Copyright © 2012

Avello Publishing Journal

ISSN: 2049 - 498X

Issue 1 Volume 2:

The Unconscious

‘We Don’t Know What Will Become Of This Psychoanalysis’ –

On a Malabou/ Žižek Encounter

Jones Irwin, St. Patrick's College, Dublin, Republic of Ireland.

1. Introduction

‘We don’t know what will become of this psychoanalysis’ (Lacan 2008: 3)

Thus Žižek foregrounds his debate with Catherine Malabou in relation to the distinction or

the conflict between what he terms, following Malabou, the ‘Freudian unconscious’ and the

‘cerebral unconscious’ (Žižek 2010) in Lacanian terms; however the specifics of this debate,

which I will address in this article in some detail, are significantly contextualised by several

more meta-level problematics, whether these are, for example, the theoretical relations

between Lacan and Derrida, or more generally the affinities or otherwise of psychoanalysis

and deconstruction. Indeed, one can go further and argue that at issue in the microcosmic

critique of Malabou in Living In The End Times is the very definition or understanding of

what constitutes philosophy itself, or to use a recent Žižekian phrase, what constitutes

‘philosophy in the present’ (Badiou and Žižek 2009). While there are significant tensions

elaborated in the Žižekian reading of Malabou’s text The New Wounded (Malabou 2012),

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what is perhaps more striking is the level of agreement between the two philosophers

exemplified in the discussion. Again, we can say that this has implications significantly

beyond the Žižek/Malabou debate itself, in relation to the future understanding of the

boundaries between psychoanalysis and deconstruction, bringing into relief, for example, the

underestimated affinities which exist in relation to the two latter disciplines, an argument

which Andrea Hurst has recently defended strongly (Hurst 2008).

2. Contextualising Malabou’s Deconstructionism

The reception of Derrida’s work and the work of those thinkers seen as especially developing

his legacy, such as that of Catherine Malabou, has often been dominated by accusations of a

supposed ‘textualism’ in deconstruction. Patti Lather, for example, has well described the

complexity of these accusations and their longevity, going all the way back to Foucault’s

criticisms of Derrida’s reading of his work in the early 1970s (Lather 2004). Derrida most

explicitly engages these criticisms in his book of interviews Positions (Derrida 1972), where

he argues for a clearly materialist base to deconstruction, but this is a thematic that runs

through all of his work, early to late. Significantly, it is also a problematic which has been

central to the conflicts between psychoanalysis and deconstruction. For example, there is a

deep tension in readings of feminism and the concept of ‘feminine difference’, or even more

broadly in notions of embodiment and sexuality, between contemporary exponents of

deconstruction and psychoanalysis. A significant case in point, in this context, is the

argument between Judith Butler and Joan Copec, where Butler reads the Lacanian concept of

‘the Real’ as excessively deterministic (Irwin 2010). Moreover, the most influential reading

of psychoanalysis in recent times, the Slovenian school of neo-Lacanianism, the ‘trioka’ of

thinkers Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič (Zupančič 2013) and Mladen Dolar (Dolar 2013),

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have also tended to distance themselves from what they perceive as this aspect of ‘idealism’

in Derrida’s work. Recently, however, there are indications that the neo-Lacanian reading of

Derrida is more sympathetic to a ‘materialist’ interpretation of the latter (for example, in

Žižek 2013).

It is hardly surprising, in such a context, that Malabou explicitly has had to engage such

issues with regard to the reception and interpretation of her own work. In a significant

interview, Malabou (Malabou 2008) has clarified the complexity of both the relation between

deconstruction and materialism, and the more original developments of deconstruction in her

own oeuvre (sometimes in a spirit of contra Derrida). We will see below how this evolution

of deconstruction in Malabou’s texts has led to the very particular (and somewhat

iconoclastic) thematics of her text The New Wounded (Malabou 2012). But earlier, in 2008,

Malabou wishes first to both recognise the influence of Derrida on her work and formation,

while also marking clear differences and distinctions. Invoking Derrida’s seminal text The

Postcard (Derrida 1987), Malabou outlines how, for Derrida, the question of influence is

never understood progressively or obviously, with the Plato/Socrates relation as a

paradigmatic example of this complexity. Here, she quotes Derrida as follows: ‘I have not yet

recovered from this revelatory catastrophe: Plato behind Socrates. Me, I always knew it, and

they did too, those two I mean. What a couple. Socrates turns his back to Plato, who has

made him write whatever he wanted while pretending to receive it from him’ (quoted

Malabou 2008: 2). In so arguing, according to Malabou, Derrida deconstructs the notion of

influence, with especial reference to developers of his own deconstructionist legacy: ‘Derrida

undermines the classical order of filiation: first comes the father, then the son or the daughter.

