Le Merle

Today a key concept at the intersection between medicine, design and politics is that of plasticity ¹. It is the center-piece of the neurosciences, where it is used to describe the way in which the brain molds itself, developing its own history and historicity beyond genetic predetermination. But it also has a long philosophical history, from its invention by Goethe to Hegel, Nietzsche and Freud, in which it constitutes the transformative continuity between nature and history and between the neuronal and the mental. For Hegel, plasticity characterizes human thought itself in the radically immanent and necessary way it develops as well as retains its past. Pure dialectics, his name for the self-movement of thought motivated by the power of the negative, is the way in which the mind comes from the body which disappears in what it becomes. It is the conceptual mediation of their ongoing conflict, the internal resistance that makes forming and unforming coincide in the continuous self-transformation of reason or spirit. ² But according to what criteria and ends does reason produce itself, and thus also design and compose its brain?

This question lies at the heart of humanism and post-humanism, as their modes of thought are bound to the actual becoming of human life. In what follows, I bring together the work of two contemporary philosophers of human enhancement, Peter Sloterdijk and Catherine Malabou, in order to restage this intrinsic relation between thought and life. At the request of the editors of this volume, I will first introduce the German philosophical anthropologist Sloterdijk, whose oeuvre contain one of the most important critical and clinical cartographies of the present. After an exposition of his recent theory of ‘anthropotechnics’ based on habit and repetition, I will further develop his notion of the autoplasticity of man through Malabou’s much better known concept of plasticity. If, with and against Sloterdijk, we nonetheless diverge from Malabou, this is because plasticity, while bearing enormous potential for imaginative thought, ultimately does not suffice as its model or image. From a medical or immunological perspective rather than merely a biological one, it provides too weak or non-binding a link between thought and life. ³ Instead, we must respond to plasticity in a more recalcitrant or elastic way, that is, with a non-modern image of thought understood as learning to protect, and take care for what we – including all those ‘others’ who are affected by our decisions and of whom we are composed – will become.

In the discourse around plasticity, elasticity is usually equated with infinite flexibility and uncritical adaptivity. By contrast, I propose the concept of elasticity to invert the modernist relation between, on the one hand, the infinite plasticity of modes of living, and on the other hand, those finite subjectivities that do not live up to the standards of science and capitalism, and that the thrust of modernity actively wants to leave behind in the name of progress. I argue that the concept of elasticity, contrary to that of plasticity, could have the power to reorient thought beyond the modern division of labor between knowledge and action, towards the production of that future continuity between past and present which today is everywhere so fatefully lacking. Sloterdijk shares the criticism of metaphysical humanism by Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger, only to be repeated more recently by Giorgio Agamben or Bruno Latour: man is not initially alienated only to find himself again as the future outcome of history, rather, he is that Promethean something capable of generating himself from the start. ⁴ Human history, in other words, is not the story of the negation of the negation of man, but the prospect (avenir, as opposed to futur) man appropriates and assumes for himself.  ⁵ We are not after finitude, but before finitude, even if it is an unlimited finitude. Following phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz, Sloterdijk refers to this conversion in our relation to history as a ‘re-embedding’ of the subject and a ‘turn (Kehre)’ towards the ‘total care (Sorge)’ of the world. ⁶ This conversion should not be understood in the sense of the unconditioned freedom of existentialism, to be sure, since the individual subject is only the fold or form of an actual becoming (elasticity) and not its agency, which, like the brain, is immediately and infinitely divided over a network of networks (plasticity). And yet to think is to answer clinically to the critical challenge how to take responsibility for the practical effects of the facticity of being-there, that is, how to participate in and slow down the events that happen to us yet of which we are never only a passive part.

Operable man

A key figure in Sloterdijk’s recent works is that of ‘operable man’ ⁷, the human whose condition is characterized by the fact that he operates on himself while simultaneously letting himself be operated on. Modern man increasingly finds himself in an ‘auto-operative curvature’ ⁸ that puts him in constant relation to his own passivity, not in the form of resignation or submission, but in the form of a free and active cultivation or care. In the most extreme case, the auto-operative curvature becomes a circle and we operate directly on our individual selves. Sloterdijk gives three examples, all cases of self-surgery. The first is that of Leonid Ivanovich Rogozov, a Soviet general practitioner who, during his stay at a research station in the Antarctic, was forced to perform an appendectomy on himself. The second is that of American Alpinist Aron Ralston, who after being stuck for five days after an accident in the mountains, decided to break his own forearm and cut off the flesh with a blunt pocket knife. And the third is the British performance artist Heather Perry, who used a local anaesthetic and a special drill for the trepanation on her own skull, apparently in order to fight her chronic fatigue and attain a higher level of consciousness. ⁹ In each case, we are dealing with an immense capacity for the toleration of suffering made possible by an extreme determination to act.

With Martin Heidegger, we could see this capacity of simultaneously acting and being acted upon as typical for the steeled subjectivity of modernity implied by modern technology. The more everyday subjectivity of operable man, by contrast, is less self-centered and more mediocre. Not without irony, it is closer to what Heidegger calls Gelassenheit or ‘releasement’ (or more religiously, grace): the decentered subjectivity of he who affirms his reticular entanglements by enlarging the radius of his actions precisely by also enlarging those of others over himself. When I switch on the TV or when I take the train, I choose for my own profit to let others do something with me. The more networked the world becomes, the more my passivity is implied by my activity: I have to make myself passive in order to be able to become active. ¹⁰ We claim more and more competence vis-à-vis our own ever-expanding relations of dependence at the same time that we claim the right to powerlessness. In this way the setting of an operating room or a dialysis center has become exemplary of the human condition in general. In fact, Sloterdijk will argue, individual humans are not thrown (Geworfenheit), but born (Getragenheit). We have never been bound to the human condition, since we are products of pre-human and trans-human processes of ‘air conditioning’: starting with the womb, we are always already embedded in atmospherical interiorities in which we do not coincide with ourselves, but find ourselves in ‘ecstatic immanence’ with our surroundings.((( For a discussion of Sloterdijk’s concept of design as air conditioning (and of the Earth as plastic entity), see Tuinen, Sjoerd van (2007). “La Terre, vaisseau climatisé. Écologie et complexité chez Sloterdijk”,
translated by Jean-Pierre Couture, in: Horizons philosophiques, Vol. 17 (2007), Nr. 2, pp. 61-80))) Living is nothing but the assumption of ourselves as intervening in the design of that which has already begun without us. Dasein is Design, ¹¹ geworfener Entwurf. ¹²

Gelassenheit, of course, is far removed from the self-understanding of the moderns, who maintain a deep mistrust for almost any form of passivity, or indeed for the past itself. In temporal terms, Gelassenheit implies that we establish a continuity between the past we passively inherit and the future we actively co-construct. Thus in medical progress, a balance is usually kept between passive patience about what is scientifically achievable (realism) and active impatience about what is still to be done (optimism). Perhaps in this respect, we should say that medicine has never been modern. In almost any other modern domain from science to political economy, by contrast, there is the ceaseless activity of a permanent revolution. When Karl Marx defined man as a species-being (Gattungswesen), an animal capable of (re)producing himself, the point was that this reproduction is not bound to our biological needs, but can happen according to any standard whatever (even that of beauty). What we are coincides with what we make and how we make it. ¹³ History is the transformation of nature by man, just as productive work would be the nature of man (homo faber). The molding of the new man proceeds by a perpetual cutting away of everything that is old; it is the production of the producer himself. The question is of course whether this operability on a grand scale is really the sign of our freedom, or whether the modern fear of repeating the past inspires a new kind of repetition, the most graceless and servile of all, namely the monotonous repetition of the present actuality without a future? Here we get a first glimpse of what Sloterdijk calls a crisis of repetition.

