Before Tomorrow- Epigenesis and Rationality Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Translator’s Foreword: Epigenesis of Her Texts Notes

  Epigraphs Notes

  Preface Notes

  Introduction Assessment: An Unstable Kant

  On the “System of the Epigenesis of Pure Reason”

  Methodological Principles

  Notes

  1 Paragraph 27 of the Critique of Pure Reason Presentation of the Initial Problem: The Origin of the Categories

  Equivocal Generation, Preformation, and Epigenesis

  Hume and Pre-established Harmony

  The Third Way

  Notes

  2 Caught between Skeptical Readings Predispositions

  “Formation without Preformation”

  Embryonic Development is Necessarily Unpredictable

  Readings and Contradictions

  Further Methodological Details

  Notes

  3 The Difference between Genesis and Epigenesis Epigenesis and Epicenter

  Localization and Surface

  Notes

  4 Kant’s “Minimal Preformationism” The “Pure” Readings of §27

  The “System of the Epigenesis of Pure Reason”: The Objective Genitive Hypothesis

  The Reductive Division of the Source

  Rejecting “Empiricist” Readings

  Some Reminders about Metaphysical Knowledge

  The Metaphysical Deduction and the Transcendental Deduction

  Preformed Epigenesis

  Notes

  5 Germs, Races, Seeds Four Main Exploratory Tracks

  Kant to Herder: The Limits of the Formative Drive

  Epigenesis and Anthropological Variety

  On Human Races

  “Intellectual” Epigenesis

  The Critique of the Power of Judgment---62

  A “Maximal” Preformationism?

  Notes

  6 The “Neo-Skeptical” Thesis and Its Evolution Who’s a Skeptic? Role Reversal in §27

  Bouveresse Analyzes Kant’s Innatism

  From Pre-Established Harmony to Gradual Harmonization

  Another Version of the Source, Another Genesis of Epigenesis

  Against “Nativism”: Helmholtz and Boltzmann

  Transcendental Idealism Disappears from the Debate: Frege versus Darwin

  Notes

  7 From Epigenesis to Epigenetics Defining Epigenetics

  To be Done, Once and for All, with “Everything’s Genetic”

  The Importance of Environment

  “Neural Darwinism” and Brain Epigenesis

  Synaptic Mechanisms

  Selection Levels

  The Example of Mathematics

  Edelman’s Theory of Systems of Recognition

  From Methylation to Hermeneutics

  Notes

  8 From Code to Book The Problem of History

  Epigenesis and Teleology

  “Life and History Are Fields Not of Explanation, But Rather of Interpretation”

  Notes

  9 Irreducible Foucault What Is Enlightenment?

  The Elaboration of the Subject and Access to Truth: Prelude to Agreement

  Genealogy and Archeology

  The End of the Order of Genetic Derivation?

  The Two A Priori

  The Transcendental as a Residuum

  Notes

  10 Time in Question Stem and Root

  Taking Stock

  Schematism and Objectivity

  The Second Edition

  What We Might Have Understood

  Why Didn’t I Take Heidegger’s Lead?

  Notes

  11 No Agreement Return to §27: The Impotence of the Transcendental Deduction

  Hume beyond Himself

  The Wholly Other World

  Notes

  12 The Dead End Between Censure and License

  Heidegger to Meillassoux: What Finitude?

  Meillassoux to Heidegger: Alterity and the Critique of Property

  Towards a Critique of Neurobiological Reason

  To Conclude

  Notes

  13 Towards and Epigenetic Paradigm of Rationality Why a New Paradigm?

  Genesis, Epigenesis, Hermeneutics: Ricœur’s Contribution

  From the First to the Third Critique: The Intrication of the Transcendental and the Biological

  Difference in Causality

  The Order of Nature and Systematic Order: Examining Purposiveness

  The Return Effect of the Third Critique on the First

  Life and Factual Rationality

  The Other Contingency and the Other Necessity

  Structure and Evolution

  Notes

  14 Can We Relinquish the Transcendental? The End of the Divorce between Primordial Temporality and Leveled-Down Time

  Regarding the Possible Non-World

  Biological Reason

  The Thorny Problem of Analogy

  Invariance and Reorganization

  Kant Tomorrow

  Notes

  Conclusion Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  End User License Agreement

  Before Tomorrow

  Epigenesis and Rationality

  Catherine Malabou

  Translated by Carolyn Shread

  polity

  First published in French as Avant demain. Épigenèse et rationalité

  © Presses Universitaires de France, 2014

  This English edition © Polity Press, 2016

  Polity Press

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  ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9153-4

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  TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD

  Epigenesis of Her Texts

  Tomorrow, the order of precedence between program and its translation will be inverted.

