Abstract
How to speak of wounding, of survival? Regarding a new “recently adopted apocalyptic tone in philosophy” and the multiple crises of the twenty-first century this question, which has shaped Occidental philosophy after Auschwitz, seems to have gained increased urgency. In her book “The New Wounded” (orig. 2007) Malabou addresses this question of the (im)possibility of the symbolization of traumatic injuries. The paper develops Malabou's understanding of survival as dis-continuity and the problem of the speechlessness of the survivor implicit to it: What can, in fact, be said, when the “in-dividual” is suspended from the chronological order of time and its mode of survival consists precisely in this suspension? By also considering the work of Dufourmantelle and Derrida on this matter, I intend to open up a yet underexplored perspective on deconstruction's contribution to a thinking of survival.
The uncanny thought of survival
In their edited volume “Die Apokalypse enttäuscht”—a title that takes up a bon mot by Blanchot— Düttman and Quent (2023) detect a new “recently adopted apocalyptical tone” in philosophy that is at work wherever theorists face contemporary challenges such as climate change or the atomic threat. Within these debates, but also in the context of public politico-social discussions surrounding the multiple “crises” of the twenty-first century—ecological, economical, class-gender-race-struggles, decolonial struggles etc.—the issue of survival appears to be ubiquitous today. For example, if we look at activist groups such as “The Last Generation,” philosophical discourses on the Anthropocene or projects like the Global Seed Vault (see Grech, 2022: 46), “survival” is often (not always) defined as a desirable goal in contrast to extinction or disappearance—but whose survival, whose disappearance exactly? And do we really already know what we are talking about, when we speak about survival?
Derrida poses this question when he indicates that the term of “revenance” as well as that of the “dangerous supplement,” both of which he frequently associated with survival (Derrida, 1977: Séance 5, 16 and Séance 8, 10–12) prove to be far more paradox, far more “unheimlich” than we generally expect, even though, or precisely because, we always already have a certain pre-understanding of what the movement of “returning” or the supplement as a mere superfluous “add-on” implies. Despite this, theorists such as Haraway (2016) or Tsing (2015) employ the term of a “collective survival” that tends to remain philosophically under-determined and therefore relies on our everyday understanding of the process (or should we rather speak of the event?) of survival. In his yet unpublished seminar on Derrida's “Thomas l’Obscur” (1977) Derrida defines this common-place conception of survival as “ça continue à vivre au-delà de…” (Derrida, 1977: Séance 8, 10). This implies living in spite of dire circumstances such as illness and war as well as a living-on after death taking place in a “world beyond.”
Both of these conceptions reveal two insinuations commonly made when we imagine our own or others’ survival, be it in philosophical or more everyday contexts: First, they both presuppose a kind of continuity or the idea, that life “more or less” goes on as we know it. The survivors retain their recognizable features—despite all difficulties, even despite death itself. While this conception of survival might be useful to inspire immediate action, it proves to be limiting in other contexts. For example, when we consider possible measures against global warming to ensure human and other species’ survival on earth, whether we imagine this “survival” as a continuation of life as we know it or as a radical fracture after which “nothing is like before” might influence our conclusions drastically. This problem is also highlighted by Düttman and Quent (2023) when they argue that the apocalyptical speech often serves conservatism rather than a demand for transformation. 1 Imagining survival as a sort of “life unscathed” might even re-install an idea of sovereignty or “super-life,” which Derrida's conception of “survivance” precisely aims to deconstruct, as Trumbull (2022) has shown.
Secondly, both of these conceptions ignore the structural entanglement of life and death. Thus, they imply what Naas (2014: 114) has called the phantasm of the possibility of a clear “cut” between life and death, which Derrida (2019) refuted in “La vie la mort” through his concept of life death. Therefore, we might in fact wish for a multiplicity of rigorously developed philosophical concepts of survival that open and obscure different future modes of our “living-on-earth.”
