in their respective ways had already pursued the future in Hegel’s Jena writings, granting it a prevalence over past and present. She acknowledges the proximity that those readers established between the young Hegel and Heidegger, and she also notes that both Koyré and Kojève reach an impasse: they grant the future a priority only at the cost of suspending all future yet to come. For Koyré, time is dialectical and is constructed from the vantage of the future, but the philosophy of history (and so the System as a whole) is possible only if history has come to an end. For Kojève, time is characterized by the primacy of the future, but at the standpoint of Absolute Knowledge man has no future left. Malabou recognizes the unresolved contradiction that this generation of readers had registered, and she takes from a later French generation—Bernard Bourgeois, Pierre-Jean Labarrière, Gérard Lebrun, Denise Souche-Dagues—the conviction that historical becoming and logical truth form, in Hegel, a dynamic unity. She does not pretend to resolve the residual problem of eternity and historicity, but she takes that problem to be sufficiently clarified in the secondary literature that it need not be the theme of her own inquiry. Her own thematic axis lies elsewhere: not in the relation between Phenomenology and Logic, not in the philosophy of history, but in the way plasticity functions as the unspoken operator that makes the very temporalization of the System possible.
The book’s whole architecture follows from this displacement. Malabou announces that her reading will not be thematic but strategic. There is no arche-moment of plasticity in Hegel: dialectical philosophy is systematically non-transcendental, and so the concept of plasticity has no overarching position from which to be deduced. Being schematizes itself, she emphasizes, and the unification of concept and existence cannot be assigned to any external principle. Plasticity is therefore present only in the interval between presence and absence, working on and within the body of systematic exposition rather than over it. This is one of the work’s load-bearing methodological remarks. It explains why the book proceeds by tracking a concept that Hegel rarely names; it explains why the choice of texts must be guided by a strategy rather than by a list of explicit occurrences; and it sets up, by anticipation, the eventual claim that plasticity has a distinct mode of presence, that of an originary synthesis sustained only as a passage. The scarcity of references to plasticity is not an embarrassment for the project but the very mark of plasticity’s mode of being.
The text on which Malabou stakes her case is the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences in its 1830 edition, and within that text the Philosophy of Spirit. Three sites in particular are selected: the section on Anthropology in subjective spirit; the section on Revealed Religion in absolute spirit; and the closing exposition of Philosophy, which culminates in the citation from Aristotle’s Metaphysics on the intelligence that thinks itself. These three correspond, in Malabou’s organizing triad, to Man, God, and the Philosopher. The choice of triad is not innocent. Malabou explicitly names it as a borrowing from Heidegger’s articulation of onto-theology, the concept under which Heidegger had placed the metaphysical tradition’s joint determination of being as ground of beings and as supreme being. Malabou’s tactical decision is to take the very triad that Heidegger had used to convict Hegel of metaphysics and to reread it from within, with a view to discovering whether the figures of Man, God, and the Philosopher, in Hegel’s text, can be detached from their function as fixed substantial entities and shown instead to be plastic instances—sites at which subjectivity gives itself the form of the moments through which it determines itself. This is the work’s principal argumentative wager: that the precise figures Heidegger sees as evidence of metaphysical closure are, on a rigorous reading, the very figures through which the System opens itself to its own internal differentiation in time.
The two stages of voir venir—the two epochs in which the substance-subject sees itself coming—are introduced as a double inflection of the relation between substance and accidents. Malabou names the first inflection the becoming essential of the accident, and the second the becoming accidental of essence. The first formula characterizes the Greek moment, the moment of substance-subject, in which the substance precedes and the subject emerges as its predicate. The second formula characterizes the modern moment, the moment of substance-subject, in which the subject is given primacy and substance comes to be predicated of the subject’s own self-determination. Each formula corresponds to a different conception of self-determination, and each generates its own modality of hypotyposis—Hegel’s term, borrowed from Kant, for the sensible translation of the spiritual. The Greek modality of hypotyposis is the plastic individuality of which Greek sculpture is the model; the modern modality of hypotyposis is the Incarnation of God in Christ, which Malabou will call divine plasticity. The Christian event—the axis around which the history of the world turns, in Hegel’s phrase—is the dialectical hinge between the two modalities, the transformation of one form of self-determination into another. Reading Hegel, Malabou writes, amounts to finding oneself in two times at once: the process is at once retrospective and prospective, the reader is summoned both to await what is to come (according to a linear, representational thinking) and to presuppose that the outcome has already arrived (by virtue of the teleological circle). The play of these two senses of voir venir is what makes Hegel more demanding than almost any other philosopher.
When Malabou turns from this introductory frame to the Anthropology, the strategic choice has already been justified. The Anthropology is the first moment in which a human being appears in the System: the first man as he awakes, rises to his feet, walks, speaks. The section’s twenty-five paragraphs follow a long, steep path that culminates in what looks at first like a poor philosophical yield, since the human is finally defined by upright posture, the formation of the limbs, the hand as the absolute instrument, the mouth, laughing, weeping, and speech. The disappointment that this conclusion has produced among commentators is, for Malabou, a productive misreading. The Anthropology matters, she contends, because at its center lies habit, and habit is, on close inspection, a plastic operation. To read the Anthropology as a series of degrading determinations of the animal rationale is to miss its real architecture, in which habit fashions the human as a work of art of the soul, and the human appears as the sensible medium in which spirit’s incarnation takes its first form.
Three reasons, all carefully separated and reweighted as the chapter proceeds, make habit the turning point of the Anthropology. The first is that habit, in Hegel’s exposition, deliberately reroutes anthropology away from the modern pragmatic anthropology of Kant and back to the founding Greek moment of the substance-subject. Hegel announces openly that his presentation of the soul will be governed not by empirical or rational psychology, but by the De Anima of Aristotle, which he calls by far the most admirable, perhaps even the sole work of philosophical value on this topic. The second reason is that habit is the mechanism of self-feeling, and self-feeling presupposes a particular modality of the reduplication of the negative: it is what allows the soul, having been opposed to itself in the crisis of judgment, to become an actual self. The third reason is that habit fashions the human as the work of art of the soul, a formula whose Greek connotation Malabou continually emphasizes, and which in turn presses the whole anthropological exposition back onto the field of plasticity.
The exposition unfolds along the threefold rhythm of the concept—universality, particularity, singularity—as Hegel formulates it in the Encyclopedia Logic: natural soul, feeling soul, actual soul. Within this rhythm, Malabou’s reading registers a sequence of crises. The natural soul, as the universal immateriality of nature, is the simple ideal life of nature, the sleep of spirit, potentially all things—a phrase, Malabou notes, that translates almost literally Aristotle’s description of the passive intellect. From this state of cosmic-sympathetic immediacy the soul moves into the natural qualities—climatic, racial, local—and into the natural alterations of life’s ages, sexual relation, sleep and waking. With sensation the soul begins to awaken to itself; with the feeling soul the relation of soul and body becomes a system of mutual Verleiblichung and idealization; with the feeling of self the soul tips into mental derangement (Verrücktheit), into the magical relationship and somnambulism, into idiocy and alienation as inverted figures of one another, in which the soul cannot synthesize itself.
It is here, at the place where the soul cannot resolve its own internal split, that habit appears as the liberating instance. Habit substitutes a posited immediacy for the natural one, producing what Malabou and Hegel call second nature. The plastic operation of habit consists in integrating and moulding the corporeality (an Ein- und Durchbildung der Leiblichkeit) so that it becomes the instrument of spirit. The body, which in the initial stages was intractable, too strong or too weak for the task at hand, is rendered completely pervious, durchgängig, made into an instrument. Soul and body are reciprocally translated, and this reciprocity is the very plasticity of the human. Habit, on Malabou’s careful reading, is not the dulling of life by mechanical repetition (though it is also that, and the deadening aspect of habit will be retrieved in the conclusion of Part I), but the operation by which the psychic and the somatic are made to coincide in such a way that the determinations of the universal can be lived as singular. Habit is a speculative clock, a clock by which the soul learns to tell time, and a clock therefore by which the soul sees itself coming. Without habit, Malabou will say, there would literally be no one to live or die; with habit, man becomes the being who knows he is finite. The mad soul, by contrast, is the soul that has not yet learned to read the time of its own becoming.
The Aristotelian background is not merely a gesture toward a venerable predecessor. Malabou devotes one of the work’s most demanding chapters to noetic plasticity, in which the entire interpretation of the Anthropology is rooted in Hegel’s reading of the De Anima. She refuses the temptation to treat Hegel’s reading as the assimilation of Aristotle’s doctrine of soul to a finished anthropology. The De Anima, as she insists, is not an anthropology; the nous is never treated by Aristotle as a self-contained entity, and man is never the topic. Hegel knows this, since in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy he never speaks, in his commentary on the De Anima, of man and never takes that text as the starting point of an anthropology. The strange position of the passive nous in Hegel’s exposition—it functions as the absolute beginning of the Anthropology, as the substance or absolute basis of all the particularization and individualization of spirit, before any individuation, before man—forecloses the assimilation. What Aristotle had treated as the conclusion of the De Anima (Book III) Hegel treats as a beginning; even granting the Hegelian circle, in which beginning and end coincide, this inversion is interpretively heavy.