Sloterdijk agrees with Marx that man himself is a product of repetition. But work is only one kind of repetition and everything depends on the capacity to make a difference between modes of repetition. At a biological or animal level, after all, the idea that man constantly reproduces himself is not exactly new. Even if the technology and science of human reproduction are in constant development, humanity as such appears to be quite satisfied with the tried and tested mechanisms of organic reproduction and affiliative variation that are co-evolutionary with itself. However, the self-reproduction of man exceeds the level of what has evolved in nature. Already at the level of evolution, nothing is fixed and species are adrift. But if there is such a thing as culture or will, as Sloterdijk argues in neo-Lamarckian style, this is because the power of repetition also constitutes a labor of man on himself. As self-generating power of ‘exercise,’ repetition is coextensive with culture at large. ¹⁴ ‘To be human is to exist in an operatively curved space, in which actions retroact on the actor, works on the worker, communications on the communicator, thoughts on the thinker, and feelings on the feeler.’ ¹⁵ Sloterdijk famously speaks of a ‘human park’ or a ‘human incubator’: a habitat in-between nature and culture in which man produces and reproduces himself by means of domesticating rituals, ideas, practices, gestures, techniques, texts and all sorts of newer media. This is where Sloterdijk is closest to the empiricist tradition from Félix Ravaisson and William James to Gilles Deleuze and Pierre Bourdieu. Accordingly, ‘habit’ reveals ‘the paradox of repetition’ ¹⁶: by constituting an intermediary milieu or elastic reversibility between passivity and activity, it draws something new – the very difference between nature and will – from repetition. ¹⁷ Habit is plastic and, to some degree, ‘autoplastic’: it is not just a passive response to a stimulus, but also inventive in its own containing way. As a consequence, it is not just a cultural thing. Nature and culture, impression and expression are not opposed but two sides of the same tendency from receptivity to spontaneity. Habitual repetition is what makes possible the hybrid determination of humans as artificial or prosthetic by nature, as well as the new functional aggregates of man and machine we celebrate today.

One of the central concepts in Sloterdijk’s more recent books based on this concept of habitual repetition is that of ‘anthropotechnics’ (or anthropo-urgy, ‘the work(ing) of man’). ¹⁸ While repetition is active by definition, we initially and for the larger part of our history and prehistory undergo the process of repetition passively – both habit (the present) and memory (the past), Deleuze writes, are ‘passive syntheses’ ¹⁹. Every tradition is the product of man’s prehistoric labor on himself, and begins as the unquestionable imposition of a collective power of command. Plato called the process by which culture transmits itself to next generations paideia, the ‘art on the child’; humanists prefer to call it Bildung or formation. In order to take away all moralistic prejudices about the finality of this primordial repetition of culture, Friedrich Nietzsche regarded anthropotechnics as the ‘morality of customs’ (Sittlichkeit der Sitte): the inscription of a capacity to remember (moral conscience) in the bodies of human animals through painful and violent training (a ‘mnemotechnics’) that remains without a moral aim in itself. ²⁰ As a dressage in hardship, culture is both the practice and the result of its own repetitive molding of the nervous systems of its children. It follows that all morality is first of all slave morality: all of culture is initially a matter of forced inheritance. ²¹

Just as anthropotechnics goes beyond natural reproduction, however, it also exceeds slave culture. Freedom initially manifests itself when cultural repetition is turned against itself and self-determined individuals manage to distance themselves from biological and local bonds of filiation and alliance. ²² This becomes possible as soon as, by means of exercises on themselves, men learn to actively intervene in the passive repetitions of which they are the result. Ascetics, from monastic rituals to the protracted training of athletes and the strained exercises of musicians, are circular drills that create self-referential relations that commit individuals to cooperate with their own subjectivation and thus switch to the active side of repetition. ²³ The patriarchal transmissions of Antiquity and the apostolic transmissions of monotheist religions are based on such secessionist repetitions. ²⁴ They also form the core of modern humanism, to the extent that it marks the transition from a logic of reproduction to a logic of auto-domesticative optimization, i.e. a logic of anthropo-design based on techniques of self-drilling and self-enhancement through which the human condition is modified and thus kept in shape. (Ibid., p. 358)

Modernity

A crisis of repetition occurs, finally, when the constancy and duration of a culture is threatened by copy mistakes, that is, when the repetitions spill over into non-intended consequences that interrupt and turn against the tradition. If modernity is the ‘age of side effects’, a ‘Copernican mobilization’ resulting in ‘global cultural entropy’ ²⁵, this is because it produces innovative effects that cannot be integrated in the line of cultural filiation – speaking in very contemporary terms, we could say it is obsessed with ‘disruptive innovation’. Like a nuclear reactor, modernity undermines its own sustainability by producing too many ‘glorious bastards’ or enfants terribles, that is, figures of increasing asymmetry between past and future: the mystic, the protestant, the entrepreneur, the nouveau riche, the discoverer, the virtuosi who develop unexpected capacities, the planter, the inventor, the parvenu, the self-made man, the proletariat, the artist-genius, the intellectual, the revolutionary, the manager, the populist politician. ²⁶ Living the fantasy of a life without presuppositions, without past, without original sin and without origin tout court, they are figures for whom action prevails over passion. As in the auto-operative circle, they either cut their relations to the world or take them in and reinvent them as their own. In the latter case, they are the hommes du monde, the heroes of classical modernity. Yet to the extent that, instead of assuming their origin or even themselves, they seek permanent mobilization, permanent insurrection, permanent innovation, permanent conversion, they also contribute, as Sloterdijk argues in his last book Die schrechlicke Kinder der Neuzeit. Über das anti-genealogische Experiment der Moderne, to the shock of an insisting and persisting crisis of repetition which increasingly threaten to drain our souls, exhaust our bodies, and destroy the earth. ²⁷

Having arrived at this diagnosis of the state of modern life as essentially corrupt or decadent, as a time out of joint, one wonders what is its sense, i.e. its critical meaning and clinical evaluation. Sloterdijk refers to his political orientation as conservative and ‘conserving (Konservatorisch)’, or more precisely, as an ‘elastic conservatism’ ²⁸. The resilient stretching of a culture in time depends on its immunization against novelty as much as on its capacity of integrating changes in its conditions, such that Sloterdijk understands Chinese culture, Jewish culture or the Catholic church as ‘success stories of strictly controlled replications’ ²⁹. Accordingly, the essence of a culture or civilization would be the stable repetition of the same, such that cause and effect or subject and object of repetition more or less coincide. As we saw with Hegel, the same goes for modernity. If man is by definition an autogenic effect, coproduced by the repercussions of his actions on himself, then its specificity is the anthropotechnical attempt of man to become the exclusive subject of his own reproduction. But this is impossible, for as we learned from the genealogy of morals, in reality the subject of repetition (the active but fractured ‘I’) never coincides with its object (the passive ‘self’). In principle, every identity is individuated in an open-ended process and appears as such only at the end of a series, not at the beginning. Worse still, every attempt to make the beginning coincide with the end can lead to ‘malign repetitions,’ in which selfish systems – Sloterdijk discusses the systems of modern penal camps, modern schools, and contemporary art – lose their elasticity and come to revolve only around themselves. ³⁰ The crisis of humanism was therefore already announced by Nietzsche as the advent of Last Man, that childless end product of humanist individualism: ‘The entire West has lost those instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which the future grows. … One lives for today, one lives very fast – one lives very irresponsibly: it is precisely this which one calls “freedom”.’ ³¹

