Womanlife or Lifework and Psycho-technique: Woman as the Figure of the Plasticity of Transcendence

Abstract

In what follows, I will reexamine the. figure of woman found, reaffirmed, and reinterpreted by Hegel: I will present the woman as a figure of—to use a word coined by Nancy and developed by Malabou—the “plasticity” of transcendence. The importance for Hegel of “plasticity” was brought forth by Jean-Luc Nancy in his La remarque spéculative (un bon mot de Hegel), and it has been further developed by Catherine Malabou since her Avenir de Hegel, ou de la plasticité temporelle en dialectique Nancy’s work on plasticity is closely connected to his friend and colleague Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s work on figuration and, more generally, on a kind of “malleability” of transcendence.² Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe used a whole set of notions such that “plasticity,” “malleability,” “figuration,” “rhythm,” “scheme,” et cetera, in order to go deeper into the question of presentation in philosophy that had been thematized by philosophers such as Jacques Derrida. Nancy’s and Lacoue-Labarthe’s terms are not late interpretations of Hegel, but rather a rediscovery of a thematic that was very important for German idealism and romanticism, namely the question of the presentation Darstellung) of truth and its relation to art and fiction: if truth is to be not only revealed but also presented, then philosophy has to face the problematics of figurality and plasticity that enable presentation as such