Over at Unemployed Negativity, friend of the blog (and sometimes even co-blogger) Jason Read writes on a new book by Judith Butler and Catherine Malabou, Sois mon corps: une lecture contemporaine de la domination et servitude chez Hegel. Order the book here. Read's post is here. First two paragraphs:
In the history of philosophy there are some texts that are difficult to say anything new about. These texts are so dominated by one influential reading that it becomes difficult, even impossible, to say interpret anew. Paradigmatic in these respects is the brief section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit known as the “master slave dialectic” or “lordship and bondage”.This section is so dominated by Kojeve’s canonical reading that is almost as if his words were already there on the pages of Hegel’s text.
This is one reason why Judith Butler and Catherine Malabou’s exchange on “Domination and Servitude” published in French as Sois mon corps: une lecture contemporaine de la domination et servitude chez Hegel is engaging. It is a reading of this all too well known section of Hegel’s text, but one that dispenses with the preoccupations of a previous generation in order to reread Hegel. Butler and Malabou each address Hegel from their particular philosophical commitments and engagements: Butler’s intervention is framed by her reading of Hegel in The Psychic Life of Power and Malabou continues her development of plasticity in her reading of Hegel.
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UPDATE (JP): I reviewed Malabou's Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing for NDPR in Feb 2010.
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