Malabou’s claim is that Hegel reads the passive nous as the place where the originary plasticity of thought is at work. The two famous Aristotelian phrases—the becoming of all things and the making of all things—articulate, on Hegel’s reading, the dual aptitude of nous: to be fashioned by all and to fashion all. The crucial Aristotelian term for the manner in which nous possesses itself is hexis (habitus), a way of being that the Aristotelian tradition has often translated, too thinly, as state. Following Hegel, Malabou keeps the stronger reading: hexis is a habitual way of being, the form of possession in which something is held in such a way that it can be exercised at any moment. From this reading follows the centrality of the example of the man who acquires the habit of knowledge: as he passes from ignorance to learning to actual knowing, he moves through degrees of dynamis (potentiality) and energeia (actuality) that are not all of the same kind. Aristotle distinguishes between an alteration that destroys (a phthora, a privation) and an alteration that preserves and accomplishes (a soteria, the maintenance of a thing’s hexeis). Hexis is the modality of an alteration that does not corrupt, the modality in which a being is acted upon without being diminished. To be habituated is therefore to harbor within oneself a reserve of energy that can be released without exhausting itself, a reserve, Malabou writes, that constitutes a reserve of the future—a possibility of futurity already inscribed in the present.
It is against this background that Malabou confronts the longstanding objection, voiced most precisely by Pierre Aubenque and Dominique Janicaud, that Hegel misreads Aristotle, theologizes the sublunary biology, dynamizes the pure act, and conflates ontological levels that Aristotle had been careful to keep separate. Malabou’s response is not to deny the textual divergence but to reframe the question of fidelity. She accepts that Hegel introduces a moment of negativity into energeia, and she accepts that Aristotle would not himself have thought of the divine as self-relating negativity or as pure activity in Hegel’s sense. She refuses, however, the inference that Hegel’s reading is therefore an abuse of dialectical systematization. Instead she argues that Hegel’s interpretive operation is governed by his own thesis about substance: that substance, as it is conceived by Aristotle, includes among its attributes the possibility—what will be its fate, or its future—of being interpreted under conceptual determinations that are not Aristotle’s. The Hegelian wager is that the ability of one epoch to be interpreted from within another’s conceptual horizon is itself inscribed in substance’s mode of being. This is the methodological point at which the principle of plasticity reveals its real argumentative load: it is what permits Hegel to install in energeia the possibility of its own self-differentiation in time, to make of substance an instance that sees itself coming. The supposed misreading is, on this account, the very name for the operation by which Hegel inscribes a Christian principle of self-differentiation within an Aristotelian substance, and by which he discovers in hexis, in the noetic habitus, the structure of an originary synthesis preserved between virtuality and actualization.
This careful retrieval of the Aristotelian hexis is in turn the basis for the decisive reading of habit in the Anthropology as a speculative time within time. I can easily say, Malabou paraphrases, that at a certain moment I possess this or that knowledge, this or that talent, without at that moment making use of it. Habit is a presence held in withdrawal, an epoche of being that is also the very form of preservation. This presence-in-withdrawal, this suspended being, traverses simultaneously past, present, and future. Habit is older than its first moment of acquisition; it belongs to the present whenever it can be exercised; and it belongs to the future as the task that an actualization must always still bring to fulfillment. Theoria, the verb that in Aristotle’s account names both contemplation and exercise, designates the circle in which hexis and its actualization are mutually anterior to one another: the pupil contemplates while learning, but the contemplation is already an exercise; one must already have actualized an aptitude in order that habit may come into being. The impossible bind of the novice, Malabou writes, is not a mere paradox; it reveals time’s second nature, its chronology suspending chronology. Habit is the modality of time that has been raised to a power, the power of time itself. From this raised power follows the very possibility of plasticity in the human being and, ultimately, in substance.
The chapter on habit and organic life extends this analysis with a striking move: habit is not specifically anthropological. Hegel’s reading of the De Anima and his elaborations in the Philosophy of Nature show that habit is operative throughout the organic kingdom and is even, by extension, present in the vegetable. The plant assimilates and adapts; the animal, more emphatically, is governed by what Hegel, following Bichat, calls the universal modification of life by habit. The chapter introduces four determinations of the animal habitus: contraction, internal disposition, conservation of change, and reversibility of energies. The animal organism is the contraction of the elements that surround it (water, air, nitrogen, carbon), and this contraction, lacking a German term, is rendered by Hegel through idealization. The animal is a habitual being because it conserves the modifications that its environment has impressed upon it, because repetition transforms what was once received from outside into a tendency that springs from inside, and because in the syllogism of sensibility, irritability, and reproduction it discovers an organic elasticity. The eye, Malabou (with Deleuze) puts it, binds light, it is itself a bound light. This binding is at once contemplative and active. Habit, in the broadest sense, is what gives a being the impression of its existence as something continuous, and even in the animal it is the source of an elementary voir venir—an anticipation, a need, a desire, an accumulation of retentions and expectations.
The consequence is that habit cannot be the differentia by which the human is distinguished from the animal. The book takes this as a positive determination: the proper of man, le propre de l’homme, is not a possession that man holds over the animal in virtue of habit. The chapter that succeeds it, ‘The Proper of Man’ in Question, accordingly turns to the question of human specificity from a different angle. Hegel’s first apparent answer is language; but the analysis must recognize that human language is preceded by what Hegel calls the individual characteristic of speech, the physiognomic and pathognomic expressivity of body and face. In the section on Observing Reason in the Phenomenology of Spirit, this immediate signifying of the body is shown to fail: the lines of the hand, the timbre of the voice, the features of the face point toward an inner that no science (Lavater’s physiognomy is the explicit foil) can render as such. The dialectical lesson is not that the inner is hidden but that the natural sign signifies too much and too little at once, and that the very form of natural expressivity collapses under its own weight. Human nature is always already second nature; the human is only what he has done; the body is the sign that the individual has himself produced by setting his original nature to work.
The economy of immediate signification therefore must give way, by its own collapse, to a different signifying economy. Malabou names it the speculative economy, the economy in which the soul’s work of art emerges. The closing pages of the Anthropology, in which the human appears as the soul’s work of art, are read through their explicit reference to Greek sculpture. In the sculpting of the body, in the disappearance of immediate signifying into the formed style of the figure, human characteristics are not given but emerge. The plastic individuality of the Greeks—they are great and free, Hegel writes, grown independently on the soil of their own inherently substantial personality, self-made, and developing into what they essentially were and wanted to be—is the model in which the sensible translation of spirit and the spiritual mediation of the sensible coincide. Pericles, Phidias, Plato, Sophocles, Thucydides, Xenophon, Socrates: these are men whose accidental commitments (Pericles to politics, Phidias to sculpture, Plato to philosophy) have, by repetition and exercise, become essential, taken on the integrity of a form. Habit, in this Greek figure, is the operation by which the contingent becomes essential. Habit, Malabou writes in a formulation that retroactively organizes Part I, is the unforeseen element of the genus; it is the future of the undifferentiated genus. Plastic individuality is therefore not a special property of certain individuals but the figure in which the general logic of substance—the becoming-essential of the accident—takes sensuous form.
The conclusion of Part I, however, registers a counter-stress. The whole reading culminates in a reversal that is also a methodological warning. The fully plastic soul is the soul that has lost the meaning of mere soul, of the immediacy of spirit; the human, in becoming the work of art of his own habit, has exhausted himself. Habit murders man, Malabou writes, with a calculated severity. Once the end is reached, the subject disappears; the habit of living brings on death, or, if put quite abstractly, is death itself. After the Anthropology, the human will not return as a positive subject of speculative development until the moment of the Incarnation in the section on Revealed Religion. This is the first internal friction the work cultivates: the very figure (the human) through whom the Greek modality of plasticity is sensibly disclosed turns out to be a disappearing subject. The substance-subject’s first form of self-differentiation is also its first death. The reader is left with a tension that the second part of the book is then required to address: if the human dies in the very work by which spirit incarnates itself, in what figure will the substance-subject continue, and what new modality of self-determination will Hegel’s text bring forth?
The transition into Part II, Hegel on God, takes seriously the strangeness of resting an inquiry into the modern concept of subjectivity on a reading of the Revealed Religion of the Philosophy of Spirit. Malabou justifies this displacement by reconstructing the historical-philosophical ground that Hegel himself had laid down for it. In the Lectures on the Philosophy of History and the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel argues that the principle of spiritual inwardness—the principle that constitutes modern subjectivity in its philosophical form—first emerges as a principle in the Roman world but receives its absolute form only in Christianity, and is conceptually realized only with Descartes and, in its full articulation, with Kant. Modern philosophy could not develop except on the basis of religion, Hegel writes, and it is incumbent on philosophy to redeem and set free the speculative content of Christianity by raising it to the absolute concept. From the Aristotelian determination of substance as a being independent of all others, by way of the trinitarian doctrine, the term subjectum will gradually acquire the modern sense of a Self. The I = I, in Hegel’s reformulation, enunciates the principle of absolute reason and freedom, and it is the Kantian synthetic unity of apperception that gives this principle its highest expression. The Revealed Religion of the Encyclopedia therefore is not a domain external to philosophy but the place where the becoming-subject of substance takes the form of divine subjectivity itself.
The whole of Part II is organized by a pair of opposed pressures that the book holds in tension. On one side is what Malabou calls the theologians’ contra Hegel: the array of objections, raised by Catholic and Lutheran readers alike, that Hegel’s God is without future, that he has been submitted to the necessity of the concept, that the dialectical reading of Entäußerung and kenosis has introduced lack into God, that Hegel’s ontotheology completes the metaphysics of presence by making God a collector who joins the totality of being which time has dispersed. On the other side is the book’s positive thesis: that the passivity of God, far from being a deficiency, is the very form in which God receives the form he gives, and that the right name for this twofold relation is plasticity. The Revealed Religion of the Encyclopedia, which Malabou patiently traces through its three syllogisms—the syllogism of being-there (Incarnation, Death, Resurrection), the syllogism of reflection (the believer’s identification with Christ), and the syllogism of necessity (the worshipping community)—presents the trinitarian movement as the very form of the substance-subject. The Father, the moment of substance in its potentiality, undergoes self-determination in the production of the Son; the moment of Spirit completes the reconciliation of that split. From this dialectical sequence the modern philosophical attributes of subjectivity are deducible.