If we continue to invoke Nietzsche, this is to emphasize the ambiguity and ambivalence of this crisis. The modern individual may have been the historical object of repetition for several centuries, but the subjective side of repetition is much harder to identify as it involves all sorts of non-human constituents including natural and unconscious processes as well as socio-economic developments and biopolitical technologies. What is necessary is a non-modern perspective on modernity. For even if all production is reproduction, this is never just the exact repetition of the same, but always the production of the similar ‘with non-resembling means’ ³². It doesn’t follow that all continuity in time is merely a fleeting illusion, but rather that whatever subsists in time is plastic in nature. Whether we are dealing with a thing, an institution or a civilization, it is always both the memory of the forces of repetition that have inscribed themselves in it and the capacity for the relative dissolution and metamorphosis of their traces. Plasticity enables the absorption of an exhausted form of life into a neighboring form, not as passage from one well delineated, total form to the other (transformation), but as a ‘transdifferentiation’ between forms (deformation). ³³ Fatigue is thus the objective limit where the past must be forgotten if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present and its future. ³⁴ It is integral to the modification of habits or the formation of new habits. What appears as a historical discontinuity of identity is in fact a more liquid continuity of becoming across differences and distances. Habit unifies the duration between, and extending through, repetitions, such that permanence itself is a pattern of changes, a communication of ‘events’ in a radically discontinuous time. ³⁵ We are so much obsessed with cultural transmission and survival that, as Claude Lévi-Strauss famously said, we want to make history the driving force of its own development. ³⁶ But perhaps the real danger for the survival of a (social) body lies precisely in the auto-immunitary attempts to conceive of repetition and transmission only in the image of what is already given and at the cost of the return of its potential of becoming. This is why Nietzsche’s ultimate concept of repetition is the negentropic idea of the eternal return, ‘the being of becoming’. ³⁷ Plasticity implies a reverse ontology: we are always already caught up in complex feedback loops of which the effects have the potential to retroact on the causality of repetition and thus to produce a third passive synthesis which makes the present and the past coexist in the future. There is no repetition without excess, but ‘[i]f repetition makes us ill,’ Deleuze writes, ‘it also heals us’ ³⁸. In this sense of an immanent alterity, of repetition as a power of the false, where continuity and discontinuity become indiscernible in the thickness of a becoming, the critical difference between the transcendental subject of repetition and its empirical object not only constitutes a post-human condition of man – operable man as a plastic multiplicity, or plastes et fictor, as Pico della Mirandola famously put it. It also necessitates, as I intend to demonstrate, a more elastic conception of conservation than Sloterdijk himself, despite his manifest Nietzschean inspiration, usually provides.

Immunology

Regardless of whether we evaluate the modern crisis of repetition as a breakdown of the old or as a breakthrough of the new, its message is clear: Du muβt dein Leben ändern, you must change your life. Indeed, as a crisis of the coherence and consistency of our habits and its traditional authorities, it may well be the only authority whose imperative we can accept. It tells us that we must re-implicate ourselves in processes that exceed us on all sides. Whether this concerns a new relation between the local and the global in network culture, a renegotiation between rich and poor in political economy, a redefinition of the relationship between man and the biosphere in political ecology, or indeed of the relation between soul and body in a new form of embodiment, operable man appears to himself under new, immunological premises, according to which he must learn to actively take responsibility for what he passively undergoes.

This re-implication of our own passivity is inseparable from what Sloterdijk calls the explicitation of the immunological paradigm. The problem of immunity is that of translating the human back into nature and incorporating the nonhuman. ³⁹ As such it remains the Outside of all classical humanisms, but by becoming explicit, it also becomes its fate, or as we refer to destiny today: complexity, risk, or uncertainty. Once it has been unfolded, it will never return to its previous folded state of implicitness. But precisely for that reason, immunological knowledge is more than just knowledge: it also changes the way we think and relate to our passivity. It can function as a prosthesis of trust that re-intimates us within nature or, what comes down to the same, within our bodies, now no longer understood as that alien prison of the soul but as our own potential or latent disposition. Sloterdijk refers to this trust as a ‘second naivety’ ⁴⁰, an anthropotechnical naivety in the same sense as when Deleuze emphasizes that we do not yet know what a body can do. It is here that both politics and science could regain a critical and clinical sense. In addition to providing insight in what we are and predicting what we can do, they cannot withdraw themselves from the affirmative interpretation and selective evaluation of how we are passively becoming. The modern bifurcation of nature has led to a culture of experts and specialists, figures of anomalous origin and mutual animosity for whom thought, whether in the guise of science or politics, has become reduced to knowledge and reflection about, but also disconnected from, life. In order to avoid this cultural stagnation and general stultification and make itself relevant for the future, the immunological paradigm inevitably reconnects thought to life itself, recovering a living or ‘natural relationship’(HH 224, Human, All…) to its past and its culture, just as it turns philosophy into what Sloterdijk calls Biosophie. If what we are is constituted by habitual series, and indeed life itself is a vital continuum of repetitive behaviour, then knowledge too becomes an immunological ‘act … conducted in such a way that its current execution co-conditions its later executions.’ If life is a homeostasis brought about through self-organizing repetition, then immunological thought explicitly wants to be a continuation of life, a consciously conducted auto-affective experiment with its own conditions. The question it raises is indeed how, building on our passivity, knowledge gets to the productive side of repetition, intervene in it and thus truly become a thought of plasticity, instead of just its indifferent reflection in knowledge. For this reason, we may agree with Sloterdijk that ‘Just as the 19^th century under the cognitive sign of production, and the 20^th century under the sign of reflexivity, in the same way the future should present itself under the sign of the exercise.’ ⁴¹

One way of further exploring this reunion of thought and being is through Catherine Malabou’s elaboration of the concept of plasticity. As we have seen, plasticity, like habitual repetition, is both active and passive, meaning ‘simultaneously the capacity to take a form (concrete or clay for example are designated as “plastic” materials) and to give a form (as in art or plastic surgery).’ ⁴² As a consequence, it is both preformation and transformability, shifting the thresholds between the organic and the inorganic, between the innate and the acquired, or indeed between the human body as an organism and machine technologies. Composed of folds, fields and layers, the brain is not a fixed entity, but an infinite series of modifications of modifications of the nervous system, of the nerves, of the neuronal and of our synapses. Perhaps we should say that the brain is a cascade of repetitions, of repeated determinations but also of their frictions and interstitial indeterminations, such that its recursivity not only fine-tunes existing brain pathways, but also generates new connections within brain regions, for example in the case of irreversible brain damage. With its twin conditions of receptivity and change, in other words, plasticity is the path-dependent, future potential of the brain.

