Catherine Malabou-Introduction to Biopolitics and Biopower

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Catherine Malabou, philosopher and author, talking about biopolitics and biopower in Foucault, Agamben and Derrida. In this lecture Catherine Malabou discusses the political deconstruction of sovereignty, the meaning of the symbolic in language and the difference between the biological and symbolic body in relationship to Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Ernst Kantorowicz, Thomas Hobbes, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Baruch Spinoza, Jacques Lacan, Karl Marx, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Gilles Deleuze focusing on life, death, dasein, phenomenology, spiritual body, subjective body, flesh, the reciprocation of gift and counter-gift, dialectical materialism, the system of debt, exchange value, linguistic economy, incest, the zero-level of value and the body without organs (BwO). Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe. 2012. Catherine Malabou.

Catherine Malabou, Ph.D., born in 1959, was a student at the École normal supérieure (ENS) and Sorbonne University in France. She wrote her dissertation on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel under the direction of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, completing it in 1994. The thesis was published in 1996 under the title L'Avenir de Hegel, plasticité, temporalité, dialectique (The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic). Catherine Malabou has taught at Nanterre University in Paris, the University of California at Berkeley, the New School for Social Research in New York City and currently is a full-time professor at the Centre for Modern European Philosophy of Kingston in the United Kingdom. She also teaches an intensive summer seminar at the European Graduate School (EGS).

Catherine Malabou is a specialist of contemporary French and German philosophy, with a focus on Hegel and Heidegger. She is most famous for her concept of ontological "plasticity." Her work also incorporates neuroscience and neuro-psychoanalysis. Malabou has published many works including Voyager avec Jacques Derrida - La Contre-allée (1999, English publication in 2004 entitled Counterpath), Que faire de notre cerveau? (2004, English publication in 2008 entitled What Should We Do with Our Brain?), La Plasticité au soir de l'écriture : Dialectique, destruction, deconstruction (2005, English publication in 2009 entitled Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction), Changer de différence (2009, English publication in 2011 entitled Changing differences). More recently, Catherine Malabou published a book in French with Judith Butler entitled Sois mon corps (2010). She also manages a philosophy book series for the French publisher Éditions Léo Scheer.