The theologians, taken seriously, open the work to its sharpest internal frictions. Eberhard Jüngel, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Barth, and Jean-Luc Marion are summoned not as foils but as interlocutors whose objections must be met if Malabou’s reading is to stand. Jüngel reconstructs the path by which the term substantia came to coincide with the modern subject, and he registers in Hegel a profound dissonance with the Lutheran doctrine of kenosis: for Hegel, the Death of God grounds an absolute spirit that transforms the union of natures into a universal truth and condition, while for Lutheran theology that union must remain ascribed to the person of Jesus Christ. Balthasar charges Hegel with an autophagia in God, an ontological insatiability, and reads Hegel’s recurrent metaphor of eating as a sign of the speculative consumption of the divine. Marion, drawing on the Eucharistic analyses of God Without Being, argues that Hegel’s reduction of the Catholic mystery of transubstantiation to a metaphysical idolatry paradoxically reinstates idolatry on the level of consciousness itself: the eucharistic presence never finds itself as definitively subordinated to metaphysics as in the conception that criticises the theology of transubstantiation as metaphysical. Barth, finally, denies that Hegel’s identification of God with the dialectical method can be reconciled with divine sovereignty, since this identification implies a scarcely acceptable limitation, even the abolition of God’s sovereignty.
Malabou does not dismiss these objections. She follows them carefully, partly because they bring out the full edge of the question of futurity. The theologians, on her own paraphrase, converge on three claims: that Hegel’s God does not promise, since the necessity of the concept removes the mystery of his coming-to-be; that this God is not anticipated, since the believer is asked to renounce all hope; and that the philosophical sublation of representation indicates the omnipotence of the concept, the complete victory of self-presence. The unity of these objections lies in the imputation of an absent future. Malabou’s response is to demonstrate that the imputation is legitimate only as long as one separates the two strands of the Hegelian Death of God. If one detaches the theological event of divine alienation from its philosophical replica—from the alienation of the modern transcendental subject—one will indeed find a deficient negativity within God. Restored to one another, however, the two strands disclose a different structure. The Death of God, in the formulation of Faith and Knowledge, is a moment of the supreme Idea; it is purely a moment of the supreme Idea, even as it is also the feeling on which the religion of modern times rests. Hegel had inherited the formula from a Lutheran chorale (Johannes Rist’s stanza of 1641, attached to a Catholic hymn), and Malabou reconstructs the trajectory by which the patristic, scholastic, mystical, and Reformation traditions had circled the question of whether Deus crucifixus could be said in earnest. What Hegel does, on her reading, is to make the formula a moment in the divine being, a first negation logically destined to be reduplicated and reversed: the death of God is the death of death, and Hegel’s interpretation of mors mortis as a negation of negation gives this trope its specifically speculative form.
The transposition of kenosis into philosophy is then read in Faith and Knowledge: the great form of the world spirit that has come to cognition of itself in the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte—what Hegel calls the poetry of grief of Protestantism, its infinite nostalgia—is the philosophical correlate of divine alienation. Reason has placed that which is better than it in a faith outside and above itself; reason has acknowledged its own nothingness; it has made itself the handmaiden of a faith once more. Critical philosophy, far from emancipating itself from theology, completes the kenotic movement at the level of the philosophical concept. The Hegelian phrase God himself is dead is therefore the precise crossing-point at which the divine sacrifice and the metaphysics of subjectivity meet. The kenosis of the divine and the kenosis of the transcendental subject share one another’s mode of time. They are not two events but one event in two aspects, and Malabou identifies the operator that joins them as representation (Vorstellung).
This is one of the strongest moves in Part II, and it requires the reader to refuse a certain familiar reduction. Vorstellung, Malabou argues, is not a figurative procedure unique to consciousness; it is not a faculty; the Encyclopedia‘s exposition of representation belongs to Psychology, not to the Phenomenology of Spirit. Representation is a psychological act defined as the combined work of interiorization (Erinnerung) and exteriorization (Ent-Äußerung). The Hegelian text on Revealed Religion makes representation operate in God, not only in consciousness: God represents only himself and does so only to himself, er stellt sich nur vor und stellt sich selber vor sich. Consciousness only represents God because God re-presents himself; consciousness is only at a distance from God because God distances himself from himself. Representation is therefore the operator by which the speculative content is given the form of a temporalization, and it is the very form of Entäußerung. Without this thesis, Malabou contends, one cannot understand why representation gives its form (that of separate spheres) to the religious content. With it, the divine alienation becomes legible as the manifestation of a new ontological guise of time: not the Greek time of teleology but the time of finite phenomenal subjectivity, the time inaugurated by the modern subject’s Vor-stellen.
The chapter on Divine Plasticity, or the Turn of Events gathers the consequences of this analysis. Time is not what it is: this is one of the work’s central, recurring formulations, and it returns here with a dense set of determinations. Time turns; it is susceptible to revolution; negativity is its turning point. Christianity, in Hegel’s account, brings about time’s great volte face, and the death of Christ is the central point around which everything turns. The plasticity in God, the title’s animating notion, is intended to register this temporality. Self-determination, in the modern modality, takes the form of Entäußerung: subjectivity determines itself by distancing itself from itself, becoming other than it is; its form is representation; its hypotyposis is the Incarnation. Within the speculative play of God with himself, time is divided into moments in a strict logical sense and in a strict temporal sense at once: the Incarnation is a moment (an Augenblick, a moment of time) and a moment (a Moment, in the logical sense) of the development of the absolute Idea. The Christian God is the very exemplar of the reflecting eye; in him the gaze is born; he is the figure in which to see (what is) coming takes its modern, exclusive, singular form.
Three concepts—finitude, phenomenon, world—are reorganized by this temporality. Limitation (Schranke), as distinguished by Hegel from limit (Grenze) in the Science of Logic, is the operator by which a being is at the same time within itself and related to the limit as to something which is not. From limitation springs the transcendence of the finite, but representational thinking conceives this transcendence as a relation between two alien instances—the finite and the infinite, the sensible and the supersensible, time and eternity—and thereby produces the figure of the ought-to-be (das Sollen). Christian revelation, on Malabou’s reading, requires of thought that time which is promise itself, that future which is pro-tension. The phenomenon, qua moment, is being for the other; the world is the connectedness (Zusammenhang) of finite existents in their reciprocal relations, the logical form whose historical correspondence is the Roman world in which Christ first appeared. The dialectic of phenomenal appearing—what Manfred Baum, cited approvingly, isolates as the Hegelian innovation: a movement in which a determination at once establishes itself and vanishes—is the key form of representational temporality.
The conclusion of Part II completes the displacement of Heidegger’s reading of the famous passage on the Aufhebung of time at the end of the Phenomenology. Malabou’s claim is precise. The Aufhebung of time at the threshold of Absolute Knowledge does not apply to time as such, but to a certain time: the time which lies ahead, the linear time of Entäußerung, the time of representation. Linear time is itself Entäußerung, she writes, citing the chapter on Absolute Knowledge: this revelation is the raising up of its depth, or its extension, the negativity of this withdrawn I, and this revelation is also the concept’s time, in that this externalization is in its own self externalized. The time that is sublated by Absolute Knowledge is therefore a determinate epoch in the relation of spirit to its sensuous form, the moment in which the concept gives itself the shape of an existent thing, becoming in its turn the object of sensory intuition, of a momentary phenomenal presence. Heidegger, on Malabou’s reading, fails to make explicit the temporality of alienation; he treats Entäußerung as an atemporal category and so misses the fact that the Aufhebung in question concerns one specific form of temporality and not time at large. This is one of the work’s most pointed counter-readings, and its philosophical leverage is considerable. If the Aufhebung is the suspension of an epoch and not the suspension of time itself, then Hegel’s text is not the closure that Heidegger had described; Hegelian time is plural, includes several stages, and survives the dialectical sublation that Heidegger thought it could not survive.
It is at the join of Part II and Part III that the work’s central tension is most fully exposed. Malabou closes Part II by recalling that Hegel identifies divine subjectivity as a schematizing faculty, and that this identification carries on, in his own way, the Kantian problematic of the transcendental imagination. In Faith and Knowledge, Hegel hails the truly speculative idea of the imagination, the idea of authentic apriority that Kant had assigned to the form of the transcendental imagination, and Hegel goes further than Kant in identifying the imagination with intuitive understanding (anschauender Verstand). Imagination, in Kant’s famous determination, is what permits something to be represented in its absence; it institutes a determinate relation between being and non-being. By identifying God with transcendental imagination, Hegel inscribes within God time, not lack. The capacity to see in advance, the originary unity of opposites that the transcendental imagination contains a priori, is the modern modality of to see (what is) coming. Only Christ, in Feuerbach’s formula that Malabou quotes approvingly, is the plastic personality; figure belongs to personality; figure is the effective reality of personality; only Christ is the personal God.
The book then opens its third part, Hegel on the Philosopher, or, two forms of the fall, with a programmatic claim that retroactively reorganizes everything that has preceded it. The unfolding of the substance-subject in its logical and chronological modes is now complete; the substance-subject (in which the accident becomes essential) and the substance-subject (in which essence becomes accidental) merge as one in the unity of absolute knowledge. Far from being a closure, however, the moment of Absolute Knowledge brings forth a new era of plasticity, a new modality of self-determination in which subjectivity gives itself the form which at the same time it receives. This is not stasis but metamorphosis. The whole of Part III is devoted to working out the structure of this transformation, and to defending it against the criticism (raised already by Hegel’s contemporaries, and reformulated by Heidegger) that Absolute Knowledge is a coup de force arbitrarily suspending the bad infinity of relation.