Derrida himself frequently addresses the problem of the imagined continuity and the temporality of survival, probably most prominently in his meticulous readings of Blanchot from the 1970s to the 1980s and later in “Demeure” (orig. 1998). However, in this paper, I want to explore another route, namely the thinking of survival within Malabou's “The New Wounded” (orig. 2007). At first glance, this might seem a little odd: the notion of survival is by no means central for Malabou, as she only uses it in a more colloquial sense and in passing. Instead, what Malabou aims at in her book, is to develop her key-concept of negative plasticity in contrast to a Freudian positive understanding of the term. Nevertheless, I will argue that Malabou provides a rich concept of survival as dis-continuity which is also, though developed independently from it, close to what Derrida, mainly in his work on Blanchot, has developed as the time of survival as an “interval between two deaths.”
In a first step, I will sketch out Malabou's concept of negative plasticity and reconstruct how she develops it through her reading of Freud. From this, I will show which understanding of survival is implicit within her notion of negative plasticity by exploring some of its central features, such as the indifference of the survivor and its precarious status between life and death. Via a short detour, I will try to further flesh out this conception of survival as “in-between” and its relation to language through Dufourmantelle's interpretation of the myth of Eurydice. In the last section of my paper, I hint at the possible applicability of Malabou's thinking of survival, especially within the general intellectual climate of “enlightened doomsaying“ (Dupuy, 2023) I sketched out at the beginning. Throughout the paper and in the concluding section, I will outline some similarities and differences between Malabou's and Derrida's conceptions of survival as interval. By cross-reading Malabou, Dufourmantelle and Derrida this way I hope to open up a yet underexplored perspective on deconstruction's and its “followers’” (Kamuf, 2010) contribution to a thinking of the existential issue of survival, a topic that has only recently gained increased attention by scholars and which for Trumbull also proves deconstruction's persisting relevance within contemporary debates in the fields of ethics and politics (Boelderl, 2022; Cohen and Zagury-Orly, 2022; Grech 2022; Saghafi, 2020; Trumbull, 2022). My aim is to establish Malabou's thought of negative plasticity as well as the notion of the new wounded as relevant interventions within this emerging field of materialistic re-readings of deconstruction as well as within various discourses on survival in the face of the (presumed) “end of the world.”
Negative plasticity
As Malabou argues in “The New Wounded,” the concept of plasticity is generally understood in a positive way as the ability to receive form (like clay) or to give form (the sculptor). Therefore, it traditionally points to a harmonious equilibrium between metamorphosis and continuity (Malabou, 2012a: 3). For Malabou (2012b: 18), this understanding is best illustrated by Freud's usage of the term in the context of “Thoughts for the Times of War and Death” (orig. 1915), where he describes the transformation of a village as opposed to the development of psychic life (seelische Entwicklung). In the case of the village, he claims that earlier stages of development are usually erased by the later one, the city, where old materials have largely vanished and have been replaced by new ones. In contrast to this, in the development of psychic life, earlier stages of development persist and co-exist alongside later ones (Freud, 1957: 285). Even if in the course of certain illnesses or accidents it may appear as if psychic life is subdued to destruction, this only denotes a fall-back into earlier stages of development. Although it is possible for Freud that later or “higher” stages of development are completely annulled, the “primitive state of psychic life” (primitive Zustände), especially the stadium of childhood, is indestructible. This is the ability of “Rückbildung” (regression), that Freud (1957: 286) coins as the “astonishing plasticity of mental developments […]. The primitive stages can always be re-established, the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable.” Thus, it cannot even be destroyed by mental illness or other “impacts in life,” such as “influences of war” (Freud, 1957: 286). For Malabou, this proves that the thought of an ultimately imperturbable continuity or persistency is central to Freud's understanding of psychic development—at least in this text from 1915, though Malabou (2012b: 58) argues that there is a certain persistency of this thought of persistency in Freud.
