Philosophy In Erection: Derrida’S Columns

Abstract

Two major figures in Malabou’s ‘philosophical heritage’ are Hegel and Derrida, both of whom occupy the forefront of this chapter. Malabou reads Derrida’s reading of Hegel in Glas by pointing out that dialectics operates ‘in raising or erecting what falls’. Yet, the Hegelian system is problematic insofar as, in the Genet column of Glas, what substitutes for the system is not a well-grounded philosophical alternative, but a sort of disseminal substitution itself, working within as much as against the system it resists. The confrontation staged by Glas is not between homosexual transgression, but instead a confrontation between two perspectives on the transcendental. The problem of Glas is that the two columns seem to ‘come out the same’ at the very moment when they seem to diverge radically. The problem is of a contagion between the two sides, which Malabou here addresses via two general questions: Why is there a risk of both contagion and similarity? What do these risks do to the transcendentality in question?