The reading of Absolute Knowledge takes its own time. Malabou begins with a remark that has the force of a methodological turn. The dialectical Aufhebung—the operation that, on the standard account, has dominated the development of spirit—must itself be subject to its own law. Why, she asks, has no translator or interpreter of Hegel dreamt of applying to the terms aufheben and Aufhebung the very meanings for which they stand? If sublation is to be the truly dialectical operation it claims to be, it must itself be transformed; it must suppress and preserve itself; it must evolve, as a term, within the same process which it regulates and measures. The book proposes that Hegel does in fact sublate aufheben into aufheben, Aufhebung into Aufhebung, and that the moment of Absolute Knowledge is the place in the System where this metamorphosis takes its decisive form. The claim is not minor. It positions the entire reading against the suspicion that Hegelian Aufhebung is a frozen procedure, by showing that the very procedure includes its own self-transformation as the condition of its dialectical consistency.
Two synthetic instances are then identified as the historical-philosophical contents that the Aufhebung gathers up: the Aristotelian originary unity of dynamis and energeia, mediated by hexis; and the Kantian originary synthetic unity of apperception, mediated by the transcendental imagination. The virtual and the imaginary, taken together, are the energy of the negative on which the dialectical operation feeds. From this twofold genealogy of the Aufhebung there follows a richer determination of its work. The double meaning of suppression and the double meaning of preservation must both be activated. Dialectical sublation, Malabou writes, proceeds through a movement whereby, at one and the same time, it contracts and alienates the material on which it acts. Each moment of spirit is, in retrospect, a hexis, a habitual disposition whose virtual existence remains ready to be reactualized; each moment is also an Äußerung, an exteriorization, an alienation that demands its corresponding interiorization. The Aufhebung therefore performs, simultaneously, the work of speculative habit and the work of speculative mourning. The two are not rivals but complementary. Habit secures the contractive side; alienation secures the kenotic side; together they make the Aufhebung a movement that suppresses and preserves at two levels at once.
This double determination is then anchored in a single Hegelian motif that Malabou makes one of the work’s pivots: simplification (Vereinfachung). Simplification, as Malabou unfolds it, has four interlocking determinations. It is the abbreviation by which thought, as the most powerful epitomist (der mächtigste Epitomator), reduces the rich variety of phenomenal content to logical essentialities. It is the sharpening of meaning into points, the rigidity by which thought confers on its determinations a consistency of being (Halt) more durable than any phenomenal quality. It is the facilitation (frayage) by which the path that spirit had laboriously cleared becomes shorter for those who come after, until what once preoccupied mature minds is reduced to the level of facts, exercises, and even games for children. And it is the acceleration by which spirit’s content seeks its own condensation in the very form of the Outline, the Grundriß, which is for Hegel the genuine and definitive form of philosophical exposition. Simplification is, by Malabou’s careful description, form playing with form. It transposes the figural Gestalt into an abbreviated Formbestimmung, it reorganizes the modes of form across the Hegelian distinctions of typos, peras, and eidos, and it gives spirit the eidetic determination by which each moment acquires its own characteristic (Eigentümlichkeit).
A delicate ambivalence runs through the whole exposition of simplification. On the one hand, simplification is a life-destroying formalization: spirit submits to its self-sacrifice and is transformed into a lifeless, skeletal thing, a row of closed and labelled boxes in a grocer’s stall. On the other hand, it is the very condition under which the speculative content can be appropriated by an individual at all; the individual devours culture as if it were his inorganic nature, and reproduces in his own being that very destruction innate to simplification. Malabou registers this ambivalence by reading simplification as the combined effect of habit and kenosis. By blunting and flattening, habit reduces spirit’s distance from itself; by alienating itself in form, spirit sheds its own self. To preserve, Hegel writes in the Science of Logic, includes a negative element, namely, that something is removed from its immediacy and so from an existence which is open to external influences, in order to preserve it. Foreshortening is the precondition of longevity; sacrifice is the price of survival. The Aufhebung, on Malabou’s reading, suppresses, but what it suppresses it saves and shelters. The System is the dwelling place where each determinate moment, having become a point, finds its proper place within a totality that is the most concentrated, most concrete, and most subjective.
A reader who follows this analysis closely will have noticed that the question of agency has begun to shift. If the Aufhebung transforms itself, who or what is the subject of this transformation? The chapter On the Self takes up this question and answers it with a precise displacement. Malabou returns to the third syllogism of the Philosophy of Spirit: Spirit–Logic–Nature, the syllogism whose middle term is self-knowing reason, the absolutely universal. The I think is no longer the originary instance; it is one moment of a larger circuit, a moment that occupies a determinate place between subjectivity and objectivity. The Self (Selbst), in this third syllogism, is a primordial subjectivity, a synthetic instance earlier than the I-self. Malabou marks the displacement by reading a sequence of Hegelian verbs—aufheben, befreien, ablegen, aufgeben, ablassen, weglassen—as a single motif of speculative abrogation, a letting-go by which thought, the proposition, and the I relinquish the fixity of their positions. Abrogation is not a renunciation external to the Aufhebung; it is its fulfillment, a sublation of sublation, the result of the Aufhebung’s work on itself. From the dialectical opposition between subject and object, by way of the I think that had served as their condition, the System emerges as a synthesis without an I. The Self is the System itself, the System as a Self, a primordial autos whose automatic movement is what Hegel had named Selbstbewegung and Selbstbestimmung.
The introduction of the term automatism requires a careful gloss. Malabou is aware of the suspicion that it might import a mechanistic image into the System. She forestalls the suspicion by recovering the Greek etymology of autos: that which happens on its own, in two senses, since this can mean that which happens by itself out of necessity and that which happens by itself by accident or chance. Aristotle had used automaton to designate chance, opposed to tyche; the verbal forms include both senses. The speculative automatism, Malabou writes, is an economy. It economizes by incorporating both tendencies of self-determination: the becoming essential of the accident and the becoming accidental of essence. The relation between necessity and contingency is then read with extreme care. Hegel’s claim that necessity determines itself as contingency and that contingency is absolute necessity is not a simple inversion. Necessary being is being which is causa sui, but precisely because it grounds itself, it experiences itself as radically passive in relation to itself; necessity forgets its own origin. A point of sheer randomness dwells within essential being. Contingency, conversely, is a power of eruption, a pure event, imposing itself absolutely and hence of necessity. The dialectical identity of necessity and contingency is freedom: Necessity does not become freedom by vanishing, Hegel writes, but only because its still inner identity is manifested; contingency becomes freedom in the same movement.
This careful reading of necessity and contingency is the text’s most subtle response to the question whether the System is a fatalism. Hegel does not deny contingency; he refuses, in the face of what occurs, to place necessity and contingency within an order of occurrence. What occurs does not arise out of a pre-existing foundation, nor is the accident itself the foundation. Their co-implication is primary. The absolute fact of Hegel’s philosophy, on Malabou’s reading, is the emergence of the random in the very bosom of necessity and the fact that the random becomes necessary. The time-form that Absolute Knowledge sublates is the time in which the unfolding of spirit appears as a free contingent event, the time that leaves us always time to think what might otherwise have been. To dialectically sublate that time is to refuse to ask whether a wholly other origin might have been possible, while at the same time recognizing—as Malabou explicitly notes—that the question of the wholly other, something that cannot be thought without a feeling of vertigo, is always in fact a question about an origin that could have been wholly otherwise. Hegel’s position does not foreclose this question; it absolves itself of the claim to answer it. The work’s reading of the dialectic of the origin of dialectic—Plato’s invention of dialectic as essential discourse, Aristotle’s transformation of it into discourse of the accidental—is the textual locus through which Malabou registers the inherent contradiction of dialectic and shows it to be the very pulse and vital spark of Hegelian thought.
The conclusion of the chapter on the Self is, accordingly, less a closure than an opening. Simplification is finally complete in the stage of Absolute Knowledge, when from a distance spirit looks on at the determinatenesses in their self-movement, as they take on the form of essential accidents, that is, of singularities. The self-identical determinateness is now posited as the whole, the self-identical negativity: the singular. The release of energy that this metamorphosis effects is the work of no one; the I think and the determinatenesses both renounce the fixity and independence of their positions; what occupies the space they once held is a composition of perspectives, a space-between, a reciprocal mirroring. The forms of spirit, all the styles and versions of spirit, everything left behind by the past, become cases in the double sense of the word: they are the determinate moments that have happened as pure accidents and as exemplary individualities revealing their necessity and its force. Distributed in this way, Malabou writes, the individuals are ready to engage again, in new constructions, new readings, new thoughts.
It is precisely at this point that the figure of the philosopher, as the third instance of the triad Man–God–Philosopher, emerges in its proper form. The chapter on the philosopher, the reader, and the speculative proposition presents what Malabou calls speculative hermeneutics: a hermeneutics that finds its formal condition in Hegel’s claim that only an exposition that rigidly excludes the usual way of relating the parts of a proposition can reach the goal of plasticity. The whole reading of the speculative proposition is now interpreted through the figure of the reader, since it is the reader who experiences the conflict between the form and the content of the proposition, who has the responsibility of setting forth the return of the concept into itself. The speculative proposition makes plasticity of meaning inseparable from plasticity of reading. The philosopher’s task is, in a sense, to inhabit the form of the proposition (subject–copula–predicate) and to recognize within it the inclination, the casus, the ptosis that grammar has always inscribed in language. Heidegger’s reminder, in the Introduction to Metaphysics, that the Greek ptosis designated any kind of inflection of the fundamental form (deviation, declension) in nouns and verbs, is recovered here. The proposition is a scene of the advent; the predicate does not add itself to the subject but comes from it; the casus is the fall through which substance reveals its own self-inflection.