The problem is that in the descriptive approach of science, this potential remains unthought. While neurobiology has explicitated an enormous amount of knowledge on the plasticity of the brain, Malabou argues that we still need to ‘implicate’ a ‘consciousness’ or ‘representation’ of plasticity in the brain itself. ⁴³ If today it makes sense to say that ‘we are our brain’, this still sounds misleadingly familiar. As Alva Noe has pointed out, it would be much more astonishing if it turned out that we are not our brain! The real question is: what is being and how does being a brain in the process of being made present itself to us? ⁴⁴ Reductionist materialists would like to see strong ties, or even a coincidence between consciousness and the brain, while idealists would like to cut all ties between them. But what if they were weak ties, such that, even if thought and life are connected, they do not mirror each other (i.e. ‘adequation without correspondence’)? For Malabou, the concept of plasticity forms the condition of the very coherence between what we know of the brain and how we relate to the brain. ⁴⁵ Before we have explicit knowledge of how the brain conditions us (or indeed: itself), we already implicitly mold the brain under the influence of our cognitive experience. What a brain can do is therefore not just an epistemological question but an ontological question. Contrary to all the contemporary tendencies towards its naturalization, the brain is never only a given, because it must always be made in order to exist. More than the object of the laws of neuroscience, the brain is first of all the milieu of thought, its matter, just as thought is not what the brain is, but what it does, the how or manner of the brain, its very performance. ⁴⁶ The brain, says Malabou, is a ‘future producing machine’ and plasticity is the ‘eventual dimension of the machinic’ ⁴⁷. In this sense, her question ‘what to do with our brain?’ – also the title of one of her books – strongly resonates with Sloterdijk’s imperative ‘you have to change your life’. The explicitation of the synthetic nature of the brain cannot but imply a minimum of care that replaces the freedom to stay unconscious about the limits of our sovereignty: ‘We are not only asking the question of repetition; repetition has become the question, what questions us.’ ⁴⁸ By means of the plasticity in repetition, we do not just design our own lives, we also design our own brain. Precisely because we now know that it is not finished and never will be, but also that our current habits of molding it are unsustainable, we must ask what to do with the brain, how to work and modify it.

Learning what to do and why

Design, ever since the word was coined, has always meant a combination of thought and action. If today we are lacking a consciousness of plasticity and merely hear the cry of its imperative, this is because our capacity for thought, as Hannah Arendt famously observed, no longer keeps up with our capacity for knowledge and action. The discrepancy between the neurological promises and possibilities, for example, and the political, philosophical and cultural space for action on these promises and possibilities could not be bigger. We make our own brain no less than we make social order, but we certainly do not realize it in the same degree. As a consequence, thought and action do not communicate. If, for example, we are confronted with an ‘epidemy of depression’ ⁴⁹, a widely spread disconnect or weakening of neuronal connections, our sense of plasticity is to take antidepressants that stimulate the neurochemical transference in order to repair and protect the plastic capacities of the brain. (cf. Heather Perry’s auto-trepanation to combat her physical exhaustion) But as Malabou points out, plasticity in these examples is reduced to the capacity to work and ‘function well’, in other words, to flexibility. In physical terms, being flexible means to be able to bend, to give way and take form, but not the capacity to produce form itself. In psychopolitical terms, it means impotent suffering, obedience and consilience, the opposite of the capacity of resistance. As modern self-entrepreneurs, we like to think of our lives as works of art, even if we are generally unmoved by the various options of styling them differently. With the brain things are even worse. We celebrate adaptivity and creativity in the form of temporary contracts, part-time work and increasing mobility, all the while we generally accept the brain as a natural given, as a closed-loop system at the intersection of social science and bio-engineering (‘finally we can measure’). In this way, our consciousness of the brain coincides with the new spirit of capitalism. We reduce the plastic potential of the brain to the alienated and displaced image of the world – the Kopfkino of our ostentative precarity – and fail to see that it is also a biopolitical construction. Everything happens, as Malabou puts it in a very Nietzschean way, ‘[a]s if we knew more about what we can bear than about what we can create.’ ⁵⁰ But like the social, the brain is not just a faculty of passive toleration, it is a field of activity. It is history in the making. And while we are exposed to history more than we make it, in this case the question is indeed how, building on our passivity, we can become at least one of the subjects of this history? How can we think what we are doing? The answer – and here, too, Sloterdijk and Malabou converge – implies a ‘cybernetic’ conception of freedom: by learning.

Everybody knows that learning is not just a cognitive affair. It means not only to think differently, but also to live and feel differently; it is a matter of conversion, as opposed to the mere accumulation of information and knowledge. There is no learning, no futurity, without a relation to the past and to history, including, perhaps today first of all, that of the brain. According to Malabou, we must therefore ‘respond in a plastic way to the plasticity of the brain’ ⁵¹. Unlike flexibility, which fixates the brain between biological determinism and economical multiple usability, plasticity delocalizes the brain by producing transformational effects. As Deleuze and Guattari say, the brain is more like grass than like a tree. ⁵² Being neither inside nor outside, it is an interstitial whole, not an integrated whole. To learn from the brain is thus to cultivate its interstices beyond biological determinism and to make new circuits. As in AI, the essence of intelligence is in the capacity of linear processes to interrupt their automaticity and produce a residual interference. It implies an experiment with a cerebral interactive network whose fragmentary organization is determined, not by some ‘administrative center,’ but on and through its immanent outside.

In this experiment/experience of learning, it is not caution that Malabou lays the emphasis on. Without an immunity crisis, without a breakdown of our habits and automatisms, the brain is doomed to remain a caricature of the world. For this reason, she distinguishes two types of plasticity, positive and destructive. In positive plasticity, a continual balance is kept between the capacity for change and the aptitude for remaining the same, in other words, between future and memory, between giving and receiving form. Plasticity is an ongoing process in which some destruction is necessary, yet this does not contradict a given form, but makes it possible. Like the Ship of Theseus or Otto Neurath’s bootstrap, our brains and bodies must be constantly but gradually reconstructed, such that they retain their essence in the form of a complex continuity in a sea of discontinuities. ⁵³ Destructive plasticity, by contrast, is a kind of plasticity that does not repair and in which the smallest accident suffices for the biggest possible deformation. It is the type of destruction wreaked by cerebral lesions, but also by a sudden burst of anger. Instead of the repetition of the same, plasticity here becomes the repetition of difference, the production of the singular. Malabou is primarily interested in this second type of plasticity, because it forces the brain to reinvent itself and discover its freedom in relation to the traces from the past. Only when the continuum of repetition that puts neuronal functioning in mutual functional dependency with the normal functioning of the world is interrupted, then, does the brain become capable of turning itself into an event and in this way of de- and reprogramming itself. ⁵⁴ When the pressure of flexible polymorphy exceeds our limits, there is a rupture, a point where we do not bend, but find our own form. An ‘explosion’ (Malabou speaks with Bergson of a ‘reversal of the law of the conservation of energy’) forces the brain to renegotiate its relation to the world in a non-pathological and non-obedient way. The alternative in plasticity, according to Malabou, is therefore not terror or fixed identity, destruction or impression of form. Rather, the immanence of explosion and generation (or: the partiality of death) is the condition of possibility of formal resilience. Plasticity has to be critical or destructive in order to become clinical, that is, in order to make a difference.