He undermines this order and shows that “to follow” may sometimes (or perhaps always)

mean “to precede.”’ (Malabou 2008: 2). It is in such a context, then, that we must seek to

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understand the relationship between Malabou’s own work and the deconstructionist legacy. Is

Malabou a Derridean? Yes, and no. ‘Then if to follow does not always mean to come after, or

to imitate or to copy, if following implies a certain dimension of anticipation, then in this

case, I would accept to define myself as a follower of deconstruction’ (Malabou 2008: 3).

Despite this affiliation, there is a clear conceptual originality in Malabou’s thinking.

Malabou’s conception of ‘plasticity’, which will become central in her later texts (including

The New Wounded) is, in this earlier interview, elaborated as a Hegelian concept. Not the

least interesting aspect of this is the fact that Malabou plays down the Hegelian interpretation

in The New Wounded, which leads to some criticism from Žižek, as we will see. Here,

however, the notion of plasticity is unabashedly Hegelian (although this reading involves

already some move away from more traditionalist readings of the latter system of thought):

‘That said, I am investing in the concept of plasticity which, in Hegel, means less the

interplay between matter and form than the interplay between form and itself, that is, the

relationship between form and form’ (Malabou 2008: 3). What this allows for is a move

beyond what Derrida early in his work referred to as ‘preformationism’ (Derrida 1978), that

is, the notion that the concept of form is stable and essentialist. Malabou stresses the need to

rethink this static understanding of form in favour of a notion of radical and fundamental

‘metamorphosis’: ‘With plasticity, we are not facing a pre-given difference, but a process of

metamorphosis. In other words, the Hegelian subject trans-subjects itself constantly. Its form

is its matter’ (Malabou 2008: 3). We thus see a crucial link between the conceptions of

transformation and subjectivity; the latter concept itself is now available for what Malabou

calls (following later Foucault) ‘transubjectivation’ (1). This rereading of the concepts of

form and subjectivity is also intended to resituate the reading of Hegelian dialectics as less

conservatively formalist and, in effect, more materialist (Malabou being critical of the

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reductionism of Deleuze’s reading of Hegel) [Malabou 2008: 4]. Whereas, according to

Malabou, Deleuze reads Hegel’s dialectic as ultimately reductive of difference, she rather

wishes to stress the process of ‘transsubjectivation’ as integral to the Hegelian philosophical

system, but as also opening up possibilities for the way we think about the relation between

psychoanalysis and neuroscience (2). Malabou additionally connects this renewed

philosophical approach to her central concept of ‘plasticity’, which she interprets as faithfully

Hegelian: ‘Plasticity might be the name of this transsubjectivation [...] I found it for the first

time in Hegel. He uses it when he defines subjectivity in the preface to the Phenomenology of

Spirit. The subject is not supple and soft, and it is not rigid either; it is something in between.

The subject is “plastic”’ (Malbou 2008: 4).

Crucially for her later work such as The New Wounded (Malabou 2012), Malabou

also, in this context, clarifies the significant connections between her concept of (Hegelian)

plasticity and the evolution in the science of neurobiology and neuroscience:

It is also clear that neurobiology today offers a new perspective on subjectivity. Continental philosophers have always despised this field [...] Neurology itself had to evolve, from a mechanical science that thought in terms of fixed “functions” and centers, a sort of successor of phrenology, through much more sophisticated clinical approaches and deeper understandings, to a more dynamic analysis of neurological difficulties in terms of functional systems, often distributed widely through the brain and in constant interaction with each other (Malabou 2008: 4).

On a meta-level, consequently, we can read Malabou’s intervention as seeking to redraw

the boundaries of the relation between psychoanalysis and neuroscience, where increasingly

in her recent work this has come to involve a critique of the Freudian-Lacanian

presuppositions concerning the relation between the mind and the brain. It should also be

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noted, however, that Malabou is in this process significantly critiquing an anti-scientific bias

in Derrida’s work, where the deconstructive reading of neuroscience viewed the latter as too

much based on a binary opposition between the concepts of ‘program’ and ‘promise’

(Malabou 2008: 6). Instead, Malabou is affirmative of neurology, especially in its most recent

articulations (‘it is then very difficult to criticize such an open definition of neurology’

[Malabou 2008: 6]), as well as of more interdisciplinary approaches, such as the ‘neuro-

psychoanalytical trend’ (for example, in the work of Damasio who makes explicit

connections to Descartes and Spinoza in the tradition of philosophy).