The treatment of the speculative proposition is one of the work’s tightest argumentative passages. Malabou develops the claim by reconstructing the Hegelian critique of the ratiocinative method, in which the reader simply reports the linkage of subject and predicate, the I of the reader replacing the subject of the proposition and turning it into a second subject whose passivity duplicates the inactivity of the first. Against this method she sets the speculative method, in which the reading subject experiences a counter-thrust (Gegenstoß): faced with a proposition like God is being or the actual is the universal, the reader cannot make the linear transition from subject to predicate, because the predicate has shown itself to be the very subject of the proposition. The reader sinks into the content; she suffers a loss of ground; she finds that the proposition resists the easy passage that grammar promised. Out of this resistance follows the demand to re-read, to recover from the fall of predication by producing another proposition. Reading is, on Malabou’s reading, the place in which the becoming-essential of contingency and the becoming-accidental of essence meet experimentally: what seems to be the predicate becomes the whole independent mass, while the predicate, as predicate, ades away in the pure universality of the subject.
What is striking in this final phase of the work is the way it articulates a positive philosophy of interpretation. The reader who has been led, by the speculative ordeal, to give up the rigid form of the I, is not simply released into an arbitrary commentary. The plasticity of reading is plasticity in the precise sense Hegel defined in the Aesthetics: at once universal and individual, both giving and receiving form. The reading subject’s singularity, distinguished from the merely solipsistic particularity of the I, is the style through which the universal speculative content takes individual form. Plastic reading, accordingly, engages the Self of the reader and is always subjective, but the subjectivity it engages is the subjectivity of singularity, not of the indifferent knowing I. In a passage that the work returns to with deliberate insistence, Hegel declares that a plastic discourse demands a plastic sense of receptivity and understanding; the reader who is asked to philosophize in this manner is the speculative counterpart of the Greek plastic individual, both universal in his attention to the matter at hand and individual in the interpretive form he gives to that matter. The speculative proposition therefore demands a re-reading in which the reader, having lost the I, must rewrite what she reads. Hegel’s text is for this reason genuinely speculative: a statement, even if already written, is only speculative in the true sense when it cannot be read without being rewritten.
The conclusion of the work, The Event of Reading, gathers these threads with a self-reflexive force that reorganizes the whole. Why, at the end of this work, Malabou asks, do we invoke the concept of reading? The answer is by now textually prepared: the Hegelian idea of plastic reading confers on the notion of to see (what is) coming its real meaning. Voir venir designates at once the visibility and the invisibility of whatever comes. The future is not the absolutely invisible nor the absolutely visible; it is the in-between of an awaiting that does not await, of a seeing that does not see. Reading, on Malabou’s account, is precisely the situation of this in-between. The reader of Hegel sees and does not see; the speculative content is yet to come and already arrived. To escape both the tautology of paraphrase and the heterology of arbitrary commentary, the reader must enter into the speculative ordeal that comes from the relationship between the difference of the reader and the identity of the text. Hegel’s absolute, Malabou quotes Bourgeois, is actualized in the final, concrete identity of this book’s reading; to bring the Encyclopedia back to life means to create it again for and in oneself; to re-read the Encyclopedia is to rewrite it. The remark places the reader at the center of the System and refuses, with a deliberate restraint, to allow the System to be a possession.
The work’s most personal moment is then offered. Malabou marks the genesis of her own concept by recalling that everything began, or began again, when, ‘falling’ one day onto the term ‘plastic’, I was brought to a stop, at once intrigued and grateful. She had begun by establishing an enumeration and an index of all the lexical usages of plastic in Hegel’s text, in order to discern what was philosophically at stake in them. Yet the procedure proper to this philological labor was not the procedure of the knowing I. Plasticity was imposed on me at the very moment when the I was broken in the ordeal of its discovery, that is, at the moment of the discovery of plasticity which, by definition, does not need an I to be deployed. This admission is methodologically crucial. The book’s own genealogy is presented as an instance of the very event of reading it has been describing, a singular fall onto a term that turned out to gesture toward a whole realm of the unknown. The construction of plasticity as a concept is therefore the plasticity of plasticity in action, and the work’s argumentative consistency depends on its recognizing that its own emergence repeats the structure it analyzes.
The conclusion then performs two final reorganizations. The first is the explicit articulation of two powers at work in Hegelian temporality. Plasticity is an integrating and informing power, an originary synthetic power; but it also requires a contrary power of dissociation and rupture. These two powers, Malabou writes, characterize perfectly the gait of the Hegelian text: gathering and splitting, both at work in the System’s own formation. They are two inseparable powers, allowing an idea of temporalizing synthesis and an idea of factual eruption to be articulated together. Plasticity is what it is, plastic: the originary operation of receiving and giving form is not a rigid and fixed structure but an instance which can evolve, an instance that can give itself new forms. By this self-reflexive determination, Malabou completes the Canguilhemian protocol with which she had begun. The concept has been varied in its extension, generalized by incorporating its exceptions, exported beyond its original domain, and given the function of a form. The form it has acquired is the very form of the temporalizing synthesis through which the substance-subject sees itself coming.
The second reorganization addresses the relation of Hegel’s philosophy to its readers, and in particular to Heidegger. Malabou notes the paradox of her own enterprise: by insisting on the originality of Hegel’s reading of Aristotle, she risks making that reading appear as the most authentically traditional; by insisting on the singularity of Hegel’s interpretation of Christianity, she risks proving only that Hegel’s God is the good God. The risk is not avoidable, but it is a productive risk, since the encyclopedic circle can be interpreted both as the final reassembly of the tradition in all its purity and as the result of a recycling of that same tradition. Synthetic philosophy—the term recovers the modern chemical sense in which materials and forms can be reconstituted chemically—is engendered by an exegetical recomposition, by an interpretative audacity released from the demand for objective fidelity to a referent. This recomposition is what Malabou sees the System making possible.
The final pages of the conclusion turn to Heidegger and propose, with a striking reversal, that Hegel reads Heidegger. The plasticity of the Hegelian concept of time is offered as a clandestine resistance to the Heideggerian charge of vulgarity. Malabou notes that Heidegger himself, in a seminar on Metaphysics VIII, had stressed the meaning of the adjective plastic in its connotation of strong, resistant: something plastic does not refuse itself, it can uphold; the lump of clay tolerates something; we call plastic only that to which, generally speaking, something can happen. These remarks, however, remain isolated occurrences in Heidegger’s writings; the term plasticity never appears in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, even though that work is dedicated to recovering Kant’s determination of time as an originary power of formation. The implication Malabou draws is delicate. Hegel, in retrospect, has offered to Heidegger an instrument indispensable to the intelligibility of his ideas; the times of Hegel’s philosophy, with a generosity Heidegger consistently denies, were perhaps generous enough to offer him a name for his own time of ontological difference.
The book closes by gathering the pair saturation and vacancy, in which the modern condition of not having time ahead of oneself is registered. The philosophical tradition, reaching its completion, has as its double the exhaustion of the outside world; the new world order means the impossibility of any exotic, isolated or geopolitically marginal event. Yet this saturation is felt as a vacuum, and the major problem of our time is in fact the arrival of free time. Technological simplification, the shortening of distances, all of which Hegel had heralded with his notion of Vereinfachung, bring about a state where we must acknowledge that there is nothing more to do. Yet this promise is also a promise of novelty, a promise that there are forms of life which must be invented. Plasticity is the name for the future understood as future within closure, the possibility of a structural transformation: a transformation of structure within structure, a mutation right at the level of the form. Malabou notes that the contemporary use of plasticity in cell biology and neurobiology—the plasticity of the nervous and immune systems, their ability to tolerate modifications and structural transformations—is not accidental. The plasticity of a closed system to welcome new phenomena, all the while transforming itself, is precisely what Hegel’s notion had already named. The same notion is also in alliance with the atomic bomb (Plastikbombe); plasticity is no less a mortal notion than a vital one. The work ends with an austere image: the philosopher bears the responsibility of protecting and preserving the rudimentary being of subjectivity, its fragile and finite kernel. Between the emergence and the annihilation of form, plasticity carries, as its own possibility, self-engendering and self-destruction. Hegel’s philosophy, on this final formulation, invites us to enter into the serenity and the peril of the Sunday of life.
It is now possible to look back on the inner movement of the work and register, with the calmness of retrospection, what the book has done. The first impression, which the introduction had cultivated with deliberate humility, is that the entire enterprise rests on an interpretive wager: that an apparently marginal Hegelian term, occurring with notable economy in the corpus, can be elaborated into a comprehensive concept, capable of grasping the philosophy of Hegel as a whole. The wager is honored by a strict adherence to the text, in which each region of Hegel’s exposition is reread with attention to formulations that might otherwise appear local. The closer determinations of plasticity are won not by stipulation but by a slow, accumulative integration. From the lexical analysis of plastik in the Aesthetics to the philosophical determination of plasticity as form-activity (Formtätigkeit) in the absolute relation of substance and accidents, from the plastic individuality of the Greeks to the plastic discourse demanded of philosophical exposition, the concept thickens by being progressively bound to the very logic of substance.
