Gender Ontology, Sexual Difference, and Differentiating Sex: Malabou and Derrida

For Catherine Malabou, "epigenetics" is a crucial concept that locates plasticity in the passage from the genotype to the phenotype. In a seminar delivered in 2012 at the European Graduate School, "Epigenetics and the Plasticity of Life," she pressed on the prefix "epi," "surface," to signal epigenetics as the "interpretive" mode of genetics. Homing in on how certain "interpretive molecules" such as "interfering RNA" can alter the appearance and structure of the phenotype's expression by inhibiting, de-differentiating, or deprogamming certain parts of the genetic sequence or code, (such that certain genes—say cancer genes—are silenced), she links this interpretive function to her own notion of plasticity, or "self-transformation." The stakes are high: for Malabou epigenetics has the potential to navigate between the often wholly polarized disciplines of neuroscience and philosophy, and beyond that, to serve as the site of a new subjectivation of nonsubjective or biological processes, which is to say, a kind of consciousness, awareness, or second sense of our biological plasticity (Malabou 2012). This concern with ways of being (biogenetically) in sex or with modes of consciousness that might be sexed or gendered lends specificity to Malabou's ascription of gender ontology, a term used in contradistinction to (but not necessarily in conflict with) theories of gender and sexuality grounded in performative social constructions or ensembles of rights and claims to an essential identity or group identification.

Malabou's interest in matters of gender ontology, sexual subjectivation, and difference in genetic differentiation is philosophically adumbrated by a review of her exchanges and debates with a mentor, Jacques Derrida. The issues and questions that arise from this view may be roughly grouped into three parts.

First, as we know, Malabou's oeuvre has been deeply inf lected by Derridean deconstruction; the procedures of trace, derivation, drift, distancing, and "difference" were philosophically constitutive, especially for her writings on Hegel and Heidegger. Malabou and Derrida would publish as a duo in La Contre-allée [Counterpath],¹ a text comparable to notable experiments in hyphenated theory by Hélène Cixous and Derrida, or by Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington in Circumfessions; or by Malabou and other thinkers such as Judith Butler or Adrian Johnston (their collaborative Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience). Such partnerships acquire theoretical currency as adventures in colloquy or experiments in creating transindividuated authorial voice. And yet, as often happens in partnerships, the principals part ways. Derrida passed away, and Malabou begged to differ. What difference did Malabou's difference make to difference? What is the status of difference after the cognitive turn? What does difference do with our brain?

A second set of questions arises out of the particular ways in which Derrida and Malabou read continental philosophy. It is through Hegel that Derrida comes to produce Glas, and it is from Hegel that Malabou derives her signature philosophical motif, plasticity. But the Derrida-Malabou duet is equally strong in the key of Heidegger. In La Plasticité au soir de l'écriture: Dialectique, destruction, déconstruction (Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, 2010), Malabou traces a line from L'avenir de Hegel. Plasticité, temporalité, dialectique (The Future of Hegel, 1999) described as "a deconstructive reading of Heidegger's concept of 'vulgar time,'" to Le Change Heidegger: Du fantastique en philosophie (The Heidegger Change, 2004) "a dialectical reading of Derrida (tracing difference back to its metamorphic origin)" (Malabou 2011) to Que faire de notre cerveau? (What Should We Do With Our Brain?), characterized as a "'destructive' (in the Heideggerian sense) interpretation of Freud or Derrida" (Malabou 2008, 8). What Malabou neglects to mention with respect to the Heidegger-Derrida arc in her work is the interrogation of gender neutrality in Dasein embedded in Heidegger's asexuated or "predual" account of Geschlecht.² In Changer de différance: Le féminin et la question philosophique (Changing Difference : The Feminine and the Question of Philosophy, 2009), Malabou tracks a "feminine" Dasein posed against the Heideggerian neuter, and by extension (if only implicitly) against a deconstructive sexuality that would claim Derrida as a philosopher...