Here, I will not explore whether Malabou's reading of Freud does him complete justice. In fact, she only takes Freud's text as an example for a general understanding of plasticity that, for her, is the prevalent way of thinking processes of transformation within the Occidental literary and philosophical tradition that favors continuity and recognizability (Malabou 2012a: 7) . Malabou (2012b) wants to counter this traditional understanding, which she illustrates through Freud, Ovid and Kafka, with a more radical notion of metamorphosis, which she introduces under the term of negative or destructive plasticity that designates a creation through destruction of form. In negative plasticity, through the annihilation of an initial identity a new one is formed, without the possibility of remembrance or return, which is why Malabou (2012b: 57) also speaks of an “identity without precedent.”
As Malabou states, the urgency of developing a term for these kinds of transformations first occurred to her when confronted with the Alzheimer's diagnosis of her grandmother. In the course of the grandmother's proceeding illness, she becomes aware that the person she is facing is a complete stranger: “Behind the familiar halo of hair, the tone of her voice, the blue of her eyes, the absolutely incontestable presence of someone else. This other person however was strangely absent” (Malabou, 2012b: xi), she describes these encounters. The new version of the grandmother is “the work of the disease, its opus, its own sculpture” (Malabou, 2012b: xi). Her state is characterized by a deep indifference towards her surroundings and her own fate. Even though everyday life has lost all significance, this coolness is also the sign of profound pain and suffering (Malabou, 2012b: xii-xiii). She cannot recognize the objects of her former life, which for Malabou indicates that every trace of memory has been erased. The only connection with her remains a way of tender- or gentleness (Malabou, 2012b: xiv).
As Malabou argues, this sort of metamorphosis would be impossible to grasp for Freud, as within the Freudian framework, the grandmother's cerebral suffering must be reduced to the structure of sexuality or would be conceived of as a sort of psychic death. However, what for her becomes visible in the course of her grandmother's illness, is exactly not the complete annihilation, but rather the emergence of a new psyche. In this sense, negative plasticity is not identical to the abolition of form. Even though it indicates a radical change, there also remains a certain—however liminal—resistance to it. Malabou (2022: 319) recognizes this as one of the major points of divergence between her and Derrida, since in her terms a survival without form—a Derridian scenario of “ashes of ashes”—is unconceivable. Exploring the destructive side of plasticity therefore amounts to nothing less than the question of the possibility of a “plastics of death” (Malabou, 2012b: 20). Regarding the situation of Alzheimer's patients it becomes clear that, strangely enough, life goes on—a life goes on. What we encounter, there, on the other side of the fracture, is still a psyche, however, a psyche that has lost and shed all indications of her former life. It is a way of disappearing before death (Malabou, 2012a: 59), that is to say, not death itself, but instead, a specific way of “living-on.” Therefore, a notion of survival implicit to Malabou's thinking of negative plasticity becomes visible. In fact, she also speaks of the formation of a “survivor's identity” or a “never before seen existential and vital configuration” (Malabou, 2012a: 19), a way of survival however, without redemption or resurrection, without sublation (Malabou, 2012b: 213). Since Freudian psychanalysis offers no sufficient explanation to describe her grandmother's suffering as a mode of survival, Malabou introduces the term of the new wounded, a category of the impaired or injured that escape the theoretical framework of psychoanalysis as well as philosophy. As becomes clear from her insistence on form, their “living on” neither indicates a complete annihilation nor continuity but rather marks a (however precarious and risky) meeting point between repetition and innovation (Malabou, 2022: 161). 2
On a sidenote, the reason why Freud cannot grasp the state of the new wounded adequately lies, in Malabou's reading, not only in his concept and prioritization of continuity over dis-continuity, but also in his understanding of the co-constitutive relationship between the event and the framework of sexuality. For Malabou, sexuality is the name of a law or of a form of causality, that determines the sense of the event within psychic life but, at the same time, is also co-constituted by the event (Malabou, 2012b: 2). Therefore, she understands psychoanalysis essentially as the theory of the relation between the event and sexuality (Malabou, 2012b: 2). However, in her view, throughout his work, Freud tends to dissolve their co-constitutive relation one-sidedly into a hierarchic order. This way, Freud relativizes the causal impact of exogeneous events within the etiology of neuroses, to the point