A second feature, emerging more clearly when the three Parts are seen together, is the work’s symmetry without identity. Each of the three Parts is concerned with one moment of the substance-subject, and each Part exhibits the same threefold structure: a presentation of the relevant Hegelian text (Anthropology, Revealed Religion, Philosophy); a critical encounter with a body of objections (the standard depreciation of the Anthropology, the theological objections to Hegel’s God, the criticisms of Absolute Knowledge as coup de force); and a constructive demonstration of the operation of plasticity within the texts. The symmetry is rigorous, but it is not formal repetition. Each Part refers backward to its predecessors and forward to its successor, and the determinations the concept acquires in one Part transform the readings that have already been offered. The Greek figure of plastic individuality, whose first form is the exemplary individual sculpted by habit, is read retroactively as the form in which the becoming-essential of the accident takes its sensible shape. The modern figure of the divine plasticity, whose first form is the kenotic alienation of God in the Incarnation, is read retroactively as the form in which the becoming-accidental of essence takes its sensible shape. The two are then dialectically combined in the moment of Absolute Knowledge, in which the subject sees itself coming in both forms at once and the Aufhebung metamorphoses into the speculative abrogation whose grammar is the speculative proposition. The book is therefore an integrated system whose unity consists in articulated relations: the same questions return, but with altered valence; the same texts are re-read, but with new constraints; and the responsibility for argumentative continuity migrates from one conceptual cluster to another as the exposition advances.
A third feature is the work’s tension-sensitivity, which is most visible in the way it treats its own central concept. Plasticity, throughout the book, is shown to be intrinsically double. It is the capacity to give form and the capacity to receive form; it is solidification and explosion; it is the statue and the bomb; it is habit and kenosis; it is the integrating power and the power of dissociation. Each of these doublings is held together without collapse, but each generates its own pressure. The most consequential pressure is the one that the analysis of habit places on the very figure of the human. If habit is the principle of plastic individuation, and if plastic individuation is the form in which spirit incarnates itself, then the human—the bearer of habit—must be both the privileged sensible medium of spirit and a disappearing subject. The book registers this tension explicitly and refuses to resolve it. Habit murders man, Malabou writes; the soul, having become a work of art, has lost the meaning of mere soul. Yet this murder is not a failure but a transition: the human dies into the absolute spirit, and the substance-subject continues in the figure of God and ultimately of the philosopher. The reader is left, at the close of Part I, with the registered fact that the very work by which the human is sensibly instantiated is also the work by which the human is exhausted as a sensible figure. This is one of the work’s most carefully sustained internal frictions, and it is the friction that the second Part is required to address in its own register.
The same kind of pressure is sustained in the encounter with theology. The book’s response to the theological objections is not a dismissal but a redirection. Malabou accepts that the theologians’ charges, taken in isolation, name something real about the Hegelian text. If one detaches the theological event of Entäußerung from its philosophical replica, one will indeed find a divine subject burdened with an originary lack, a subject who does not promise and is not anticipated. The book’s defense of Hegel rests on the demonstration that the two strands cannot be detached, that the divine kenosis and the alienation of the modern transcendental subject are mutually informing and constructing, and that the operator that joins them is Vorstellung, understood as a temporalization rather than a faculty. The defense is therefore a structural one. It does not deny the theologians’ textual references; it relocates them within a system whose two faces are inseparable. This is a methodological wager that the book performs without hiding its risks. The risk, registered explicitly in the conclusion, is that the demonstration of Hegel’s fidelity to a Christological vocabulary produces, in the same gesture, a charge of onto-theological completion that the work cannot wholly disarm. Malabou does not pretend to escape this charge; she recasts it as the very condition of any encounter with the Hegelian text in the contemporary scene.
A fourth feature is the work’s careful attention to its own framing. The opening Acknowledgements, which Malabou has placed before the Preliminary Remarks, function as more than a courtesy. The book is a revision of a doctoral thesis, defended on 15 December 1994 at the École Normale Supérieure under the supervision of Derrida, with a jury composed of Bernard Bourgeois, Denise Souche-Dagues, Derrida himself, Jean-François Courtine, and Jean-Luc Marion. Each of these names returns in the text. Bourgeois is the great French Hegelian whose readings of the Absolute Relation and of the difference between substantialist and subjectivist principles are repeatedly cited; Souche-Dagues belongs to the generation that established the dynamic unity of historical becoming and logical truth in Hegelianism; Courtine has provided the editorial support that included the work in his series; Marion is the theological interlocutor whose criticisms in God Without Being form one of the principal objections the book must meet. The Acknowledgements therefore mark a constellation of readers whose presence shapes the work’s interpretive constraints and whose voices return in the body of the argument. Derrida, the supervisor, is the most consequential of these. The book opens with a substantial preface of his own, A Time for Farewells: Heidegger (read by) Hegel (read by) Malabou, originally published in La Revue Philosophique in 1998. The preface, in its turn, is treated as both an introduction to Malabou’s argument and a separate philosophical essay in its own right, and the book’s own argumentative bearing is shaped by the fact that its first authoritative reader is also its supervisor and its most important interlocutor. Malabou’s closing epigraph, I trust that this book—did he ever see it coming?—will show him the extent of my debt, displays the very phrase, voir venir, that organizes the entire work, transposed into a personal register. The Acknowledgements is therefore one of the book’s first interpretive operators: it indicates the institutional and conceptual conditions under which the very concept of plasticity could be elaborated, and it embeds the work in a network of readings that will reappear throughout the text.
The Preliminary Remarks also function more weightily than their brevity suggests. The translator, working from Malabou’s French, has had to negotiate a series of difficulties whose philosophical stakes are non-trivial. Aufhebung has been systematically translated by sublation, aufheben by sublate, modifying the actual translations available in English. Begriff has always been translated by Concept. The third volume of the Science of Logic is rendered as the Doctrine of the Notion [Concept]. Two further difficulties are flagged. The first is the rendering of voir venir: the translator has chosen to see (what is) coming, with the parentheses around (what is) marking the reserve inherent in waiting itself. The second is the rendering of devenir essentiel de l’accident/devenir accidentel de l’essence: the becoming essential of the accident/the becoming accidental of essence. The translator’s choices, modest as they appear, encode the book’s principal philosophical resources. To see (what is) coming, with its parenthesized object, retains the very ambivalence Malabou wants in her voir venir; the becoming essential of the accident and the becoming accidental of essence, by their syntactic symmetry, mark the symmetry of the Greek and modern modalities of self-determination. The English reader inherits, by way of the translator’s apparatus, an argumentative scaffolding that the French reader receives more directly from the idiom. The Preliminary Remarks therefore register the editorial mediation of the work and indicate the constraints under which its claims are to be read in English.
A fifth feature is the work’s handling of the Heideggerian challenge. Heidegger is not a foil but a permanent interlocutor, and the book’s bearing toward him is precise. Malabou never claims to refute Heidegger’s reading of Hegel; she claims to contest it on a determinate point. The contested point is the determination of the time that Hegel’s text sublates at the threshold of Absolute Knowledge. Heidegger, on Malabou’s reading, levels down dialectical time in order to prove that dialectical time is leveled-down time. The dialectic, as Heidegger reads it, takes its own time as the time of presence, and the Aufhebung of time is therefore the final consummation of the metaphysics of presence. Malabou’s response is that the time Hegel sublates is one specific form of time—linear time, the time of Entäußerung, the time of representation—and that this sublation is conditioned by the fact that the Greek modality of teleological time, the unrolling of dynamis and energeia, lies behind it. The criterion of completion assumed by modernity must come, in fact, from a time which is not modernity. The two times meet and unite at the very moment when one of them is dismissed. This is one of the work’s most controlled antinomies, and Malabou treats it with the methodological discipline that the introduction had promised. She does not invent a non-Heideggerian Hegel; she works within Heidegger’s own terms and shows that the temporal dimension of Entäußerung must be made explicit if the analysis is to be complete. By showing that Entäußerung itself is a determinate temporal form, she reverses the polemical charge: it is not Hegel who flattens time, but Heidegger who fails to register the temporal stratification that Hegel’s text actually performs.
The same restraint governs the work’s treatment of contingency, and it is here that the book most clearly refuses the temptation to triumphalism. Malabou does not claim that Hegel is open to the event in any naïve sense. She does not claim that Hegel’s substance is permeable to a wholly other origin. She claims, with patient textual support, that the system contains an internal structure of futurity, a plasticity that allows it to welcome new phenomena while transforming itself, and that this structure is what Heidegger’s reading had not addressed. The future Hegel admits is a future within closure, a transformation of structure within structure. This determination is one of the work’s distinctive achievements, and it is what gives the concept of plasticity its specific philosophical edge. Plasticity, Malabou writes, designates the future understood as future within closure, the possibility of a structural transformation. The phrase resists the more grandiose reading according to which Hegel might be assimilated to a philosophy of the event, and at the same time refuses the consolation of pure closure. Plasticity’s own peril—the way it is always susceptible to petrifaction, the way it shares the lexicon of the bomb—is the price of its viability. The book maintains this peril throughout, and the closing image of the Sunday of life is offered not as a reconciliation but as the serenity and the peril in which contemporary thought is to be carried on.
A sixth feature is the work’s articulation of a positive theory of reading, which is also the work’s most distinctive contribution to philosophical method. The reader, on Malabou’s account, is not a passive recipient of a text but the locus in which the speculative content takes its operative form. The reader’s plasticity is the formal counterpart of substance’s plasticity. To read Hegel speculatively is to let go of the I without being released into arbitrariness, to take on the singularity of a style, to inhabit the proposition’s casus, to allow the Gegenstoß to throw thought from the predicate back to the subject and from the subject back to the predicate, until the reader’s own subjectivity becomes a substantial accident, a style, a plasticity. The book makes good on this account in its own performance: its conclusion includes the autobiographical moment in which Malabou fell upon the term plastic and was compelled to read Hegel’s text under its sign. The autobiographical moment is offered without sentimentality; it is presented as the demonstration that the structure of voir venir—anticipation, surprise, the event of reading—is operative in the very enterprise of forming the concept of plasticity. The work thereby exhibits a self-reflexivity that is rare in commentary and that is not arbitrary: the structure analyzed and the structure of the analysis coincide.