Vahanian (Vahanian 2008) foregrounds the problematicity of Malabou’s reading of

neurobiology for an understanding of the relationship between the brain and the mind, in the

context of both psychoanalysis and philosophy of mind: ‘Doesn’t the notion of a biologically

determined unconscious—the blind brain— as opposed to a Freudian, imaginary

unconscious, threaten the subject’s freedom by foreshadowing a certain natural

determinism?’ (Vahanian 2008: 6). Malabou, however, while foregrounding the brain and

the concept of a ‘cerebral unconscious’ (as opposed to a ‘Freudian unconscious’) is

unequivocal in her very explicit disavowal of any conception of a determined brain: ‘a

significant part of the neural organization is open to outside influences [...] That is what

“plastic” means when applied to the brain’ (Malabou 2008: 6). Here, we see the connectivity

of Malabou’s interests: from subjectivity to the neural brain and the neural self, but ultimately

to the transubjectification of ‘plasticity’. While this concept (as we have seen) looks back to

Hegel, it is also the case that Malabou’s philosophical understanding of plasticity looks to a

radically new configuration of the relation between psychoanalysis and neuroscience which,

on her terms at least, takes her work beyond Freud and Lacan, as well as beyond Derrida’s

more reductionistic interpretation of brain science. We will see the culmination of this meta-

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level reading elaborated in The New Wounded (Malabou 2012). We will also see that while

Žižek is critical of certain aspects of the latter (Žižek 2010), that paradoxically his

interpretation of Malabou brings her closer to Lacan, and indeed to his own work, than her

interpretation seems to allow.

3. ‘The New Wounded’ – Žižek For and Against Malabou

In his recent text, Living in the End Times (Žižek 2010), Žižek addresses the specifics of

Malabou’s reading of the brain and mind relation in The New Wounded (Malabou 2012),

while also exploring some of the meta-issues at stake in the disagreements between

deconstruction and psychoanalysis. Additionally at issue here, as Žižek makes clear, is the

very status of philosophy as a discipline in its own right. This perennial question of

philosophy, in effect, ‘what is philosophy?’, has been a recently more foregrounded thematic

in Žižek’s work, as well as in the work of the Slovenian school of psychoanalysis (Irwin and

Motoh 2013). It draws on the very same epistemological issues which preoccupied Lacan and

Derrida, in their original theoretical conflicts (Hurst 2008). Žižek thematises Malabou’s

contribution to the discussion in terms of a conflict between ‘the Freudian unconscious versus

the cerebral unconscious’ (Žižek 2010: 291). At issue, as so often for Žižek, is the complex

question of ‘abstract violence’ and its effects on what Žižek refers to as ‘the reality of human

lives’ (Žižek 2010: 291). This problematic for Žižek is at the heart of Malabou’s concerns in

The New Wounded, specifically as it relates to the ‘psychological consequences of this rise in

new forms of “abstract” violence’ (Žižek 2010: 292).

What is at stake for Žižek, in this context, is nothing less than the question of the very

priority or hierarchy of concepts in psychoanalysis, with regard to the valuation of the

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concept of the ‘unconscious’ vis-à-vis the concept of ‘trauma’. Žižek elaborates the original

Freudian priority as being given to the concept of the ‘unconscious’ which he explicates as an

‘unknown known’ on Freudian terms, or in the Lacanian phrase, ‘there is a knowledge that is

not known, knowledge that is based on the signifier as such’ (Žižek 2010: 292). However,

we must distinguish this from the lesser valued notion of ‘trauma’ in Freud, which is

designated as an ‘unknown unknown’; ‘the violent intrusion of something radically

unexpected, something the subject was absolutely not ready for; and which it cannot integrate

in any way’ (Žižek 2010: 292). Not the least interesting question here is to what extent the

original Freudian priority given to the concept of the ‘unconscious’ over ‘trauma’ can be seen

as being faithfully maintained by Lacan, or indeed by Žižek? We will return to this question,

central to an understanding of the future of psychoanalytic thinking, below.

But, at this juncture, this meta-level issue is not Žižek’s primary concern. He is rather

interested in the exact direction of Malabou’s own critique of psychoanalysis, or what he

refers to as her ‘critical reformulation of psychoanalysis’ (Žižek 2010: 292). The priority

given to the concept of ‘unconscious’ in Freud, for Žižek, amounts to a valuation of the

‘inner’ over the ‘outer’ (or the ‘internal’ over the ‘external’). This valuation and hierarchy is

fundamental to the very epistemology which underlies psychoanalysis. Outer shocks or

events with a traumatic impact on the self derive their meaning not in and from themselves,

but from their relation to a prioritised inner psychic life. This, according to Žižek, is a priority

which is shared by both Freud and Lacan: ‘for Freud and Lacan, external shocks, unexpected

brutal encounters or intrusions owe their properly traumatic impact to the way they touch on

a pre-existing traumatic “psychic reality”’ (Žižek 2010: 292).