where the event almost seems to have no causal effect on psychic suffering at all. Malabou demonstrates this at length with reference to Freud's and Breuer's “Studies on Hysteria” (1895) and his “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (orig. 1915) as well as within his work on the war neuroses (1919, 1920). In fact, Freud is first challenged to account for the relation between event and neurosis when he is confronted with war neurotics in World War I. In short, Freud explains their suffering by proclaiming that prior to the accident or the injury suffered there must have been an affective conflict within the ego, that is merely actualized through the event. The “crack” that runs through and devastates the psyche, which first appears to be an effect of the injury, can thus only open along “preexisting fault lines” (Malabou, 2012b: 77). The psyche is damaged, even before the body is. For Malabou Freud's conception of the relation between the event and sexuality therefore remains unsatisfactory as he cannot think cerebral suffering adequately and notoriously underestimates the event. In reaction to this, she turns to neuroscience, which from her point of view makes it possible to consider the destruction of cerebral structures through injury or illness, that has an irreversible transformative effect on the individual's identity and psyche, without the assumption of a preceding inner affective conflict. For Malabou, neuroscience makes us perceive the devastating effect of the accident, which Freud is unable to grasp. Thus, what the phenomenon of the new wounded, but also neuroscience, make us consider, is the psyche's ability to “survive the senselessness of its own accidents” (Malabou, 2012b: 5). Interestingly, with regard to the question of the speechlessness of the survivor, Malabou (2012a: 29) also points out that from the perspective of neuroscience the accident cannot be symbolized, thus it resists being integrated into a linear narrative (as any structure into which it could be inscribed is destroyed by the accident).
We could therefore conclude that Freud and Malabou open two different understandings of survival that differ with regard to the question of continuity: when we speak of survival, do we imply that something is saved when jumping the “gulf of the event,” that threads can be re-tied and reconciled (Freud)? Or does survival precisely designate the possibility of a fracture after which nothing is like before, without the possibility of regression or turning back, of re-construction?
As indicated above, this question doesn’t have to be answered in the terms of an exclusive Either/Or, but instead these two as well as other concepts of survival might be complementary. However, since Malabou aims at developing the notion of negative plasticity, she follows the idea of a more radical cut, which Freud and others in her view subordinate under the ideal of a continuity “unscathed” and which therefore generally receives less attention within philosophy as well as psychoanalysis. Malabou thus performs a clearly deconstructive move in her reading of Freud—although one could object that her argumentation follows from a rather simplistic understanding of what Freud means by “reconstruction,” namely the re-establishment of a primal state. If we follow Malabou with this, how does she characterize the state of the new wounded or the “survivor's identity” and its temporality? Having established that Malabou's notion of negative plasticity also implies a conception of survival, in the following I will develop three of its main characteristics (which are however closely interconnected): (a) the indifference of the survivor and the disruption of the survivor's relation to (human and non-human) survivors (b) survival as a state between life and death and (c) survival's relation to language.
Indifference, between life and death
For Malabou, the new wounded as well as their mode of survival are characterized by a deep lack of interest in their former lives, but also in the event of the cut itself. They are completely indifferent towards their own survival, the fact that they have survived, but also towards the life and survival of others.
From a Derridian perspective, this state, in which the survival of the other has no relevance for us anymore, must seem like an exceptional situation. As Derridian concepts such as différance and autoimmunity or the evocation of the “law of friendship” in his later texts (2004) show, every entity—be it a sign, a living organism, radioactive isotopes (Derrida, 1989) etc.—only emerges through its embeddedness within and its openness towards its “surroundings”: human or non-human survivors, the realm of language as well as the inorganic, etc. To describe this interrelatedness, Derrida (2011: 132) introduces the image of a (textual) “weave” (tissage) of survival in his last seminar. As each entity's existence and survival is equally threatened and dependent on this “network,” the new wounded are no exception to this, however, it seems that their “contact points” are irreversibly damaged. They “say farewell before the end,” as Malabou (2012a: 59) indicates.