A seventh and final feature is the work’s resistance to closure on its own terms. The book does not claim to complete the elaboration of plasticity. It claims to have shown that plasticity can be elaborated, and that the elaboration changes the available reading of Hegel. The conclusion explicitly registers the unfinishedness of the project. Plasticity is essentially astonishing, Malabou writes; to demonstrate that, it must be constituted in a schema which is at once verbal and conceptual. The schema she has offered is one schema; it is open to further elaboration; it is itself plastic. The book’s ending therefore does not pretend to a final synthesis. It hands the figure of the philosopher over to the reader, and it asks the reader to take up the responsibility of speculative hermeneutics in its own time. This is, in the end, the form of unity the work attains. It is not the unity of a doctrine, but the unity of a methodological commitment: that the philosophy of Hegel admits of an interpretation that is at once faithful to its inner movement and open to the event of reading that each new reader must perform.
The methodological inheritance from Canguilhem deserves a final note. Malabou has, throughout the work, kept faith with the formula she had cited at the outset: to elaborate a concept is to vary both its extension and its intelligibility; to generalize it by incorporating its exceptions; to export it outside its original domain; to give to it, bit by bit, through ordered transformations, the function of a form. Each phrase has been honored. The extension of plasticity has been varied: from sculpture to plastic individuality, from plastic discourse to the speculative proposition, from habit to kenosis, from the becoming-essential of the accident to the becoming-accidental of essence, from divine plasticity to the plasticity of the Aufhebung. Its intelligibility has been varied: from the lexical doublet of receiving and giving form to the structure of an originary synthesis, from the speculative determination of substance to the operator of speculative hermeneutics. Its exceptions have been incorporated: the apparently isolated occurrences of Plastik in the Aesthetics, the apparently theological remarks on the union of natures in Christ, the apparently merely methodological remark of the Preface to the Phenomenology on plastic exposition, have all been bound into a single interpretive function. And the concept has been given the function of a form: it is the form of substance’s self-determination, the form of speculative time, the form of dialectical reading, the form of the System’s own openness to its readers. The Canguilhemian elaboration has not produced a deduction; it has produced a plasticity of plasticity itself, in which the concept exhibits in its operation the very structure it analyzes.
It remains to register, with the same scholarly restraint, the work’s distinctive philosophical voice. Malabou writes with conceptual precision and with a deliberate evenness of tone. The work does not court the spectacular, even as it maintains an attention to figures—the bomb, the statue, the speculative Sunday—whose force is felt without being announced. The argumentative procedure prefers patient redescription to polemic, and the careful citation of Hegelian formulations carries the weight of the inferential burden. The book’s many internal contrasts—between hexis and energeia, between Greek and modern, between teleological time and the time of representation, between habit and kenosis, between the I think and the Self, between necessity and contingency, between figural and speculative form—are sustained without forced resolution. The work’s most striking conceptual moves are accompanied by their own immanent corrections. When plasticity is presented as the operator of substance’s self-determination, the figure of plastic individuality is shown to disappear into the death of man; when divine plasticity is presented as the modern modality of self-determination, the very figure of God is shown to enter into kenosis as a self-emptying; when Absolute Knowledge is presented as a transformation of the Aufhebung, the very I think that had served as the principle of synthesis is shown to give way to a synthesis without an I. Each elaboration of the concept is therefore also an undoing, and the undoing is precisely what gives the concept its philosophical bearing. Plasticity survives its own determinations not by escaping them but by transforming itself in their light.
What form of philosophical unity, finally, does the book attain? It would be inaccurate to call it the unity of a thesis, because the book disclaims the project of demonstrating a thesis whose terms are fixed. It would be inaccurate to call it the unity of a method, because the book’s methodological commitments are themselves the object of its self-reflection. The most precise description, drawn from the work’s own vocabulary, is that the book attains the unity of a speculative hermeneutics in which the form of the analysis and the form of the analyzed coincide. The speculative content of Hegel’s philosophy, on Malabou’s elaboration, is the temporalizing synthesis of the substance-subject, the voir venir in its two modalities, the originary unity of acting and being acted upon that plasticity names. The form of the analysis is itself a voir venir: a careful watching of what comes, an attentive registration of what is happening in the text, a refusal to anticipate too quickly while at the same time tracking the inferential structure that the text imposes. The concept of plasticity, in this sense, is recognized in the operation by which it is constructed, and the construction is shown to be a plastic operation. Unity, then, is the unity of an articulated relation between content and form, in which neither term can be detached from the other without losing the very structure that makes the analysis possible.
A reader who has followed the work through its three Parts will notice, finally, that the figure of the philosopher in Part III is not simply the third moment of the triad. It is also the retroactive figure under which the first two moments are shown to have been already at work. The Greek figure of the plastic individual (whose example for Hegel includes Plato, Socrates, and Sophocles) had already announced the figure of the philosopher; the modern figure of Christ as plastic personality (in Feuerbach’s sense, recovered by Malabou) had already announced the figure of the philosopher in his kenotic relation to thought. The philosopher, in the third Part, is therefore not added to the triad but disclosed as the figure that the previous two had been moving toward. The position is structural: the philosopher is the reader of the System, the reader who re-writes what she reads, the reader whose subjectivity is the singular and individual style in which the universal speculative content takes its operative form. The triad Man–God–Philosopher, far from being a metaphysical doctrine of three ontological types, is the articulation of three plastic instances in which the substance-subject takes successive figural forms, and the third instance is the one in which the System discloses itself as the System as Self. The work’s overall organization is therefore not a pyramid but a circle: the figure of the philosopher returns to the Anthropology and to Revealed Religion with the resources to read them, and the reading is the very form of the System’s life.
The closing pages of the conclusion register, with sober precision, the contemporary stakes of the elaboration. The two contrasting movements that plasticity supports—integration and rupture, gathering and splitting—are mirrored in the contemporary condition of saturation and vacancy. The exhaustion of geopolitical exteriority and the arrival of free time produce a present in which the future, from now on, depends on the way the shapes and figures already present can be put back into play. The outcome that will follow, Malabou writes with deliberate restraint, depends on this awakening; thought has nothing to do but wait for the habitués to look at their habits. The figure of the plasticage, the bombing, is not picturesque; it indicates that plasticity, as the concept that holds together the form-giving and the form-destroying powers, is also the concept under which the contemporary tradition can be exploded into reuse. The book does not propose a politics, and it does not propose an aesthetics. It proposes a concept whose plasticity makes the political and the aesthetic possible as transformations within the closure of the tradition.
The last image, the serenity and the peril of the Sunday of life, recovers a Hegelian phrase from the Aesthetics, where Hegel had described the post-classical condition of art under the name Sonntag des Lebens, the Sunday of life. Malabou’s appropriation of this phrase performs a small and final hermeneutic gesture. The Sunday is the day after the work, the day of contemplation, of repose; in Hegel’s phrase, it is the day on which classical Greek immediacy can no longer be possessed, in which the works of the Muse have lost the power of the spirit, in which we receive the beautiful fruit offered to us by a friendly Fate. To enter the Sunday is therefore to receive the philosophical past as something already done, already formed, already ready to be read. Malabou’s appropriation of this image at the end of her book is not a retreat into nostalgia. It is the registration of the condition under which contemporary philosophy must work: the past is given, the closure is real, the time-form has been sublated, and yet plasticity—the integrating and dissociating force—is what allows this closure to be transformed right at the level of the form. The serenity and the peril are inseparable. The peril is the danger that the Sunday will be only the day of monumentalization; the serenity is the recognition that the past is plastic and can be reanimated, re-read, rewritten. The book ends, accordingly, on a note whose modesty is its own form of philosophical responsibility.
To summarize the whole as a structure of articulated relations: the introduction sets up the problem of the future of Hegel and prepares the elaboration of plasticity through Canguilhem’s protocol; the Hegel on Man of Part I demonstrates the Greek modality of plasticity through habit, the noetic plasticity of the De Anima, the syllogism of the soul, and the figure of plastic individuality, registering at its conclusion the pressure that habit places on the figure of the human; the Hegel on God of Part II demonstrates the modern modality of plasticity through the doctrine of the Trinity, the kenotic event of the Death of God, the operator of Vorstellung, and the divine plasticity, registering at its conclusion the pressure that Entäußerung places on the figure of God; the Hegel on the Philosopher of Part III demonstrates the third modality of plasticity through the Aufhebung of the Aufhebung, the simplification of the dialectic, the speculative abrogation of the I think, the synthesis without an I, the speculative proposition, and the figure of plastic reading, registering at its conclusion the inseparability of plasticity’s two powers, the integrating and the rupturing. The conclusion gathers these threads into a final determination of voir venir as the structure of an awaiting that is also a giving form, and into a final reading of contemporary plasticity as the future within the closure. The work’s three Parts are not independent essays joined by a common theme; they are three exhibitions of one operation that takes successively richer form as the exposition advances.
Reading the book in this manner allows one to understand why its form of unity is irreducible to either reconciliation or controlled antinomy. Reconciliation, in the strong Hegelian sense, would imply that the determinations of plasticity have been finally bound together into a single synthetic figure that has overcome its contradictions. The book disallows this: plasticity remains susceptible to petrifaction, in alliance with the bomb, in tension with the figure of the human who must die in becoming a work of art, in tension with the figure of God who must alienate himself in becoming a subject. The controlled antinomy of, say, Kantian thought, in which two opposed determinations are held in reflective tension without claim of resolution, would also be an inadequate description: Malabou does claim that the determinations of plasticity combine into a single articulation, that integration and rupture are inseparable, that to see (what is) coming is one structure with two faces. The work’s unity is, accordingly, that of a layered stratification held together by methodological restraint. Each layer—lexical, ontological, anthropological, theological, methodological, hermeneutic, contemporary—is sustained without subordinating the others, and the methodological restraint is what keeps the whole from collapsing into either dogmatism or eclecticism. This is the form of unity that the work attains, and it is the form that its title—The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic—announces in its very structure: a future, mediated by plasticity, articulated with temporality and dialectic, refusing the closure that any one of these terms would impose if it were taken alone.
