Catherine Malabou is a French philosopher and teaches in the Philosophy Department at the Centre for the Study of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London, at the European Graduate School and in the Comparative Literature Department at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD from Jacques Derrida with a dissertation that became her first book, L’Avenir de Hegel: Plasticité, Temporalité, Dialectique (Hegel’s Future: Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectic), in 1996. She is known for the concept of plasticity, which she developed while reading Hegel’s philosophy, and later rethought in the field of modern neuroscience. Her work also deals with feminism and the concept of difference, psychoanalysis and the concept of trauma, cognitive science and the concept of artificial intelligence and, in recent works, the political idea of anarchism.

• Wednesday, 11.10. 20.00, PLAC

“I had to stop hiding behind the supposed asexuality of the philosophical subject, which is the argument most often put forward by women to stay in this testosterone concentrate that is traditional philosophical discourse,” says Catherine Malabou. The testosterone concentrate… doesn’t it permeate all theoretical discourses? Perhaps critical thought as such? And certainly not only the conservative right, but also the progressive left. So we have drawn up some cockblock rules for non-phallic discourse. We will read them and debate them – especially those who have been confronted with the leftist-theoretical testosterone concentrate in critical thought for a long time and who have been trying to establish a different critical discourse for a long time. If you have never attended feminist reading groups because you are not interested in such content, it may still be time to listen to their practice, otherwise there is no future for left politics and critical thought.

Katja Čičigoj is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy, University of Klagenfurt, where she researches and teaches in the fields of contemporary European philosophy, critical theory and philosophy of gender. She co-founded the feminist reading circle Delfinke (KUD Anarhiv) in 2014 and co-directs it until 2021. She translated Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectics of Gender (*cf. publishing house, 2019) and wrote the accompanying study, and she is currently co-authoring a scholarly edition of this work in English with a colleague. She is currently co-editing a special issue of Feminist Encounters on feminist techno-imaginaries and a volume on Firestone and feminist utopias of reproduction (*cf. 2023). She is a member of the editorial boards of spol.si and Studies in the Maternal, and of the board of the International Simone de Beauvoir Society.

The programme is supported by the Kultura nova foundation as part of the World Around Us project.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them