In fact, she describes their state as “lesions in otherness” or “paralysis of touching” (Malabou, 2012b: 161). It is a wounding of the dimension of alterity, a disturbance to our relation to others, other survivors. Paradoxically, this inability to touch or being touched comes from a wounding and thus, from touching itself (Malabou, 2012b: 161). Of course, not every touching equals a wounding. Rather Malabou (2012b: xiv) distinguishes between different ways of touching, when she points out that the only way of creating contact with her grandmother is a certain way of tenderness, that is to say, a modulated way of touching. In her book “Power of Gentleness,” which also includes a foreword by Malabou, Dufourmantelle (2018: 21) calls this the intelligence of touch, that could also be described as touch without touch, or tact. For Dufourmantelle (2018: 13), this gentle tactile touching indicates a care for the other's life, as she shows with regard to the infant. As much as this way of touching is crucial for the human baby's survival, it also remains the only reliable connection to the new wounded for Malabou.
Another characteristic of the new wounded is their in-between state: Since the possibility of destructive plasticity is not equivalent to the end of life, the new wounded seem to dwell in a hardly grasp- or tangible suspense between life and death. The survivors persist on a shady threshold, that cannot be reduced to either of these sides—on which no door can be closed or opened.
Their mode of survival can thus be described as an interval, whereby the question of the boundaries of this in-between arises. At first glance, in the case of the new wounded, the interval of their survival seems to be clearly limited by two events: the accident on the one and death (defined by the complete failure of all cerebral functions) on the other. However, as the traumatic accident always distorts the consecutive order of time, these limits are constantly being blurred and shift. The time of survival is out of joint, suspended from the chronological order of time, exempt from causality. It “depends on nothing,” Malabou writes (2012a: 69). In his readings of Blanchot, Derrida similarly introduces the term of “demourance” to describe this “anachrony of all instants” initiated through the time of survival (Derrida, 2000: 81). Normally, this interval is too fleeting to be observed; however, through the new wounded, it receives form, a body (Malabou, 2012a: 69).
The notion of survival as the state of the new wounded therefore seems to function as a third term that inserts itself between life and death. However, Malabou, just like Derrida, strictly distances herself from a traditional understanding of such a mediating third term, which would only serve the validation of an oppositional order—and, in the end, lead to identification, as Derrida has shown (Derrida, 2019: 1; Malabou, 2012a: 70). Malabou claims that in Occidental thinking, only a few have considered such an in-between escaping the logic of dialectics. One example, which she discusses at length (Malabou, 2012a: 32), can be found in part IV, Proposition 39 of Spinoza's “Ethics,” where he defines death as disproportion of motion and rest between the body's parts (De Spinoza, 2018: 189). In the attached scholium Spinoza brings up the case of the Spanish poet Luis de Góngora who lost his memory due to illness. Nothing seems to tie him to his “past life” (De Spinoza, 2018: 190), he doesn’t remember his work and even forgets his native language, thus falls into speechlessness. Even though all the signs of liveliness are still there, the transformation is so profound, that it must be understood as a sort of death, that is however not identical with the transformation of the body into a corpse (De Spinoza, 2018: 189–190). As Malabou (2012a: 33) argues, Spinoza therefore seems to introduce a third “dark pathway,” taking its place between life and death. At this point the dimension of the living-dead, of life death opens. 3
The speechlessness of the survivor
To add another observation to Malabou's interpretation of this passage, one might also highlight, that instead of further discussing this strange entanglement of life and death any further, Spinoza cuts off the thread of argumentation at this point, in fear of “providing material for superstition […] or to raise outlandish questions” (De Spinoza, 2018: 190). It seems that, as soon as he risks suspending the opposition of life and death by a third term, this third is pushed to the supposedly supplemental margins of his text and is finally handed over to the realm of superstitions, to the visionaries, who are experts for the ghostly in-between and all things haunting. This philosophical speechlessness concerning the third is further underlined by Spinoza's emphasis on the poet's loss of speech and language, which, from the philosopher's perspective, seems to weigh even more than the loss of others, of touch.