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On Malabou’s terms, there has been an intensification of the outer shocks in our

contemporary society, nothwithstanding the fact that these latter traumas ‘have of course

been known for centuries’ (Žižek 2010: 292). This intensification leads to a need for a

deconstruction of psychoanalytical categories, especially in the context of an era which can

be described as postreligious or ‘disenchanted’, with the attendant effects in terms of

metaphysical frameworks of meaning: ‘since we live in a disenchanted, post-religious era,

they are much more likely to be directly experienced as meaningless intrusions of the real’

(Žižek 2010: 292). This latter phrase is especially important in this context: ‘meaningless

intrusions of the real’. On Malabou’s terms, at issue is a supposed misunderstanding of the

latter emptiness of meaning, which Freud and psychoanalysis (including, it would seem,

Lacan’s evolution of the latter), on her terms, misdiagnose. These events are ‘brutal but

meaningless’ and they ‘destroy’, on Malabou’s interpretation, rather than simply reform the

‘symbolic texture of the subject’s identity’ (Žižek 2010: 292). This represents the key node of

disagreement between Malabou and Freudian-Lacanianism (assuming, as she does, the unity

of the latter theoretical designation). That is, there is disagreement over the exact status of

such external shocks to the psyche and the level of their destructiveness with regard to

symbolic meaning and the status of the subject per se.

T here are three different categories of such meaningless, external shocks or traumas which

can be seen as characteristic of our contemporary socio-political reality. In the first instance,

there is external, physical violence, which may relate to the effects of events such as ‘9:11,

the “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq, street violence, rape, and so on but also natural

catastrophes; earthquakes, hurricanes’ (Žižek 2010: 292). Second, there is the violence

which attacks ‘the material base of our inner reality’ (Žižek 2010: 292). Here, the examples

given are such phenomena as brain tumours, Alzheimer’s disease and organic cerebral

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lesions, each being characterised by the capacity to ‘utterly change, destroy even, the

victim’s personality’ (Žižek 2010: 292). The final and third category which Žižek delineates

refers to ‘the destructive effects of socio-symbolic violence (such as social exclusion)’

(Žižek 2010: 292).

Malabou, in a personal note at the beginning of the text, The New Wounded (Malabou

2012), cites the trauma of her grandmother’s Alzheimer’s disease as paradigmatic for her

investigation of this area of research (Malabou 2012: xi ff.). Faced with obviously radical

changes in her grandmother’s personal identity, Malabou was struck by the inadequacy of

philosophical understanding (and indeed psychoanalytical understanding) to explicate the

detail of what was happening.

Philosophy had even less to say than psychoanalysis; neither the Platonic theory....nor the existential thinking of anxiety, the temptation of suicide, disorientation, or boredom could shed light on this specific form of dispossession. It must be stated outright: no philosopher has ever approached the immense problem of cerebral suffering (Malabou 2012: xiv).

We can perhaps note two key issues here. First, the concept of a ‘specific form of

dispossession’, which as we will see, bears fundamentally on the notion of subjectivity as

Malabou comes to understand the latter. Second, the strong emphasis given to this being a

wholly original or unprecedented dimension of philosophical thinking: ‘no philosopher has

ever approached.’ This constitutes the meta-level dimension of the argument, where Malabou

sees the very self-understanding or definition of philosophy as having to change. This latter

revolutionary charge is also made by Malabou against psychoanalysis, as understood in its

‘Freudian-Lacanian’ designation.

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These forms of violence are not new in contemporary society but, as Žižek reads Malibou’s

claim here, the entrance to a ‘postreligious, disenchanted world’ (Žižek 2010: 292) seems to

recontextualise these events from an epistemological point of view. With no overarching

metaphysical or sacred context of meaning to make sense of these events, the sheer

meaninglessness of each of the three genres of events seems to come to the fore. These events

become brute events, there is nothing to be learnt from them and no meaning or

understanding can be recuperated. Moreover, they also, in their very meaninglessness,

fundamentally tear at the very status of the subject or self (sometimes destroying the latter

beyond recognition). We will return to this complex issue of subjectivity and selfhood, from

Malabou’s perspective, below.

What focuses Žižek’s attention, in the first instance, is how this description of meaningless

events by Malibou constitutes a fundamental challenge to the very self-understanding of

psychoanalysis. Žižek reads Malibou’s work as calling for a complete ‘critical reformulation’

of the very premises of psychoanalysis as a science. This constitutes, on Žižek’s terms, her

‘basic reproach to Freud’ (Žižek 2010: 293), and indeed, it would seem, an equally strong

reproach to Lacanian psychoanalysis. Understood in this manner, this would also constitute a

fundamental disagreement between Malibou and Žižek, which we might then broaden out to

involve a whole disagreement between psychoanalysis and deconstruction as such. As Žižek

notes,

‘Malabou’s basic reproach to Freud is that when confronted with such cases, he succumbs to the temptation to look for meaning. He is not ready to accept the direct destructive power of external shocks; they can destroy the psyche of the victim (or at least wound it in an irremediable way) without resonating with any inner traumatic truth’ (Žižek 2010: 293).

