The Heidegger Change: On the Fantastic in Philosophy

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.