Heidegger Change, The

On the Fantastic in Philosophy

Publication Year: 2011

Elaborates the author’s conception of plasticity by proposing a new way of thinking through Heidegger’s writings on change. After the readings of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas and the broad disengagement from him in critical theory and humanities, the work of Martin Heidegger has generally not been the subject of inventive interpretations, especially not by thinkers developing their own body of concepts. In this work, one of France’s most inventive contemporary philosophers, Catherine Malabou, undertakes such a reading, arguing that behind Heidegger’s question of being lies another, one not yet addressed in continental philosophy: change. Treating under this deceptively simple heading the themes of exchange, substitution, migration, and metamorphosis, Malabou argues that Heidegger’s thought offers a radical theory of “ontico-ontological” transformability not found in any other thinker, and sketches its implications for a whole range of issues—capitalism, the gift, ethics, suffering, the biological, technology, imagination, and time—of central concern to the humanities. A major step in the series of texts in which Malabou elaborates a body of theory that starts from certain consequences of the philosophies of difference in order to go beyond them, The Heidegger Change is also an audacious work of theory for an age at risk of forgetting what it might take to do theory. A piece of writing in its own right, the text invents its own terminological and metaphoric lexicon while addressing its reader directly and urgently, and thus recalls the inventiveness and style of the classic theoretical texts of previous decades even as it stakes a route toward novel conceptual possibilities.

Published by: State University of New York Press

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Title Page, Copyright page

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pp. iii-iv

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pp. vii-x

Translator/Editor’s Preface

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pp. xi-xxiv

Bringing Catherine Malabou’s philosophy into English form involves very different problems than did the translation of the generation of intellectuals and philosophers associated with “French theory.” Not only does Malabou belong to a moment (which she calls “la génération d’après”) when long, intricate sentences and self-referential language no longer provide the basic structure of theoretical thought...

Introduction: Wandel, Wandlung, and Verwandlung

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pp. 1-30

Part I. Metamorphoses and Migrations of Metaphysics

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pp. 31-35

It all starts with a change. The foundational event of metaphysics is, indeed, a mutation. A “change of the essence of truth” [Wandel des Wesens der Wahrheit] comes to pass.¹ Plato, that is, brings about “a transformation in the essence of truth" ²...

1. The Metabolism of the Immutable

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pp. 37-52

You suggest that I begin by exposing, in their simultaneity and contemporaneousness, the turning point of a first exchange, the emergence of a form, and the trail of a displacement. These are the three terms of the taking place of metaphysics, the three constitutive instances of the first (ex)change. ... .

2. The Mound of Visions*: Plato Averts His Gaze

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pp. 53-76

The crossing of the two (ex)changes is where I am now inviting you to proceed—the very place where the commencement and overcoming of metaphysics appear together, in a startling contemporaneousness. Come, let me take you to this peak, this rise in the exposition. Come to the place where being juts up in its structure, where it lets itself be seen. ...

3. “Color, the Very Look of Things, Their Eidos, Presencing, Being—This Is What Changes”*

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pp. 77-97

I will now lead you to the critical point where the other form slightly surfaces from form, where another pathway takes shape, and the bulge of a turnaround rises in the middle of the road. We are headed to the place where Nietzsche and Heidegger meet, where one last look at metaphysics gets exchanged for a first vision of the other beginning. ...

4. Outline of a Cineplastic of Being

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pp. 99-121

You protest. I’ve been speaking the whole time, you say, of migration, metamorphosis, and the migratory structure of metaphysics, but without ever truly clarifying what all this means. We have so far explored together the economy of both the initial and terminal moments of the first change...

Part II. The New Ontological Exchange

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pp. 123-128

There is another (ex)change—an other (ex)change. This is inconstestable, and Heidegger never stops announcing it. An other—nonmetaphysical—(ex)change. An other—non-capitalist—(ex)change. An other (ex)change that owes nothing to the Geltung, which no longer involves “quick and fleeting circulation [schnellen, augenblicken, Verkher],” ...

5. Changing the Gift

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pp. 129-153

Envisage the other (ex)change, for itself, as if it proceeded from nothing. From nothing other than itself. A brusque, emergency leap, no bridge below, an improvised stand-in—here goes. As if it leapt from the withdrawal of its own provenance, making visible the originary withdrawal of all provenance. ...

6. Surplus Essence: Gestell and Automatic Conversion

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pp. 155-177

Thinking being in its own right does not, then, come down to serving notice to all exchangeability between being and beings. Indeed, the other thinking does stop taking beingness as its foundation. But the possibility of suspending the exchange of being and beingness—of giving the change that governs the entire history of metaphysics...

7. The Fantastic Is Only Ever an Effect of the Real

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pp. 179-200

Why speak of the “reality” of the ontological difference? What is the bond uniting change to the real, and why keep this old word “real,” which Heidegger seems in Being and Time to dismiss forever? ...

Part III. At Last, Modification

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pp. 201-210

In each thing, which is to say in everything, there is a line of demarcation between two modes of being: the metaphysical and the ultrametaphysical. This line in each thing, which is to say in everything, is like a parting of the historical waters. Everything is at once united and sundered on account of this incision that, like a joint, assembles and braces it between two modes of presence. ...

8. Metamorphosis to Modification: Kafka Reading Being and Time

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pp. 211-231

So it is now, and only now, that I invite you to open Being and Time. We have followed, since the beginning, the migration and metamorphosis of Heidegger's thought of originary change, which transforms the affirmation that everything proceeds from a mutation of essence of truth into the view that (ex)change is but the other name for the withdrawal of being. ...

9. “The Thin Partition That Separates Dasein from Itself . . .”

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pp. 233-244

This witness-form exists. It is a question of a wall, or partition, of very little thickness. Of a quasi-imperceptible separation. Of an articulation even more intimate than the one forming the joint between the existentials. Of a limit without any analytic, ontological, or existential status and whose profile is only hastily drawn. ...

10. Man and Dasein Boring Each Other

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pp. 245-268

Analyzing the meaning of the wall or partition in Being and Time leads us, then, to consider another line of division, secretly drawn in the route of the first, which separates the two understandings of change from each other. This separation is clearly marked in Heidegger's work when the vocabulary of modification...

Conclusion: The W, W, & V of an Alternative

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pp. 269-290

In setting out from the first (ex)change conceived as the constitution and progressive metamorphosis of both the form of metaphysics and the shape and switchbacks of its route, then exploring after that the migratory and metamorphic articulation of the second (ex)change as manifested in giving...

E-ISBN-13: 9781438439563
E-ISBN-10: 1438439563
Print-ISBN-13: 9781438439556
Print-ISBN-10: 1438439555

Page Count: 224
Publication Year: 2011

Series Title: SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought
Series Editor Byline: David Pettigrew