  Catherine Malabou

  With every new Malabou translation comes a fresh understanding of my practice and another translation manifesto. Working with her – especially this time, where for over a year the author has been the translator’s partner in transforming her text – translation has assumed its plasticity, its change, its accident, and, now, its epigenetic function. As Malabou analyzes the epigenesis of Kant’s notion of rationality in Before Tomorrow, I am led to consider how, in translation, her own texts undergo a process of epigenesis: that is, the biological process of cellular differentiation. Which parts are sloughed off and which undergo maturation? How does Malabou develop in her arrival in English? Does the move into the Anglophone conte
xt allow for a development of that which is premature or impeded in French? Where else is she going? Who will retranslate her work tomorrow?

  In the sinews of her rigorous and unrelenting tracking of Kantian philosophy, Malabou proposes that “critique itself, from the Critique of Pure Reason to the Critique of the Power of Judgment,” is subject to “epigenetic development” (156). Drawing again on the sciences that other continental philosophers have turned their backs on, she finds the most exciting movements of our era and brings to life biology. She confronts the moment when Kant is to be relinquished by speculative realists by uncovering in his work the resources she needs to open “the chink of a farewell” (xiii). She will bring in the life force of new frontiers in biology, for “the time has come to say it: transcendental epigenesis is epigenesis of the transcendental itself” (158). That which we thought was set in stone will be rocked by a new focus, shattered, then regrounded, differently: “The transcendental is subject to epigenesis – not to foundation” (158).

  Beyond all the trying genetic investigations, always in search of a lost, inaccessible, founding origin, Malabou’s book on Kant acknowledges frankly that “epigenesis can produce” (50), even if it builds on moving grounds. For our part, as translation theorists, we have been thinking translation in genetic terms and therefore failing to account for, or recognize, epigenetic productivity. Yet translation is epigenesis. After the afterlife and after survival, the plastic life of the text. As translators, “we now all have a new word”1 for our art, something to help us explain how it is that texts are not complete until they are translated. How it is that texts bear the program to translate, the need to develop their parts in translation. That translation is generative, not as “a succession or connection of events taking place in a linear fashion starting from a given, identifiable point” (175), but rather, more holistically, as “the temporality of a synthetic continuum within which all of the parts are presented together in a movement of growth whereby the whole is formed through self-differentiation” (178). Translation is that process in which the text self-differentiates and thereby grows, develops, matures.

  Malabou deploys new biological paradigms to read Kant, and in turn, reading her, I propose that we adopt epigenesis in translation studies to better describe the plasticity of the translating process. But is this any different from the multiplicity of metaphors that the discipline has already developed? The proposal and contestation of metaphors is integral to our field, from Lori Chamberlain’s foundational “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation” (1988) to James St André’s recent essay collection, Thinking through Translation with Metaphors (2014).2 Analogical thinking seemingly corresponds to our relational practices. But epigenesis is different. Just as Malabou is sensitive to the fact that her argument rides on being more than a “rhetorical artifice,” that her parsing of Kant’s phrase in paragraph 27 of the Critique of Pure Reason, “as it were a system of epigenesis of pure reason,” must be more, for “if it turns out that epigenesis is only an image with nothing other than an exoteric, pedagogic, or illustrative role, then my entire elaboration is meaningless” (181). Indeed. To say what is goes far beyond as it were, and at this point, translation studies, too, must go beyond analogy to talk mechanics, life systems.

  The slow seismic shifting or the shock of the quake. The moment in a translation when words slip, leap, echo, fly. Epigenesis: is that what translation is? Is that how we rid ourselves of the genetic paradigm that has shackled us to the original? Is it here, again, translating Malabou, that I find an answer to my questions about how to frame translation? It is – and I don’t think it’s just a translator’s conceit. Even as the authors’ closest readers, we, translators, work at the surface, determined to achieve the moment where “their difference disappears right into their contact” (157). We translate and retranslate, conscious that “epigenesis marks the current valency of the meeting point between the old and the new, the space where they reciprocally interfere with and transform one another” (158). Epigenetics describes how specific genes are activated or deactivated in response to environmental variants – the gene expression that is the transcription and translation of genetic code. The epigenesis of translation is about how texts turn off and on to speak to their audience, to react to their specific contact point. And so here, with a translation that is at once biological and textual, I find that epigenesis, then, is the meaning in translation.