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Žižek reinforces his point here with reference to the example of the ‘muselmann’, the

supposedly resigned and defeated-in-advance concentration camp victim, simply waiting

around to die with no fight left. If the ‘muselmann’ can be said to constitute some kind of

human condition, shared by ‘victims of multiple rape, torture and so on’ (Žižek 2010: 293),

this condition again can be said, on Malabou’s terms, to transgress the epistemological

boundaries of psychoanalytical thought. The ‘muselmann’ condition is misunderstood on the

Freudian terms of the unconscious: ‘[the muselmann] is not devastated by unconscious

anxieties, but by a “meaningless” external shock which can in no way be hermeneutically

appropriated or integrated’ (Žižek 2010: 293).

We saw above how the originality and radicality of Malabou’s work lies in her

interweaving of the concepts of the brain, plasticity and subjectivity (Malabou 2008). Žižek is

alert to the ramifications of this Malabouian intervention for the very status of Freudian (and

indeed Lacanian) psychoanalysis. Malabou reads her own work as pointing towards the

possibility of a ‘new self’ as opposed to the old, psychoanalytical self: ‘The brain in no way

anticipates the possibility of its own damage. When this damage occurs, it is another self

which is affected, a “new” self founded in misrecognition. What Freud cannot envisage is

that the victim, as it were, survives its own death; ...a new subject emerges which survives its

own death, the death or erasure of its own symbolic identity’ (Žižek 2010: 293-294).

It is clear, on these terms, that Malabou is offering a strong critique of Freudian-Lacanian

psychoanalysis, or on Žižek’s terms, ‘a critical reformulation’. Žižek’s own analysis follows

that of Malabou quite carefully and, at times, he appears to be wholly in agreement with her

analysis. For example, he describes the move from a ‘Freudian twentieth century’ to a

‘twenty first century....of the post-traumatic disengaged subject’ (Žižek 2010: 295) where

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‘today, the enemy is hermeneutics; all hermeneutics is impossible’ (Žižek 2010: 295). Read

in this way, Žižek would seem to be interpreting Malabou’s critique of psychoanalysis as

persuasive. This seems to leave Žižek’s oft-stated Lacanianism rather vulnerable, but he does

clearly mark disagreements with Malabou’s readings of both Freud and Lacan at specific

junctures. These points of philosophical tension raised by Žižek (contra Malabou) are

significant and help us to situate this whole problematic on a more meta-level, in relation to

psychoanalysis and deconstruction per se. Žižek’s rejoinders to Malabou concern her

readings of both Freud and Lacan in specific detail, while also questioning her own

independent articulation of philosophical concepts such as the ‘cerebral unconscious’.

Interestingly, however, while his arguments are in places strongly critical, there is a

paradoxical overall rapprochement between Žižek and Malabou’s positions, which has

significant implications for how we understand the relations between psychoanalysis and

deconstruction, or indeed the very self-definition of contemporary philosophy.

With regard to her reading of Freud, Žižek accuses Malabou of an ‘all too naive reading

of Freud, taking him too hermeneutically’ (Žižek 2010: 304) and moreover for ‘failing to

distinguish between the true core of Freud’s discovery and the different ways he himself

misunderstood the scope of that discovery’ (Žižek 2010: 304). This accusation foregrounds

Žižek’s own complex understanding of the nature of philosophical interpretation which,

despite his oft repeated claims to ‘orthodoxy’, is of a very creative and revisionist type (Irwin

and Motoh 2013; Žižek 2013). That is, in criticising Malabou’s interpretation of Freud, Žižek

is in no way interested in defending some literalist psychoanalytical view. Rather, the reader

of Freud should be sensitive to the self-misunderstandings of Freud, the ways in which

Freud’s concepts and philosophical claims may often distort the ‘true core’ of his thinking,

which would have to be developed otherwise. Here, Žižek also significantly mentions

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Malabou’s supposed ‘ignoring [of] those precise readings (from Lacan to Laplanche) which

convincingly demonstrated that this dualism [of drives] was a false way out, a theoretical

regression’ (Žižek 2010: 304). In this context, it is clear that Žižek’s own understanding of

psychoanalysis, or ‘Freudianism-Lacanianism’, encompasses radical rereadings of the

original core texts over time within a certain psychoanalytical tradition, up to and including

the work of the ‘trioka’ of Slovenian thinkers of psychoanalysis, to which Žižek belongs

