The Heidegger Change , livre ebook

SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought

Edited by David Pettigrew and François Raffoul

THE HEIDEGGER CHANGE
On the Fantastic in Philosophy
Catherine Malabou
Translated and Edited by
Peter Skafish

© 2004 Éditions Léo Scheer Le Change Heidegger
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2011 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Malabou, Catherine.
[Change Heidegger. English]
The Heidegger change : on the fantastic in philosophy / Catherine Malabou ; translated and edited by Peter Skafish.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in contemporary French thought)
“Bibliography of Heidegger's works”—P.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3955-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Heidegger, Martin, 1889–1976. 2. Change. I. Skafish, Peter. II Title.
B3279.H49M271213 2011
193—dc22                                                                                                                                                   2011007665
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

My mind leads me to speak now of forms changed into new bodies:
O gods above, inspire this undertaking (which you've changed as well)
and guide my poem in its epic sweep
from the world's beginning to the present day.
—Ovid, Metamorphoses I, 1–4

Translator/Editor's Preface
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, but her work itself abandons one of the chief presuppositions that made that its preferred form. Making the capacity of things to give, receive, and change their own and each other's forms the basic character and condition of the real results in a very different understanding of things than one that grants differences that role. The power of each individual to resist and change the other becomes just as important as (if not more crucial than) the capacity to be affected by the other. What fails to withstand the other will never be able to integrate enough from it to undergo change.
The consequences for writing and translation are almost immediate. Language that is stable, not so much polyvalent as subtly ambiguous, and even closed down to certain meanings turns out to be more effective at conveying this new ontological and politico-ethical status of identity than the old fragmented and plurilinear style. Malabou thus often renders her prose (especially in this book and her part of Contre-Allée / Counterpath 1 in terms so deliberate that the polysemy necessary for its reading and interpretation is kept from feeding back on and endlessly amplifying itself. As for translation, the common practice of infecting the host language with strong traces of the cadence, tone, and grammatical structure of the original language is no longer self-evidently good. Reminding readers of the inadequacy of translation and thus the always-lost specificity of the original becomes less useful for transmitting its thoughts than bending them into idioms more ordinary in the other language. Cast in such familiar language, the translation takes on the sort of sharp definition that made the original distinctive; when the duplicity or untranslatability of the original needs to be exposed, the translation is strong enough to sustain punctures and gaps.
Translating in such a “plastic” fashion allowed the character and meaning of Malabou's writing to emerge more than would have the methods, whether literalist or fideist, commonly applied to philosophical texts. So while precision was my concern throughout, I preferred whenever possible natural phrasings over constructions whose “accuracy” would have mostly stiffened the original's sense. What was initially most important to me was to preserve the distinctiveness of Malabou's voice. At once personally unassuming and philosophically demanding, calm and volatile, and invitingly open and unyieldingly stern in its refusals—simultaneously “modest” and “cunning” was how Jacques Derrida put it—readers who have encountered Malabou in person know this contradictory affect to be the source of her credibility as a thinker. Instead of conveying genius through intellectual speed and agility, or philosophical authority through “classical” (and anachronistic) remove, she balances her fighting streak with a humility that suggests the point of philosophical sparring is to share in wisdom, not attain academic triumph. Because her voice is particularly evident here—the reader is both ordered and anticipated by it through the form of direct address employed for the entirety of the book—it seemed best to render it into an English disencumbered of heavy Gallicisms. These would have made it seem literally foreign instead of the internally uncanny force I believe it would be in many languages.
A less estranged English also proved suitable to the book's novel line of thought. Malabou's contention here is that Heidegger offers a conception of change that can more effectively think difference, the other, ethics, the gift, and time than the philosophies of his greatest and also most critical readers. This claim (which even sympathetic readers will no doubt find controversial) hinges on his persistent use of three words— Wandel , Wandlung , and Verwandlung (W, W, & V) —in nearly everything he wrote after Being and Time . Heidegger employs these terms, which more or less correspond to “change,” “transformation,” and “metamorphosis,” to express how each of the various philosophical dispensations through which being is revealed in and as history is the transformation of the dispensation it succeeds (such that being is a continuous, unbroken transmission). But he also ends up using Wandel , Wandlung , and Verwandlung to make other, more radical claims about change and being that are rarely ascribed to him: the “it” in the “it gives” ( es gibt ) with which he eventually characterizes being never transcends what it gives; the series of dispensations that is the history of being is thus substitutive (and even prosthetic) in nature; and change is therefore originary, without being able to anywhere begin.
Yet despite how much being thus turns out to be, as Malabou puts it, nothing but its changes, Heidegger never fully elaborates this thought or comments on what this text calls “the triad of change.” Wandel , Wandlung , and Verwandlung are instead just left dangling, some of the loosest, most neglected threads in his writings (although more promising than others, like Geist and Gestalt , at the center of the French debates over Heidegger). Malabou even characterizes the triad as “textual pulp,” leftover philosophical matter so unrefned that even careful, independent readers (when they have managed to notice them) are unable to connect to the major problems of his work. One instead ordinarily gleans from them (this was at least true for me) only a picture or image of the processes of change and transformation they express—a “fantastic,” almost hallucinatory vision of the real as metamorphosis that analysis, argument, and concept are initially foreign to and can only afterward express.
So even as Malabou was only able to perceive the triad's significance because of her prior work on Hegel and plasticity, she approaches them less by tracking how they both exclude and open certain philosophical possibilities in Heidegger's texts than by simply conveying this strange vision. This required of her a poetic style rich enough to evoke a vivid picture of transformation but unobtrusive enough to not make the image seem like an artifact of language. The text's routine, argumentative sentences and adorned, performative phrases alike thus benefited from simple renderings that would not distract readers from this image of change.
This is not to say, however, that the text's marked words, technical expressions, and neologisms could somehow be simply transferred into English. Terms like l'articulation migratoire-metamorphique and la cinéplastique de l'être —which emphasize that change and molding are movement (and movement therefore change)—or l'édition imaginale de la présence , which plays on the fact molding leaves the prints or imprints so important in deconstruction, required the same mixture of fidelity and abuse that more technically difficult philosophical translations do. But these are not so rife in the text as to have made my method impossible. (Where they prove particularly “untranslatable,” the originals are kept in brackets.)
The word that features the most this way is the French noun change ; it carries a double meaning—both “change” and “exchange”—nearly impossible to evoke with the English substantive “change,” and Malabou frequently plays on both senses throughout the text, sometimes even using the term interchangeably with two other frequently appearing words: changement , “change,” and échange , “exchange.” Since there was thus no way to consistently translate the term, I most often resort to “(ex)change,” while occasionally using “change” (and placing change in brackets) when the meaning or rhythm of a sentence calls for it. In certain cases where chan