  Carolyn Shread

  Notes

  1. Peter Connor, conversation, “Translation in Transition” conference, Barnard College, May 2015.

  2. Lori Chamberlain, “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 13, 1988, pp. 454–72; James St André, ed., Thinking through Translation with Metaphors, New York: Routledge, 2014.

  Epigignomai: (1) to be born after (oi epigignomenoi, the descendants); (2) to arise, to take place; (3) to add.

  All evolution is epigenetic.

  Georges Canguilhem1

  Hence natural things which we find possible only as ends constitute the best proof of the contingency of the world-whole.

  Immanuel Kant2

  Notes

  1. Georges Canguilhem, Georges Lapassade, Jacques Piquemal, and Jacques Ulmann, Du Développement à l’évolution au XIXe siècle, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, coll. “Pratiques Théoriques,” 1962, p. 26. My translation.

  2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, §75, p. 269. Hereafter CPJ.

  PREFACE

  Why write another book on Kant? Why add to the already extensive list of dissertations, monographs, and articles written on him even today?

  Quite simply, because, working behind the screen of all this recognition and celebration, my plan is to trace out the opposite, namely the chink of a farewell. A break with Kant is in the works in contemporary continental philosophy. Under the banner of “speculative realism,” a new approach to the world, thinking, and time puts into question a number of postulates considered untouchable since the Critique of Pure Reason: the finitude of knowledge, the phenomenal given, the a priori synthesis as the originary relation between subject and object, the entire structural apparatus said to guarantee the universality and necessity of the laws of both nature and thought, in a word, the “transcendental.” And the rallying cry of new post-critical thought is relinquish the transcendental.

  This relinquishing has been on the cards for some time. Initiated by Hegel, it marched on unrelenting until we reached the destruction and deconstruction of metaphysics. From Hegel to Heidegger, then from Heidegger to Derrida and Foucault, the transcendental was interrogated on the grounds of its rigidity, its permanence, its purported role as the condition sine qua non of thinking. To bring time, as did Heidegger, or history, as did Foucault, into the transcendental was already a way of relinquishing it. But that’s not all. The neurobiological revolution of the late 1980s, which must at last be acknowledged, and which brought to light a set of questions that are not entirely germane to the analytic tradition, also undermined any notion of the transcendental. Recent discoveries about how the brain functions have, in their own way, challenged the supposed invariability of laws of thought.

  How, then, should we situate speculative realism, given that it views itself as even more radical than the deconstruction of metaphysics and cognitivism? And amidst all these upheavals, what happens to Kantian philosophy, or, for that matter, philosophy itself?

  I believe that it is important to formulate a response to these questions by presenting a panorama of the ultra-contemporary philosophical landscape, where several major readings of Kant are being staged in terms of three questions: time; the relation between thinking and the brain; and the contingency of the world.

  Of course, the indispensable counterweight to this exploration is the response of Kant himself to his own posterity.

  I have constructed this resp
onse here around epigenesis, a figure that Kant summons in the Critique of Pure Reason in reference to the gestation of the categories. In biology, epigenesis designates the growth of the embryo through the gradual differentiation of cells – as opposed to preformation, which assumes that the embryo is fully constituted from the start. I develop the thesis that, far from being simply a rhetorical artifice, epigenesis applies to the transcendental itself. The transcendental grows, develops, transforms, and evolves. This evolution is such as to ensure that it spans the centuries separating the epigenetism of the eighteenth century from contemporary epigenetics.

  Thus, the transcendental begins life anew.

  After The Future of Hegel, 1 the time has come to write on Kant’s future. The next task will be to return to the relation between epigenesis and dialectic.

  *

  I wish to thank Monique Labrune and John Thompson, my publishers in France and the UK, for their patience and confidence. I also thank Øystein Brekke for his invaluable aid, both philosophical and bibliographic; this book owes much to our exchanges between Paris and Oslo. Étienne Balibar also provided me with books that were nowhere to be found, and I would like to express my gratitude and enduring friendship to him here. Lastly, I am deeply grateful to my translator and friend Carolyn Shread, and to Steve Howard, from Kingston University, who so generously reread the translation. Without their scrutiny and expertise, this project would not have come to light.