(Žižek 2013). Thus, although Malabou sets her own concepts (for example, of the brain or the

subject respectively) very explicitly against certain fundamental tenets of the

psychoanalytical tradition, Žižek seems to be arguing that, for the most part, her conceptual

innovations are already implicit within that very tradition itself, and thus ultimately faithful to

Freudianism-Lacanianism. The disagreements between Žižek and Malabou while significant,

therefore, reside more at the level of readings of Freud and Lacan’s ‘true core’ than they do

at the level of independent conceptual articulation by Žižek and Malabou themselves. On the

latter level, Žižek and Malabou’s thinking remain strikingly in congruence. We can see this if

look at the specific disagreements concerning Freud and Lacan’s conceptuality.

4. Rethinking the ‘True Core’ of Freudian-Lacanianism Between Malabou and Žižek

Without equivocation, Malabou thematises her work in The New Wounded as revolutionary

in intent, when understood in the context of contemporary frameworks of philosophy or

psychoanalysis. With regard even, for example, to the deconstructionist legacy of Derrida

which she often invokes, she is nonetheless clear that there can be no simple ‘following’, on

her part (Malabou 2008). With regard to psychoanalysis, her critique is significantly more

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acute. She is quite derisory concerning the psychoanalytical assumption that Freud and Lacan

have said all there is to say on the subject of psychic suffering: ‘could it be that

psychoanalysis hasn’t said everything on the subject of psychic suffering...or new forms of

suffering? Could it be that there are new wounded whom psychopathology has never

encountered before now?’ (Malabou 2012: xiii). In this context, she connects this

fundamental critique of the terms of reference of both philosophy and psychoanalysis as

disciplines, to three hypotheses which form the basis of her claims (Malabou 2012: xix).

First, she considers the psychoanalytical emphasis on the concept of sexuality (as understood

broadly) to be inadequate to address the ‘specific causality’ she wishes to elaborate (Malabou

2012: xix). In place of sexuality, Malabou will stress ‘the existence of a psychic regime of

events –a cerebral eventuality – whose specific causality is radically different from that

which psychoanalysis had elucidated’ (Malabou 2012: xix).

Second, Malabou’s work claims to displace the Freudian-Lacanian stress on the concept

of the ‘unconscious’, which runs the risk, on her terms, of reducing outer to inner, while also

overstressing an epistemology of meaning (Malabou 2012: xix). We discussed this point in

some detail above in relation to Žižek's articulation of this problematic. For Malabou, what is

sought after in place of the hegemony of the unconscious is a ‘general theory of trauma that

would itself be founded upon the elucidation of the traits that all of the new wounded have in

common’ (Malabou 2012: xix). Third, and finally, Malabou emphasises the continuity of the

concept of ‘plasticity’ in her work, which we discussed above in relation to her earlier oeuvre

(Malabou 2008). Here, in The New Wounded (Malabou 2012), there is a more specific

articulation of the concept of plasticity as ‘destructive plasticity’: ‘the development of the

preceding points is supported by the hypothesis of destructive plasticity; until now unknown

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to psychoanalysis but also insufficiently thematised by neurology; that forms the psyche

through the deconstitution of identity’ (Malabou 2012: xix).

Significantly, Malabou also seeks to contextualise the importance of these hypotheses

understood collectively with regard to a meta-level reading of psychoanalysis, or the future of

psychoanalysis. At this juncture, the particular reference is to the relationship between

psychoanalysis and ‘neuropathology’ (Malabou 2012: xix). But what Malabou wants to make

clear is that her three hypotheses (however radical) are in no way intended as lending support

to ‘some liquidation of psychoanalysis and thus to declare unconditional devotion to the

neurological approach to psychic disturbances’ (Malabou 2012: xix). Rather what she

emphasises in contrast is the need for a ‘sustained dialogue between the two disciplines’

(Malabou 2012: xix), that is, psychoanalysis and neuroscience, with the express purpose of

thinking (or rethinking) what she terms ‘the new faces of suffering’ (Malabou 2012: xix).

We have already seen how she has also cast significant aspersions on philosophy’s capacity

to engage such new experiences and phenomena, whether the framework is Platonic or

existentialist (Malabou 2012: xi). It is arguable that the three Malabouian hypotheses

described here, as they become articulated through the text of The New Wounded at times

overstress the conflict between psychoanalysis and neuroscience and take the discussion

beyond the supposed framework of a ‘sustained dialogue’. With regard to Malabou’s

deconstructionism, however, we might defend and justify such a polemical approach in terms

of Derrida’s notion of ‘active interpretation’, sometimes deliberately distorting literal

meaning in the name of creativity or philosophical insight (Irwin 2010).