Spinoza's reflection on the fleeting interval of life and death that is picked up by Malabou thus leads us to the problem of the speechlessness of the in-between: How to speak of and within this interval of survival, this existential state between life and death? Or does the time of survival allow nothing but utter silence? Of course, this also concerns the possibility of witnessing, a topic largely explored not only by Derrida, but also within the vast genre of survivor's literature, especially after World War II. As for example Semprún (1994: 174, 204) has shown, the problem of speechlessness poses itself to the survivor as the contradiction between the desire and the obligation to bear witness and the utter impossibility of this task, emphasized through an urge to completely forget. Narration thus presents a strategy of survival as much as a mortal threat. 4
Malabou herself approaches the problem of the silence of the survivor through the mythical story of Orpheus as imagined by Barrois. In his version of the tale, Orpheus falls into speechlessness after his return from hell and loses all desire and his ability to sing. Therefore, he has to invent a new art, without relying on the scaffold of any known grammar. Barrois opposes the Orpheus myth to Oedipus, also emphasizing that the patients he worked with in his practice as a military psychiatrist, generally do not return from childhood but from “hell” (Malabou, 2012b: 154). As Malabou (2012b: 154) points out, for Barrois this does not only apply to survivors of war, but to “all subjects whose identity has been profoundly metamorphosed from the impact of a catastrophe.” 5 Barrois therefore gives a name to the precarious locus of the survivor: it is “hell.” Accordingly, Malabou argues that his substitution of Orpheus in place of Oedipus amounts to the substitution of a “hell without memory in place of a purgatory of culpability” (Malabou, 2012b: 154).
The figure of Orpheus seems to perfectly encompass the in-between state of the new wounded—their way of survival as dis-continuity—as described above. However, this replacement of Oedipus by Orpheus could possibly be followed by another substitution of Orpheus by Euridyce who might be even more suited to grasp the state of the new wounded—and therefore to embody what I have tried to develop as the interval of survival with Malabou. To make this second substitution plausible I suggest a little detour via the last chapter of Dufourmantelle's book “In Praise of Risk” titled “At the Risk of Going Through Hell (Eurydice),” where Dufourmantelle, like Barrois, also describes the state of the traumatized patient or analysand struggling with speechlessness as a sort of “hell,” but from the perspective of Eurydice.
Dufourmantelle (2019: 181) interprets Eurydice as the figure who remains “a wanderer between the living and the dead,” who therefore embodies, even more than Orpheus, the impossibility of a return or the hope of a reconciliation with the upper world. She has been through hell, however, after her attempted rescue, she doesn’t return to it, but finds herself stranded in a “a space between two worlds, exiled from both, belonging nowhere” (Dufourmantelle, 2019: 185). 6 Upon their arrival all inhabitants of this realm, “are promptly unburdened of any past” (Dufourmantelle, 2019: 181). This in-between thus opens up “to another time, immemorial,” disturbing the chronological order of time and announcing the strange temporality of survival (Dufourmantelle, 2019: 181). It is without memory and thus also without mourning and weeping, just like the state of deep indifference Malabou describes with regard to the new wounded (Dufourmantelle, 2019: 181). Similarly, Dufourmantelle (2019: 183–184) also marks the “disincarnation” happening within this in-between state whose inhabitants are “bodies deprived of all singularity, scent, silhouette, and tone of voice.” In a way that is again quite close to Malabou, Dufourmantelle also emphasizes that the threat of cutting all ties with the “upper world” is an existential possibility that concerns us not just as an exceptional state, but at any given time: “We are all Eurydices. […] Eurydice recalls that death can claim us at any moment,” as she puts it (Dufourmantelle, 2019: 180). This hell is also not characterized by perfidious agonies, but by a strangely orderly and pleasant indifference and numbness, “unburdened of any useless sorrow, anxious expectation, and even melancholy; […] No rush.” (Dufourmantelle, 2019: 182).