But is the concept of plasticity enough to learn from the brain? This is the immunological question I would like to raise. A plastic rupture, after all, is not something you ‘want’ for the sake of it. If it happens, it happens behind your back, unintentionally, in the interstices between your own reasons and the body-brain you inhabit, and thus at the risk of leaving you unprotected against the chaos of an uninhabitable form of embodiment, something which approximates what Deleuze and Guattari have described as a ‘black hole’. ⁵⁵ Plasticity means that our life can go on without us. ⁵⁶) It may pose no threat to the continuity of the brain, but it may well mean a radical discontinuity in consciousness and thought. As such, it is a change that is potentially without measure or resistance. When we become what we are, our brains do not necessarily become who we are, such that, in the worst case, the one we will become doesn’t care that he is what he has become. Jairus Grove has therefore argued that plasticity is not so much a matter of hope as it is of horror. Reading the history of cybernetics as a trial run of neuroplasticity, his point is that plasticity turns out to be less the ability to learn as the ability to control and predict outside the humanist horizon. As a consequence, it may be interesting as a speculative problem, but it is limited in practical scope: ‘the challenge of neuroplasticity is necessary but insufficient to formulate a politics or an ethics’ ⁵⁷.

In fact, we should wonder whether, in practice, destructive plasticity and flexibility are not equally indifferent to thought. In both cases, there is a neutralization of subjectivity. While it is clear that the plasticity of the brain implies a resingularization and could provoke reflexivity (as Hegel says: the body negates itself and becomes thought), it is not at all clear how thought or reflexivity matters in the becoming of the brain. It is as if the plasticity of the brain doesn’t really need thought to organize itself, but merely makes our narcoleptic ‘selves’ suffer from one disposition to the next – it is, after all, a change of unconscious habits without our conscious intervention. But also, as if the answer to the question ‘Que faire de notre cerveau?’ is already known and leaves little to be learned from the risks of disaffection and disattachment to which the brain is exposed. As Sloterdijk says, the very form of the question, which dates back to Lenin and the avantgardes, expresses a kind of ontological energy, an extreme certainty that doing something is still possible even when all existing possibilities seem exhausted. ⁵⁸ While risk is the price of progress, moreover, it becomes increasingly hard to see how anyone is likely to profit from the leaps taken by the entrepreneurs of neurocapitalism. By contrast, what we have previously defined as a crisis of repetition therefore means precisely that we do not know what to do, nor even if we can do anything at all! This is also Grove’s point: yes, plasticity means that our thought, freedom and life are contingent. But as a consequence, knowledge immediately acquires an all the more acute practical and political – or in Sloterdijk’s words, immunological – component. In a situation of radical disorientation, of what Ulrich Beck has called our precautionary hysteria in the face of the unknown, there are either too little or too many motives to act. ⁵⁹ We have to change our lives, but we cannot spontaneously act on the basis of what we know is possible to do with our brain. On the contrary, the knowledge of plasticity seems to induce in us the same radical disinterestedness and irresponsibility as does the experience of plasticity itself. Hence it is doubtful that our way of relating to plasticity, its thought or reflection, must itself be plastic. Rather, it seems that the notion of plasticity is not enough to establish more than just a theoretical coherence between thought and brain, because in practice they do not communicate in the same way. As a consequence, Malabou’s attempt to solve the ambivalence of plasticity by dissecting it into the two contraries of flexibility and resistance remains abstract as well, with freedom or creative thought only appearing in the blind transgression of the limits to flexibility.

Precisely because plasticity offers us no promise of return, the image of elasticity, understood as a different way of relating reflectively to plasticity, is a better, and perhaps the only human(ist) way to address the tension between obedience and (self-)creativity. Insofar as it is grounded on the eternal return of difference instead of the same, it could make for an important supplement to Malabou’s concept of plasticity. For Malabou, elasticity is the same as flexibility, the natural limit of variably present forms that exclude the plastic labor of the negative. ⁶⁰ But while flexibility is the ideological form of plasticity, elasticity is the capacity of returning, if not to an original form, then at least of something in the original form across a difference. Unlike the sheer consilience of flexibility, then, elasticity also constitutes the re-silience which allows for the forming of a processual self with and against its destruction. If positive plasticity relies on formal continuity, the reason for this constancy is found in the elastic manner in which this continuity, as soon as it has come into being, is (re)produced in discontinuous matter. In destructive plasticity, by contrast, there appears to be neither reason nor cause. ⁶¹ Yet no explosion is total and plasticity is always partial, a dialectics between emergence and destruction of form. Here, too, only the elasticity of the deformed form can give sense to the appropriation of an explosion and develop it into a new degree of freedom. Once there is homeostasis (which, seen from the perspective of genesis instead of structure, is always a principle of ‘allostasis,’ that is, of heterogenesis and meta-stability), self-preservation proceeds as constant, internally directed self-creation in and on the outside. Precisely because plasticity is limitless and will ultimately kill you, it must be dissociated from itself in order to be made viable. Stasis is crucial. Even if it is born from passivity, as a slip in(to) the environment which camouflages it, elasticity gradually becomes a cause in itself, a force of internalization. It is thus the conative capacity (the ‘passibility’ ⁶²) to deal with the tension between the genesis of form and its ongoing deflagration. Structurally open but operationally closed, it is the vis elastica that integrates within oneself the world as it exceeds one’s strength. ⁶³

Since the body and the brain are never just natural givens but must be constructed in their continuity and variation by the very ways we inhabit them, the question is how do we learn to make ourselves at home in them. It is not sufficient to say what the body or the brain is or can do; we have to make a difference by making them ours, that is, to repeat them and to produce ourselves through repeating them. To supplement plasticity with elasticity is therefore to supplement the question ‘what to do?’ with the question that has to be answered by any living entity, that is any mode of being that has a stake in the continuity in its vital conditions: ‘why here now?’ ⁶⁴ While the former question belongs to knowledge and action, possibility and actuality, only the latter is capable of orienting thought in the presence of its ground and thus of taking us on a learning curve, even if it ultimately takes us beyond itself in repetition. Today, the plastic brain is the image and etiology of bare life; it is the cornerstone of biopolitical management of uncertainties and social engineering of probabilities and possibilities. But thought is precisely the elastic imagination by which we claim a stake in how we become what we are and thus in what we will become. If the brain is the plastic power or potential of thought’s becoming, thought is our elastic capacity to learn and grow with its interstices.