A final word concerning the work’s status as an object of study. The book is a substantial scholarly contribution, but its weight is not merely scholarly. It is a demonstration, in the strict sense, of an interpretive concept, and the demonstration is conducted at every register at which it is possible to conduct it. The lexical register is honored by careful philological attention to plastik, Plastizität, plastisch, Aufhebung, Entäußerung, hexis, theoria, automaton, casus, ptosis; the ontological register is honored by careful attention to substance, accidents, the form-activity, the speculative proposition; the historical register is honored by careful attention to the Greek and modern moments, to Aristotle and Kant, to Christianity, to the Reformation, to Hegel’s contemporaries; the methodological register is honored by careful attention to the Canguilhemian protocol; the hermeneutic register is honored by careful attention to the figure of the reader. The book holds these registers together by treating them as the registers of one and the same plasticity. It is in this sense that the work is, on its own terms, plastic: it gives form to its concept by receiving form from each of the registers it traverses, and it survives the determinations through which it has passed without being reducible to any one of them.
The book ends, deliberately, without a final claim. The phrase the Sunday of life is offered as an image, not as a conclusion. The image registers the work’s final philosophical commitment, which is the commitment to a speculative attention to the new-born. Malabou had quoted Hegel’s description of the moment in which the child takes a first breath and breaks the gradualness of merely quantitative growth, the moment of the qualitative leap, the flash (Blitz) that illumines the features of the new world in one moment. Philosophy, for Hegel, she writes, can in a certain sense be defined as this attention brought to the newborn, who is the most vivid and sensuous image of the future. The image of the newborn is not a metaphor among others; it is the figure under which plasticity gathers its two forces, blossoming (éclosion) and explosion. A process of formation and of the dissolution of form, plasticity, where all birth takes place, should be imagined fundamentally as an ontological combustion which liberates the twofold possibility of the appearance and the annihilation of presence. The Sunday of life is the day on which this attention is exercised, the day on which philosophy waits for the new-born, the day on which the past is rewritten by being read in the light of the future it has always already contained.
The character of the philosophical responsibility the book proposes follows from this image. The philosopher is the one who bears the responsibility of protecting and preserving the rudimentary being of subjectivity, its fragile and finite kernel. The philosopher is the reader whose plasticity makes possible the rewriting of the System. The philosopher is the exemplary individual whose singularity gives form to the universal even as it receives form from it. The philosopher is, finally, the figure who, having received the past as an ensemble of cases in the double sense—as exemplary individualities and as pure accidents—engages them in new constructions, new readings, new thoughts. The individuals are ready to engage again, Malabou writes near the end of the chapter on On the Self; this readiness is the very form of the future that the work has been elaborating throughout. The Sunday of life is, in this sense, not the end of philosophy but its open horizon—the horizon in which plasticity, having become the concept of the substance-subject’s self-determination, becomes the concept under which the subject is invited to give itself the form it receives.
It would be inaccurate to close this description without acknowledging one further textual feature. The book’s Notes and Bibliography—the editorial apparatus visible in the English edition—display a scholarly density that is in keeping with its origins as a doctoral dissertation. The Bibliography distinguishes Hegel’s German editions, French translations, English translations, and the secondary literature in French, German, and English; it gives the Encyclopedia in its 1830 edition the central place in the Hegelian corpus that the book’s exposition has demanded; it lists the editions of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, and the Aesthetics that Malabou cites; and it situates the work within a network of contemporary readers (Bourgeois, Labarrière, Lebrun, Souche-Dagues; Jüngel, Balthasar, Barth, Marion; Aubenque, Janicaud; Heidegger, Derrida; Deleuze, Bergson; Ravaisson) whose voices have been registered in the body of the analysis. The Notes are extensive and carry the philological burden of the argument, allowing the body of the text to remain in continuous prose even as the textual base is preserved in detail. The presence of this apparatus is one of the ways the work makes itself a plastic object: each reader can return to the textual base and re-elaborate the argument; each citation can be re-examined, each translation re-considered, each interpretation re-tested. The Notes and Bibliography are therefore not merely documentary; they are the conditions under which the event of reading can be repeated and the work can take new form in new readings.
To register the work, finally, as an integrated system whose unity consists in articulated relations is also to register that the work resists any easy paraphrase. Each of its principal concepts—plasticity, voir venir, the substance-subject, the becoming-essential of the accident, the becoming-accidental of essence, the Aufhebung of the Aufhebung, the speculative abrogation, the synthesis without an I, the speculative proposition, plastic reading, the future within closure—has acquired its determinacy through the entire argumentative path, and each is irreducible to its first formulation. The reader who would describe the book must therefore describe its inner movement, the way later claims have retroactively determined the sense of earlier ones, the way concepts have shifted role across contexts, the way argumentative responsibilities have migrated from one cluster to another. The form of unity the book attains is the form of an articulated movement, and this is the form that the present description has tried to render.
The book, in the end, does not promise to make Hegel new. It promises to show that Hegel was always already, in the precise sense Malabou has elaborated, plastic: capable of giving form to readings that were not yet given, capable of receiving form from readings that have not yet come, capable of inhabiting the ambivalent in-between of to see (what is) coming. We are aware, Malabou writes near the close, of the paradoxical aspect of an approach which, anxious to underline the originality of Hegel’s reading of Aristotle, could not however avoid the trap of considering his reading as the best one. The paradox is registered without remedy. The work claims neither to have found the final reading of Hegel nor to have escaped the structures it analyzes. It claims to have shown that the tradition Hegel completes is also the tradition Hegel transforms, that the closure Hegel announces is also the closure Hegel opens, that the future Heidegger denies him is also the future his text has been waiting to give. The serenity and the peril of the Sunday of life, the work’s final image, is offered as an invitation: to enter into the work’s mode of attention, to take up the responsibility of plastic reading, and to do so with the awareness that plasticity’s two powers, the formative and the explosive, are inseparable.
What remains to be done, the work suggests without prescribing, is the rewriting of Hegel that the book has demonstrated to be possible. The figure of the philosopher, on the work’s own description, is not a position one occupies once and for all; it is a style one acquires by inhabiting the speculative proposition’s casus. The reader who has followed the analysis has, in following it, performed precisely this acquisition. The reader is therefore, in the work’s own terms, the figure in whom the future of Hegel takes its present form. In its role as fall, as ordeal and trial, Malabou writes near the end, philosophy sparks off a necessary anamnesis that undoes spirit from its alienated relation to the familiar and well-known, which drives it away from the customs of the doxa, thus involving it in the work of recomposing new habits, new hermeneutical habits. The recomposition of new hermeneutical habits is the form of the future the book proposes. The future of Hegel is, on this final determination, the form in which Hegel survives the sublation of his own time-form: not as a doctrine to be held, but as a corpus to be read, re-read, and rewritten. This is the form of philosophical unity the work attains by the end—a form that is neither reconciliation nor controlled antinomy, neither layered stratification alone nor methodological restraint alone, but the disciplined integration of all of these into the single operation of an attention to the new-born.
The work’s pages, taken as a whole, can be described as a single integrated demonstration that plasticity is the concept by which Hegel’s philosophy may be received in our time without nostalgia and without rupture. The demonstration is conducted from within, with a fidelity to the inner movement of the System that is sustained at every register; it is conducted with tension-sensitivity, with attention to the frictions that the work’s own categories generate; and it is conducted with restraint, with a refusal to overclaim the speculative inheritance. The future of Hegel, the title’s double genitive, names both the future of his philosophy and the future within his philosophy, and the work has shown that the two genitives are inseparable. The future of Hegel is the future within Hegel made possible for new readers; the future within Hegel is the future of Hegel as the inheritance that demands its own recomposition. To see (what is) coming, finally, is to take up this inheritance not as a possession but as the condition of a style. The book invites this style and exhibits it in its own performance. The event of reading, with which the conclusion opens and on which the final pages close, is the form that this style takes. To read the book is to be drawn into the very plasticity it elaborates, and to find oneself, by the close, holding a concept that one has helped to form.
It is on this disciplined open form that the work, internally, comes to rest. The unity of the book is the unity of an integrated philosophical operation in which content and form, system and reading, past and future, dynamis and energeia, habit and kenosis, the I and the Self, are articulated together into a single, sustained, and self-reflexive demonstration. The work neither presents this unity as a thesis nor proposes it as a method to be followed mechanically; it exhibits it in its own composition. The reader, having followed the inner movement of the argument, is left with a concept that has been progressively determined and progressively undone, and with a methodological commitment that has been progressively practiced and progressively rewritten. What the book accomplishes, in its own terms, is the elaboration of a form of philosophical attention that is at once strict and supple, at once faithful to its text and open to its readers, at once respectful of the philosophical past and oriented to the philosophical future. This form of attention is, on the work’s own description, the plasticity it has spent the entire book elaborating. It is in this sense that the form of unity the work attains is, finally, indistinguishable from the concept it has demonstrated. The book, by being plastic, is its concept; and the reader, by reading it, practices its concept. The unity of the work and the operation of plasticity coincide. To finish reading is therefore to be left with a task, the task of re-reading, that the work has shown to be the proper form of philosophical inheritance under contemporary conditions.
Simon Gros 
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