The possibility to escape hell for Dufourmantelle resides in making this in-between speak. Thus, she remains faithful to the Freudian talking cure: “Speech is a weapon. The only one down here” (Dufourmantelle, 2019: 182). But, as one could object from Malabou's perspective, what, in fact, can be said? When the individual is separated from its history and her mode of survival resides exactly in this separation? 7 For Dufourmantelle, it would be mandatory to invent a new language (maybe one of gentleness), while for Malabou the new wounded are primarily reached by touch.
Double death
Leaving the realm of myths, we might ask at this point: who, exactly are these orphic or rather eurydical figures? That is to say, how could Malabou's thinking of survival as dis-continuity be applied within contemporary discourses on survival that most often emerge in the context of apocalypticism? Remarkably, Malabou not only applies this hell without memory to the situation of persons with Alzheimer's disease. Other examples she gives are the jobless of the economic crisis in France during the mid-1980s, as well as people who break with their families (Malabou, 2012a: 13; see also Dufourmantelle, 2019: 22). That is to say, for Malabou, the loss of one's economical basis or the severance of all ties with one's family seem to have the same effects as the irreversible loss of memory that accompanies the illness of her grandmother. On the one hand, this seems to underline once more the commonness of wounding and survival: While an Alzheimer's diagnosis might still seem like a rather exceptional, singular situation, there are also more mundane events that for Malabou indicate a transformation just as profound. The process of becoming “new people, others, re-engendered, belonging to a different species” (Malabou, 2012a: 13) that links all of these heterogeneous tales of survival, is thereby again highlighted as an everyday possibility. 8
All of these examples denote an irreversible incision within the life of the individuals, after which “nothing is like before,” or, through which their bodies become irreversibly estranged from themselves. The understanding of survival implicit in Malabou's thinking of negative plasticity allows to acknowledge that after certain injuries—and the loss of economic and existential security for her explicitly counts as such an incision—no reconciliation with the so-called “normality” or a time “before” is possible. The events thereby also mark the beginning of a time of survival, that is cut off from the supposedly linear history of the subject, without the possibility of reconciliation, mediation or integration into this story. Rather, the cut indicates the arrival of a new identity, of a survivor, that doesn’t recognize itself. In contrast to Gregor Samsa, whose profound transformation seems to have no impact on the magisterial orderly tone in which his story is told, the new wounded need to develop a new (body)language (Malabou, 2012b: 15). The time of survival thus marks a form of death, but not the end of life itself. That is to say, the survivors “go through” the experience of death, as also Semprún (1994: 99) has described it, an experience that seems to be nonsensical, impossible—but nonetheless real. The survivor is the dead-(wo)man awaiting the encounter of death with death. In this sense, we can conceptualize the time of survival with Malabou as an interval between two deaths.
At first glance, this understanding of survival seems rather counter-intuitive. Nevertheless, it is also close to what Derrida develops as the interval of survival in his readings of Blanchot, especially in the 1970ies, but also later in “Demeure.” Since it was the aim of this paper to develop Malabou's thinking of survival implicit to her conception of negative plasticity, it cannot offer a rigorous comparative reading of Derrida at this point. However, in concluding, I would like to pick up one single thread of such a possible future inquiry that would show how their conceptions of survival illuminate each other through their various congruences and disagreements.