Far from the sign of a sentimental humanism which subordinates the body to the mind or separates intentionality from its embodiment, elasticity is the anthropotechnical power of incorporation, of rising to the occasion. Instead of reducing cerebral life to our image and seeking total dominance over it, we make ourselves relevant to the adventure of the immanent discontinuity of its future development. The elasticity of habit is generative of both person and brain, rendering them mutually inclusive in their singular becoming. If what the brain ‘is’ will be decided by the manner in which it is exercised, all we can do is experiment and follow the brain’s restless plunge into chaos. ⁶⁵ In the question of the ends of man, as Jacques Derrida has famously pointed out in his deconstruction of humanism, there can be no transcendent answer, because the ultimate end of man is precisely the end of man. ⁶⁶ Or in the words of Malabou, the plasticity of repetition is the raw material of our lives in which we return even when our essence is dissolved: ‘the human is sculpting a certain relationship to repetition and … in return, this relationship is sculpting it.’ ⁶⁷ But from the immunological point of view, a point of view that is no longer modern, the way we respond to a crisis of repetition is elastic. Given a certain historical situation, we cannot but protect our mode of living. Only the fragility of habit can open a space of expectation and desire, and is therefore a prerequisite for belief in the future. Thought is this immanent orientation process that produces its criteria as it operates, becoming sensitive to the validity and viability of differences, demonstrating its aptitude for return and for engendering a heritage or tradition.

Vertical Tension

Like plasticity, the concept of an elastic conatus as ultimate reason and image of thought has a long, albeit different tradition in modern philosophy which goes back to Spinoza and Leibniz. ⁶⁸ As a power of contraction and dilation, elasticity is the weak tie whereby exterior forces are doubled or folded over by an interior resistance. ⁶⁹ To think, we could say, is to fold is to repeat and appropriate our own passivity and possibility. Elasticity thus constitutes the dialectical reciprocity and coherence between soul and body, of the development of the soul by the body and of the enveloping affirmation of the body in the soul.

The main difference introduced by more recent authors such as Schelling, Bergson and Ravaisson is their empiricism. Instead of a (provisional) dualism of beings (bodies and minds, passivity and activity, sensibility and understanding, nature and will), there are only modes or manners of existence defined by their habit. ‘The self does not undergo modifications, it is itself a modification’ ⁷⁰. Hume had already warned that the propensity of repetition, as a principle of human nature, finds its cause neither in a physical modification of the body nor in an intellectual faculty. ⁷¹ Ravaisson’s reply is that habit is causa sui, a cause inseparable from its real efficacy. Being both the propensity of repetition and its principle, the ultimate reason for the existence of a thing is nothing more than the creative manner in which it repeats its tendency to pass from nonexistence into existence. ⁷² But at the same time, we are always immediately alienated by the open-ended nature of our habits. Ravaisson’s world is therefore a thoroughly plastic or ‘mannerist’ world in which repetition or change both precedes and exceeds essence, whether that of the body or of the soul. Instead of a mere mechanism that annuls freedom and thought, then, habit is the manner in which the will and intelligence pervade the body and become a form of life itself, ‘the very being of the movement and of the tendency that it determines’. Constantly feeding back into themselves, becoming ever more immediately present, closer and closer to the actuality they seek to realize, they become the body’s ‘second’ instinct or nature. ⁷³

Elsewhere I have argued that this synthetic world of mannerism is still our own. ⁷⁴ It is a world in which, as Malabou and Sloterdijk argue, our bodies and our brains grow to the modes in which they are exercised. Mind is a manner in which matter exists; it is both the body and its product, where product means metamorphosis of the body. ⁷⁵ But unlike  Hegelian dialectics, corporeal habits and reason are not opposed but mutually determining. While habitual activity tends to involve little thought, its plastic potential or its internal resistance to pure automatism is precisely the beginning of thought and learning. Before the mind is negation, it is the interstitial production of a difference through and from habit. As a consequence, it doesn’t follow that body and mind meet in the void of negation as in Malabou’s understanding of plasticity. Immanent alterity must be reconceived as positive disparity, as a differential element that is at the same time a plenum of continuous and discontinuous repetitions and their corresponding modes of existence – a pluralism of manners. ‘Man is not negativity, but the point of difference between repetitions.’ ⁷⁶ Born from difference (natal difference ⁷⁷), the self as infinite self-founding and self-appropriating tendency movement outside of itself is the ordeal of immanence. ⁷⁸ The immunological challenge is to orient ourselves in this groundless ground of existence as in a field of distances, neighbourhoods, moods and vectors.

For Sloterdijk, the guiding intuition in this orientation is that of the self. Just as the Ravaisson’s concept of habit must be understood as a disposing disposition, a virtue (hexis) of actualization acquired through and composed of previous acts by which a being has a hold on itself and its future, ⁷⁹ Sloterdijk defines habit not by what we are but by what we possess while being possessed, which leads him to a ‘rehabilitation of egoism’ as primordial virtue. ⁸⁰ He quotes Ernst Bloch: ‘I am. But I do not have myself. That is why we first become.’ ⁸¹ A habit is a kind of self-addiction: we come in possession of ourselves through relations of being-possessed. (Again, this explains why the traditional humanist project of man to become fully in possession of itself is doomed to fail. New habits imply new compulsive repetitions.) To contract a habit (derived from habitus (habere/ekhein): to have/hold) is to integrate the elements and repetitions from which we come in a new way. I always begin as ‘guest of the other,’ but this beginning is simultaneously the appropriation of the difference out of which this relation with the other comes. ⁸²) The stone becomes a tool in my hands at the same time that I become a stonecutter. Habit is thus the self-referential and imaginative manner in which a being makes the pass from an unstable methexis (participation in the other) to a stable individual. For Sloterdijk, it provides a basic orientation for immunological thought, namely the Standortvorteil Ich. The human individual, he argues, is not a given but the political project of the ongoing conditioning of an elastic atmosphere or immune system: ‘The individual is a futile passion, but a passion it should nonetheless remain.’ ⁸³

Sloterdijk further specifies this immanent orientation on the self in terms of a ‘vertical tension (Vertikalspannung)’: the affirmation of resistance in an auto-genetic gesture by which we make a difference. Only by seeking-producing friction do we secede from and get to the ‘other side of habit’, e.g. from the repeated repetitions of religion and mass media to the repeating repetition of art or sports. It is true that an elastic that returns to its initial form is not interesting. But just as elasticity is an essential feature of plasticity, elasticity without the rigidity and resistance of plasticity is only the lowest degree of elasticity. In reality, there can be no reproduction without turning repetition against itself in creative self-intensification generated from within a tortuous but virtuous circle. The elastic human, for Sloterdijk, therefore holds the middle between an athlete and an acrobat. He practices a ‘subversion from above,’ a ‘supraversion’ of actual existence. ⁸⁴) Thought or design, we may argue with Sloterdijk, is nothing but this transcendental ascensional pull in the production of a Halt im Haltlosen, a gekonnte Abwicklung des Nichtgekonnten. ⁸⁵ It is a kind of parallel action, the ritualistic and imaginary overcoming of the gap between what we are able to do and what we are not able to do. The more complex the machine, the slicker its interface must look. In this sense of a generalized mannerism, design is the power of impotence; Thought it is pure gesture, pure self-referentiality, pure self-potentialization: sprezzatura. ⁸⁶)