This philosophical style of obscurantism is hardly foreign to Lacanianism (Lacan

2008: 3) and Žižek even goes so far in his text The Plague of Fantasies (Žižek 1997) as to

specifically endorse Derrida’s method of distortive ‘misreading’. His compatriots Zupančič 16

and Dolar have also, in recent interviews, been keen to emphasise this ‘active’ or ‘violent’

dimension of their Lacanian readings, decrying any kind of regressive literalism (Zupančič

2013; Dolar 2013). But in terms of Žižek’s reading of Malabou in Living In The End Times

(Žižek 2010), it seems that too much is at stake to take such liberties. Against such

possibilities of liberal misreading, Žižek seems rather to be keen to realign Malabou’s work

with the general direction of Freudian-Lacanianism, while simultaneously reasserting the

latter’s contemporaneity and adaptability to current developments in neuroscience and socio-

symbolic reality. Žižek’s dexterity in bringing about what appears to be such a successful

realignment of Malabou and psychoanalysis (understood as ‘Freudian-Lacanian’), against all

initial appearances to the contrary, constitutes perhaps one of the most impressive passages of

his work in recent times (Žižek 2010: 291-314).

As we saw above, Žižek follows Malabou’s critique of psychoanalysis and her elaboration

of a ‘sustained dialogue’ between the latter and neuroscience very carefully in Living In The

End Times (Žižek 2010), so closely as at times to appear almost indistinguishable from the

latter. Nonetheless, certain key points of tension do emerge as Žižek’s reading progresses. In

the first instance, we described above the indictment of Malabou as an ‘all too naive’ reader

of Freud (Žižek 2010: 304), for ‘taking him too hermeneutically’. However, this

interpretation by Žižek is less a critique of Malabou and more a rereading of Freud through

Laplanche and Lacan (Žižek 2010: 304), as Žižek explicitly clarifies. Second, there is the

problematic of the priority afforded by psychoanalysis to the concept of the ‘unconscious’

and the underestimation of the concept of ‘trauma’ (Žižek 2010: 295). Here, Malabou wishes

to reassert a ‘general theory of trauma’ which will allow the radicality of the experience of

meaninglessness to be properly registered by psychoanalysis and/or philosophy (Malabou

2012: xix). On initial inspection, this appears to be a radical break between Malabou and

17

Žižek, but again Žižek seeks to contest the distance which Malabou has asserted between her

work and psychoanalysis on this point. He argues cogently that Malabou seems to have

neglected the clear difference (at least in Lacan’s work) between ‘pleasure’ and ‘jouissance’

(enjoyment): ‘Against Malabou, however, the difference between pleasure and jouissance

should be fully acknowledged’ (Žižek 2010: 295). But if this difference is fully

acknowledged, it would seem to have the effect of bringing Malabou and psychoanalysis

closer together once more, as a Lacanianism (or even Freudianism) premised on the concept

of jouissance and excess is one which is far more compatible with Malabou’s general theory

of trauma. Here, I follow the Lacanian articulation of jouissance, as amongst other elements,

a vehement attack on the notion that every phenomenon must have a ‘meaning’. If we take

one of the senses of ‘jouissance’ as ‘enjoy-meant’, it articulates an acute subversion of more

traditional philosophical attempts to categorise all aspects of human life epistemologically

(Bowie 1997). For Lacan, this radicalism is already articulated in Freud’s very notion of the

unconscious, although he is also very aware of how much Freud’s radicalism on this point

has been blurred by subsequent, misguided interpretation: ‘and so we relate this unconscious

to old rumours and erase the line that would allow us to see that the Freudian unconscious has

absolutely nothing to do with what was called the unconscious before Freud’ (Lacan 2008:

11). Thus, on Žižek’s terms, Malabou has somewhat repeated this misreading of Freud, as

here exemplarily outlined by Lacan, and underestimated the proximity of Freud’s conception

of the unconscious to her own notion of trauma and radical meaninglessness.

Against the notion that psychoanalysis underestimates the full shock of events such as

violent attacks on the person from outside or cerebral wasting diseases, a psychoanalysis of

jouissance (or enjoyment) unequivocally rejects the hegemony of meaning or epistemology

(however ‘unconscious’) which Malabou describes. Indeed, Žižek goes so far here as to

18

conversely accuse Malabou of the very same epistemologism in her reading of the ‘new

suffering’: ‘Is Malabou not then guilty of the same mistake for which she reproaches

psychoanalysis; the mistake of not being able to think the absence of meaningful engagement,

of reading disengaged indifference from within the horizon of such engagement?’ (Žižek

2010: 300).

