Catherine Malabou
Tom Mitchell once gave me a pink woolen cap as a present. It is a knitted cap, with large stitches. Maybe it’s crocheted. Its pink is comparable to the chewing gum in France called Malabar (note the phonic proximity with my name). A very soft pink. I’ve never worn it outside because it looks a bit like a ’50s swimming cap. It’s very beautiful, adorable, but a little flashy. On the other hand, I wear it at home, at my office, whenever writing seems difficult to me. This cap is like a membrane that protects my ideas, halfway between a kangaroo’s pouch (for the brain) and a robot’s or alien’s helmet. Protection is something ambiguous. I remember Aristotle stating that a shield (in Greek problema, literally “what is found ahead”) means both what guards from and what exposes to a screen and an obstacle at the same time. My cap, then, is securing my ideas but it also confronts them with the outside, the outside of the wool shelter, thus making the outside appears as an engaging thread, in all its ambiguity.
It is often suggested, in intellectual circles, that the time has come to abandon the twentieth-century formulations of a critical-theory project. A theory is critical, Horkheimer said, to the extent that it seeks human “emancipation from slavery,” acts as a “liberating . . . influence,” and works “to create a world which satisfies the needs and powers of” human beings.[1] What remains of such a project? How is it possible, and is it possible to bring together different contemporary discourses on subalterity and regroup them under a common banner? Critical Inquiry, for me, has always been and will always be the place, the unique place for raising such questions, the place where critical theory is both challenged and maintained, preserved and transformed, undressed and reshaped.
My pink cap is the symbol of such a strange metamorphic power. Between the inside and outside of my head, opening in the intimacy of my being something like the critical zone, the biological equivalent of the exposed intimacy of the journal. Sign of hope in these dark times, promise of benevolence and rigor.
I am so happy to have published so many different articles in it, from Spinoza to reflections on neurobiological issues, up to recent explorations of political hegemonies.
From all the neural convolutions of my cap, in the name of all my “problems,” I thank you immensely, dear Tom, and extend my gratitude to all the other members of the crew.
I wish you a very happy anniversary, Critical Inquiry.
Catherine Malabou is a professor of European languages and studies and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (2012), Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality(2016), Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains(2019), and, most recently, Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy(forthcoming). She is also on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry.
[1]. Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell et al. (New York, 1992), p. 246.
In the Moment 