When Sloterdijk speaks of elasticity as vertical tension, he therefore develops it as an aristocratic posture. ‘At any time you should act in such a way that you personally anticipate the better world in the worse.’ ⁸⁷ This ‘ethical difference,’ which he traces back to Heraclitus, is in fact already implied by the concept of habit, since ‘habit can only be surpassed by habit’ (Thomas a Kempis). ⁸⁸ Habits not only habituate but also habilitate. This means that manners always produce their own conditions of enhancement, like an excess value over essence that drives a process forward in becoming. ‘Mannerism puts on top of the first floor of popular habits a second, a third floor of increasing extraordinariness. The higher, the more mannerist.’ ⁸⁹ Following Maine de Biran’s essay The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking, Ravaisson explains this differentiating and hierarchizing power of repetition as the ‘double law’ of habit, according to habit has opposite effects on the passive and active aspects of conduct: repeated passions weaken and are selected out while repeated actions strengthen and remain. ⁹⁰ The elasticity of habit thus makes us pass from optimism to meliorism: becoming is better than being. For Sloterdijk, immunological thought is not a transcendent movement back-and-forth between the possible and the real, but a constant and immanent orientation on ‘the best (eris)’. ⁹¹ If plasticity is a cold and indifferent change without subjectivity ⁹², then elasticity is the capacity to synthesize and subjectivize change into self-enhancement. Just as in sports, we are ultimately not in competition with others but with ourselves, working on and with an outside that is necessarily more intimate than any relative inside, because it is the very potential of our becoming better. Every habit, every tendency, can be thought of as duplicitous and incomplete, i.e. as transductive relation in which we must take care for the best, which may contain the worst as much as be contained in it. ⁹³ You have to change your life. This ascetic conversion of thought to the world, as opposed to the mere dominance of the former over the latter or vice versa, ⁹⁴) is Sloterdijk’s rendition of Heideggerian Gelassenheit: thought and life do not meet in the plasticity of the brain, but in the elastic fold of their co-articulation.