In “Demeure,” Derrida reads Blanchot's “The Instant of my Death,” which is commonly viewed as an autobiographical narration recounting Blanchot's almost-execution by a Nazi firing-squad in 1944. As Derrida underlines, Blanchot explicitly frames his survival as double death or a death awaiting another death (Derrida, 2000: 95). Moreover, Blanchot's text also attests to the impossibility of a simple “returning” to or reconciliation with the time “before” the terrible event of survival. As Derrida shows, this becomes clear right from the beginning of the text, where a distinction between the author (Maurice Blanchot), the narrator and a “young man” is made, indicating that the name appearing on the cover of the book, the witness telling the story and the one experiencing the excessive violence, cannot be simply identified (Derrida, 2000: 53). In his seminar on “Thomas l’Obscur” as well as in “Otobiographies,” a text Derrida first developed in the context of “La vie la mort,” Derrida coins the term of “doublement” for the process of the survivor's necessary fragmentation (see for example Derrida, 1977: Séance 2, 27, 1985: 16). This indicates that with regard to the survivor we don’t deal with an individual “shattered” (“identité clivée,” Derrida, 1977: Séance 2, 27) but rather an uncanny case of a “Doppelgänger.” From this perspective, Malabou's conception of the new wounded seems to offer a far more radical concept of survival as dis-continuity, as the “Doppelgänger” still bears a resemblance, even implies the risk of a confusion, which becomes clear through the “slippage” or gliding of the narrator's voice in Blanchot's text that at times becomes indistinguishable from that of the young man's (Derrida, 2000: 85). For Malabou however, despite her insistence on form, no reconciliation, no confusion with the “I” before the terrible event of survival appears to be possible. The frail thread of gentleness remains the only telephone wire through which the new wounded can be reached.
Returning to the question of apocalypticism, I tried to show, that the conservative or “prophylactic” apocalyptic speech implies a traditional image of survival as more or less undisturbed continuity of “life as we know it”—the assumption that “the future is like the present, just a little more so,” as Grech (2022: 40–41) points out with reference to the Dark Mountain Project. In contrast to this, Malabou's thinking of survival that emerges through negative plasticity and the figure of the new wounded seems to offer a different way of conceptualizing the times of survival that helps us make sense of the situation of all the “déjà morts” who also frequently appear within apocalyptic discourses: survivors who, just like Blanchot in the „instant of his death,” have already lived through their death and for whom the disaster already arrived (Horvat, 2021: 29); the dead (wo)man awaiting death. The new wounded, embodying the everyday possibility of destructive plasticity, let us conceive of survival as an in-between state—neither complete disappearance nor a life “unscathed,” but radically changed. On the one hand, their way of “living on” thus seems to resonate well with the general feeling of “the ticking doomsday-clock” that has certainly popularized and is generated through apocalypticism, without however relying on its alarmist imagery. Since destructive plasticity explicitly does not designate a total annihilation of form, while taking the possibility of an irredeemable loss and the necessity of its mourning deadly serious, Malabou's thinking of survival opposes the fear-mongering as well as the conservative tendencies of apocalyptic speech. Instead, negative plasticity seems to propose an (Blanchotian) “apocalypse without apocalypse.” Quite in accordance with Blanchot, Malabou also recognizes the necessity of a change of tone, the invention of a new language, that no longer pretends to remain “untouched” by the rupture it lives through. This also implies to let go of an oppositional understanding of “meaning and matter” and the prioritization of Western ways of meaning production implied by it. A “language of touch” or gentleness, on the contrary, will have to take the interconnectedness of semio- and biosphere (Horvat, 2021: 39), the interdependencies between “symbolic life and biological life” (Malabou, 2022: 314) into account through which new ways of living together can be envisioned. Even though Derrida can certainly not be fully redeemed from the reproach of having prioritized the “symbolic” to “material life” (Malabou, 2022: 312), the opposition of “matter and meaning” is certainly not exempt from the movement of deconstruction within his work, as numerous scholars have shown (Kirby, 2009; Trumbull, 2022). With regard to these approaches, one could argue that in this regard, Malabou and Derrida are once more very much on the same page, even though Malabou explores the intricacy of matter and language much more rigorously and explicitly.