Žižek makes an analogous argument when it comes to the difference between a

psychoanalytical conception of ‘sexuality’ and Malabou’s supposedly distinctive notion of a

‘cerebral unconscious’. What the latter conception allows for, according to Malabou, is a

radicalised conception of ‘plasticity’ which allows for radical breaks in selfhood, for in effect

new selves. But, for Žižek, this is less a refutation of some kind of residual substantialism or

metaphysics in Lacanianism and more an internal development of Lacan’s own logic. As

Žižek notes, ‘Lacan introduces a logic which is not taken into account by Malabou’ (Žižek

2010: 305). Again, we can refer to Lacan’s own text in this context. ‘As Max Jacob used to

say, and I tried to reproduce it at the end of one of my écrits; “the truth is always new” and if

it is to be true, it has to be new’ (Lacan 2008: 17). Malabou’s new selves, new subjects, her

‘destructive plasticity’ are, for Žižek, simply a continuation of Lacan’s ‘new truths’. This is

not to undermine Malabou’s achievements in The New Wounded, as Žižek is clear throughout

that Malabou’s text is full of contemporary and irreducible insight (especially in the

reworking of the boundaries between psychoanalysis and brain science). As an example of

this powerful commendation, he even goes so far as to contrast the ‘Freudian twentieth

century’ with the ‘twenty first century....of the post-traumatic disengaged subject’ (Žižek

2010: 295) where ‘today, the enemy is hermeneutics; all hermeneutics is impossible’ (Žižek

2010: 295).

19

But, while admitting that our early twenty-first century may thus well be Malabouian, we

may also say that Žižek wishes to stake an equally Slovenian claim to this moment, what, we

might argue, is just as much a twenty-first century of the Ljubljana trioka (Irwin and Motoh

2013) of Žižek, Zupančič and Dolar. Here, no radical rereading of psychoanalysis would be

required but simply attention to the detail of Lacan’s own texts on truth, where Lacan at his

own most radical moment avers his very lineage with Freud:

‘A hole in truth: it is the negative aspect that appears in anything to do with the sexual, namely its inability to aver. That is what a psychoanalysis is all about. We can feel that what Freud called “sexuality” takes on a new meaning from the very beginning’ (Lacan 2008: 22).

For Žižek, then, as for Lacan, the very radicality and contemporaneity of Malabou’s

philosophical intervention in The New Wounded would lead all the way back not simply to

Lacan, but to Freud (3). As Lacan notes, ‘Freud’s terms come back to life, take on a different

import’ (Lacan 2008: 23). And this rebirth of Freudianism and psychoanalysis would

paradoxically, and somewhat against Malabou’s active reading, be there ‘from the very

beginning’ (Lacan 2008: 22).

Notes

1. According to Malabou, Foucault insists upon what he calls the process of

‘transsubjectivation’, ‘which consists in a trajectory within the self. This

transsubjectivation doesn’t mean that you become different from what you used to be,

nor that you are able to absorb the other’s difference, but that you open a space within

yourself between two forms of yourself. That you oppose two forms of yourself

within yourself’ (Malabou 2008: 4). Malabou quotes Foucault directly in this context: 20

‘Foucault writes: “Clear a space around the self and do not let yourself be carried

away and distracted by all the sounds, faces, and people around you. (…) All your

attention should be concentrated on this trajectory from self to self. Presence of self to

self, precisely on account of the distance still remaining’ (quoted Malabou 2008: 4).

2. Another concept foregrounded here by Malabou is ethopoiein: ‘Ethopoiein means

making ethos, producing ethos, changing, transforming ethos, the individual’s way

of being, his mode of existence’ (Malabou 2008: 4).

3. One can make an analogous argument that Derrida’s work also anticipates very

clearly this philosophical dimension. In On Touching (Derrida 2005), for example,

Derrida reads the work of Nancy in terms of a problematic of ‘plasticity and

technicity’ [‘en compte de la plasticité et de la technicité’] (Derrida 2000: 249, 2005:

220). Derrida seems to be arguing against the notion that one can draw the boundaries

of touch at the organic limits of bodies. Rather we now have to consider a whole new

dimension of ‘touch’ and ‘sense’, which has evolved from ‘the intertwining of techne

and the body [verflectung]’ (Derrida 2005: 237). The affinities with the thematic of

The New Wounded are clear. Derrida’s work also owes a significant debt to Georges

Bataille in this regard, especially in the context of a technics or a ‘writing’ of

embodiment (Irwin 2010, esp Ch 2; Bataille 1988), a debt Derrida readily

acknowledges, for example in his seminal essay, ‘From Restricted to General

Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve’ (in Derrida 1978).

21

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