1. This text was initially published in Radman, Andrej, and Heidi Sohn, editors. Critical and Clinical Cartographies: Architecture, Robotics, Medicine, Philosophy. Edinburgh University Press, 2017.→
2. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, Preface to the second edition, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 19.→
3. Joining a coalition of feminist theory, science and technology studies and environmental movements, Sloterdijk gives an immunological redefinition of the finite/infinite relation and warns of the bad infinity, or metaphysical ‘infinitism’ (Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären II: Globen. Makrosphärologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag), 410-1n173) that lives in denial of its immunological premises.→
4. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History. On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London/New York: Verso, 2007), 107-9, 113-4→
5. Bruno Latour, “A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk” in: Sjoerd van Tuinen & Koenraad Hemelsoet (eds.), Measuring the Monstrous. Peter Sloterdijk’s Jovial Modernity (Brussels: KVAB, 2009), 61-71→
6. Peter Sloterdijk, Du muβt dein Leben ändern. Über Anthroropotechnik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2009), pp. 493-518, esp. 510, and 691-8, esp. 697→
7. Peter Sloterdijk, Nicht gerettet: Versuche nach Heidegger (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001), pp. 212-34→
8. Ibid., pp. 69-81; Sloterdijk, Du muβt dein Leben ändern, p. 590→
9. Ibid., pp. 595-97→
10. Peter Sloterdijk, Zeilen und Tage. Notizen 2008-2011 (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2012), p. 54→
11. Henk Oosterling, ‘Dasein as Design. Or: Must Design Save the World?’, in: From Mad Dutch Disease to Born to Adorno. The Premsela Lectures 2004-2010, trans. Laura Martz (Amsterdam: Premsela, 2010) pp. 115-40→
12. Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie. Gesamtausgabe 65 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1989), p. 56→
13. See Franck Fischbach, La production des Hommes. Marx avec Spinoza, Paris: VRIN, 2014.→
14. ‘I define as exercise every operation by means of which the actor acquires or improves his qualification for the next execution of the same operation, regardless of whether this operation is declared an exercise or not.’ Sloterdijk, Du muβt dein Leben ändern, p. 14→
15. Ibid., 174-75→
16. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 70→
17. Félix Ravaisson, Of Habit, trans. by Clare Carlisle and Mark Sinclair (London: Continuum, 2008), p. 59→
18. Sloterdijk, Du muβt dein Leben ändern, p. 629→
19. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 71→
20. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic. Trans. by Michael A. Scarpitti (London: Penguin Books, 2013), essay II, par. 2→
21. Peter Sloterdijk, Die schrecklichen Kinder der Neuzeit (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2014), pp. 245, 255→
22. Sloterdijk, Du muβt dein Leben ändern, p. 639→
23. Ibid., pp. 175, 301-7→
24. Sloterdijk, Die schrecklichen Kinder der Neuzeit, pp. 229-311→
25. Ibid., p. 92→
26. Ibid., pp. 312-28, 54, 485→
27. Ibid., p. 23; Peter Sloterdijk, Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2005), pp. 241-42→
28. Sloterdijk, Du muβt dein Leben ändern, p. 17; Peter Sloterdijk, Heilige und Hochstapler: Von der Krise der Wiederholung in der Moderne, (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2015), p. 8→
29. Sloterdijk, Die schrecklichen Kinder der Neuzeit, p. 234→
30. Sloterdijk, Du muβt dein Leben ändern, pp. 683-4→
31. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Viking Press, 1954), pp. 463-564 (p. 493).→
32. Gilles Deleuze distinguishes between resemblance as producer and resemblance as produced. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation, trans. by Daniel W. Smith (London/NY: Continuum, 2004), p. 98→
33. Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 16→
34. Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, ed. by G. Colli & M. Montinari (München: De Gruyter/dtv: 1999), 7.251→
35. Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, 7.579→
36. I borrow this reference to Lévi-Strauss’s concept of ‘warm societies’ from Georges Didi-Huberman’s discussion of plasticity as material force of becoming between survival (Nachleben) and rebirth, memory and metamorphosis, aftereffect (Nachwirkung) and effect, and body and style in Das Nachleben der Bilder. Kunstgeschichte und Phantomzeit nach Aby Warburg, trans. Michael Bisschoff (Berlin: Surhkamp Verlag, 2010), p. 177→
37. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy, trans. by H. Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. 24→
38. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 21→
39. Ibid. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 230→
40. Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären. Plurale Sphärologie: Band III: Schäume (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2004), p. 202→
41. Sloterdijk, Du muβt dein Leben ändern, p. 14→
42. Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, p. 5→
43. Ibid., p. 11→
44. Ibid., p. 69→
45. Ibid., p. 3-4→
46. As Deleuze says, ‘[i]t’s not that our thinking starts from what we know about the brain but that any new thought traces uncharted channels directly through its matter, twisting, folding and fissuring it.’ (Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. by Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 149) For this reason, he contrasts the neuroscientific image of thought based on the ‘charted channels’ and ‘basic conditioned reflexes’ of the brain with thought’s imageless ‘creative tracings’ (What is Philosophy, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (London/New York: Verso, 1994), p. 209).→
47. Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain, p. 38→
48. Catherine Malabou, “From the Overman to the Posthuman: How Many Ends?”, in: Brenna Bhandar and Jonahan Goldberg-Hiller (eds.), Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou, ed. by Brenna Bhandar, Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015, 61-72, p. 71→
49. Philippe Pignarre, Comment la dépression est devenue une épidémie, (Paris: La Découverte, 2012).→
50. Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, p. 13→
51. Ibid., p. 30→
52. Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.17→
53. Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, p. 56→
54. Ibid., pp. 73-4→
55. Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 333-4→
56. ‘Plasticity is not habit, but it is a condition of habit.’ (Clare Carlisle, ‘The Question of Habit in Theology and Philosophy: From Hexis to Plasticity’, in: Body & Society, 2013 00 (0) pp. 1-28, p. 2→
57. Jairus Grove, ‘Something Darkly This Way Comes: The Horror of Plasticity in an Age of Control’, in: Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou, ed. by Brenna Bhandar, Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 233-63, p. 250→
58. Sloterdijk, Du muβt dein Leben ändern, p. 614; Sloterdijk, Die schrecklichen Kinder der Neuzeit, pp. 54-74→
59. Sloterdijk, Die schrecklichen Kinder der Neuzeit, p. 85→
60. Catherine Malabou, ‘Plasticity and Elasticity in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ in: Diacritics Winter 2007, pp. 78-85→
61. Catherine Malabou, Ontology of the Accident. An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, trans. Carolyn Shread (Polity, 2012), pp. 59-61→
62. As Ed Cohen has argued, instead of the self-environment opposition a ‘natural elasticity’ or natural healing propensity of organisms (vis medicatrix naturae) lies at the basis of pre-modern (pre mid-nineteenth century) medicine. Ed Cohen, A Body Worth Defending. Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 4→
63. Sloterdijk speaks of ‘the discovery of the world in man.’ (Sloterdijk, Du muβt dein Leben ändern, 507-11.  Deleuze discusses elasticity as a force of inertia that is capable of rendering visible the real activity of the world in images and signs. While activity itself is a matter of invisible forces, it is only because its traces are kept in a body of sensation that the movement becomes visible. ‘Movement does not explain the sensation; on the contrary, it is explained by the elasticity of the sensation, its vis elastica.’ (Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. 41→
64. Isabelle Stengers, 2005, “Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices”, Cultural Studies Review 11(1): 183-96→
65. Sloterdijk, Du muβt dein Leben ändern, p. 255. As Deleuze and Guattari write, the brain ‘plunges into and confronts chaos’ (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (London/New York: Verso, 1994, p. 210).→
66. Derrida, Jacques, 1982, Margins of Philosophy, transl. A. Bass, Chicago/Sussex: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 109-36→
67. Malabou, ‘From the Overman to the Posthuman: How Many Ends?’, p. 62→
68. See Gilles Deleuze, The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Deleuze makes the elasticity of the brain the key to his entire reading of Leibniz. Mark Sinclair, 2011, ‘Ravaisson and the Force of Habit’, in: Journal of the History of Philosophy, 49 (1), 65-85→
69. See Gilles Deleuze, The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Deleuze makes the elasticity of the brain the key to his entire reading of Leibniz.→
70. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 79. Because of its essential passivity, habit proceeds by contemplation, as Deleuze argues with David Hume: the reason or cause for the contraction is a relation external to its terms. There is nothing in A that connects it to B, only an association of the mind. The mind thus exceeds the elements from which it comes, introducing a new manner all the while it remains absolutely inseparable from its ‘matter’. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 74-7→
71. David Hume, Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 43-4→
72. Habit or manner is ‘a necessity of attraction and desire … It is the final cause that increasingly predominates over efficient causality and which absorbs the latter into itself.’ (Ravaisson 57).→
73. On Habit, p. 57→
74. See Sjoerd van Tuinen, ‘Mannerism, Baroque and Modernism: Deleuze and the Essence of Art’, SubStance, 43, 1 (2014), 166–90→
75. Malabou, Was tun mit unseren Gehirn?, pp. 102-4→
76. Sloterdijk, Du muβt dein Leben ändern, p. 430→
77. Sloterdijk, Ausgewählte Übertreibungen, 85→
78. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Restlessness of the Negative, (2002), p. 57→
79. Ravaisson, On Habit, 49, 77→
80. Sloterdijk, Du muβt dein Leben ändern, 376-8, 391; Sloterdijk, Nicht gerettet, 32→
81. Sloterdijk, Zeilen und Tage, p. 89→
82. (Nancy, 2002, Restlessness of the Negative, 57→
83. Peter Sloterdijk, 2013, Ausgewählte Übertreibungen. Gespräche und Interviews 1993-2012, ed. Bernhard Klein, Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, p. 444→
84. Sloterdijk (2011), p. 135. Deleuze would speak of a ‘counter-effectuation’, although Sloterdijk blames Deleuze for putting too much emphasis on the (involuntary) event: “He ascribes to the event what belongs to exercise.” (Sloterdijk, Zeilen und Tage, p. 151, 164→
85. Peter Sloterdijk, “Das Zeug zum Design”.→
86. As Sloterdijk argues, there is no freedom without resistance or stress, just as there is no difference between positive and negative freedom, because it is only here that we break with ‘tyranny of the possible’ and seek to find our worthiness in the immediate realization of ‘the best’. Modern decadence, by contrast, would be due to the fact that the project of Enlightenment has raised our sensibility far beyond the reality principle, thus fatally disconnecting thought from the activity of the world. (Peter Sloterdijk, Stress und Freiheit (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2011), pp. 29, 47, 57-8). ‘Enlightenment,’ however, ‘as it first took form in ancient sophistry, is above all a prophylaxis of helplessness.’ (Sloterdijk, Ausgewählte Übertreibungen, p. 293) This prophylactic quality is also the essence of a manner or attitude (Haltung): when habitual tricks and easy answers fail, we find agency (existentielles Können) precisely in amechania. (Ibid., 394-5→
87. Sloterdijk, Du muβt dein Leben ändern, 506, 290→
88. Ibid., 269. With the concept of habit ‘is given to us an anthropological concept for the efficacy of inner technologies,’ which ‘explains, how it is possible that precisely what already comes easy feels the pull of the better, and why the what can already be done perfectly finds itself in the field of attraction of a still higher capability.’ The theory of habit ‘describes man in all discretion as acrobat of virtus – one could also say: as bearer of a moral competence, which passes into social and artistic performance.’ Ibid., 291-2.→
89. Sloterdijk, Zeilen und Tagen, 153→
90. Repetition ‘gradually leads the pleasure of action to replace the more transient pleasure of passive sensibility. In this way, as habit destroys the passive emotions of pity, the helpful activity and the inner joys of charity develop more and more’ (Ravaisson 69).→
91. Ibid., 304-9; NHGS 92-3. On the upgrading of being as the latent metaphysics of late modernity, see Sloterdijk, Ausgewählte Übertreibungen, p. 156, 163→
92. Malabou 2012: 11→
93. Emphasizing its duplicitous motive, Bernard Stiegler describes eris or artistocratic culture as emulative competition (as opposed to levelling, imitative competition) or ‘the elevation towards an always possible best, artiston.’ (Stiegler 2011: 50, 84).→
94. Sloterdijk’s aim is to ‘develop an ethically more competent and empirically more adequate alternative to the coarse derivation of all hierarchy-effects or phenomena of ranking from the matrix of domination and subordination.’ (Sloterdijk, Du muβt dein Leben ändern, 208→