Catherine Malabou, Changing Difference (trans. Carolyn Shread), Polity Press, Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA, Polity Press, 2011. 180 pages, £14.99, €18.00, paper, ISBN: 9780745651088.

Catherine Malabou works in classic continental philosophy, neuroscience, and neuro-psychoanalysis. In some of her other works Malabou has written on trauma, the plasticity of writing and mourning. With Changing Difference she contributes to serious scholarship on contemporary feminism, most notably on the issue of essentialism. This short book was originally published in 2009 as Changer de différence, and it consists of four essays. The second and third essays, ‘Grammatology and plasticity’ and ‘The phoenix, the spider and the salamander’, investigate the ontology and biology of the feminine, whereas the first and final essays, ‘The meaning of the “feminine’’’ and ‘Woman’s possibility, philosophy’s impossibility’, examine the outcome of the two former essays in terms of sex and gender. It is in the final piece, in particular, that Malabou weighs in with her contribution to the heated feminist debates around essentialism.

Such debates centre around the question of whether there is a set of properties that are held in common by all women in virtue of being women. If there were such a set of properties, such as shared biological features or experiences of gendered oppression, then presumably on the grounds of these commonalities women should be able to act collectively for political change. However, reducing all women to the category of ‘woman’  tends to erase important differences amongst women. One worry about anti-essentialism that Malabou shares is that a lack of commonalities throws the possibility of collective political action based on women acting together, qua woman, into doubt.

Drawing from Levinas, Irigaray and Butler, Malabou begins by constructing the ontological being of the feminine as hospitality, the instance of ethical openness, the origin of wonder, and the space of play between genders. This is its ‘ontological meaning which ensures that the feminine is not restricted to woman’ (page 21). And yet Malabou claims that in Levinas, Irigaray and Butler’s works there is always already an ambiguity that ties femininity back to biological women and women’s sexuality (pages 27-29). ‘To speak of the ‘feminine’ would thus lead, in one way or another, to a reinforcement of traditional divisions and a reduction in the breadth of difference’. That said, Malabou argues that the critique of the feminine also leads ‘to a dead end’ (page 32) and this neutralizes and eradicates the subject of feminist struggles. As such, she argues that ‘no theory of the pluralization of difference will be able to shake the rigidity of the dyad’ (page 38).

What Malabou demonstrates, then, is that there is a problem with both essentialist and anti-essentialist positions; both are guilty of reduction and violence. In reality, women are ‘dominated sexually, symbolically, socially, economically, and culturally’ (page 92), whereas in deconstructionist thought, as well as in gender and queer studies, a kind of theoretical violence is done to ‘woman’ which ‘can play into the hands of ordinary violence against women in both the domestic and social realm’ (page 96). Gender and queer studies have radically hollowed out ‘woman’, even while claiming to liberate her. They have, in the end, assimilated woman to ‘being nothing’. Malabou insists, however, that this may be a fruitful point of departure. Instead of thinking ‘woman’ as an empty concept, she calls for her to be seen as possessing a plastic and resistant essence. This is, for Malabou, totally changing the terms of the essentialist/anti-essentialist debate and ushering in a new, ontologically grounded and open plastic era in feminist struggle. Her claim is a strong one; gender and sexual difference have never been investigated ‘back to [their] ontological source’ (page 2); at the same time, queer theory has never confronted deconstruction. The result of both failures is systematic real and theoretical violence against women.

Malabou tends to these wounds by maintaining that there is, in fact, a ‘minimal essence’ that keeps in mind the ‘specificity of the violence to women’ (page 93). This undoubtedly necessitates accepting a sort of feminine essence which is neither essentialist nor anti-essentialist, here Malabou’s training in the thought of Hegel shows through clearly for it is not one, or the other, but a dialectic movement between the two. Malabou is careful to tell this story through her own narrative, not wishing to speak on behalf of other women, but hoping some will follow the path offered in her book. In the final essay she submits philosophical analysis to the rigour of proof through her own experiences. To be part of the act of philosophizing is to be violated as woman, and to refuse to leave the discipline is to be constantly mitigating against this violence.

In the background is Malabou’s fundamental concept of plasticity (developed fully in her 2004 Que faire de notre cerveau?), derived in part from Hegel, which serves as the key of her concept of minimal feminine essence. For Malabou plasticity is that which is malleable (clay) or is able to give form (sculpture), but it is also something that has the power to explode (plastic explosives). It is universal; all is being changed or is changing. In the case of ‘woman’ her very violation shapes her. That said, the violation that shapes her also creates a new being, which in turn can shape other things. The process of plastic formation produces formative power, and it is in this way that women can ‘transform their impossibility of being into a specific power’ (page 112). Malabou’s notion of the feminine essence, then, is one that remains in flux, still empty in a sense, but powerful and transformative.

Malabou’s essays cover much ground in a more or less suggestive way. It is not so much that her arguments are not rigorous, for they are in many ways. Rather, there are many points which would do well to be further elaborated. Her construction of a minimal essence of femininity locates a sort of resistance to violence, in a practical sense, that is derived from that very violation. One wonders, as Malabou does not make this sufficiently clear, if there is anything other than a negative definition of feminine essence. Has the history of women’s resistance to violation provided no positive account of a minimal essence? Moreover, Malabou heavily criticizes anti-essentialist thought without making great reference to a wealth of feminist literature on the subject. Irigaray, Butler and Beauvoir do not constitute the whole of the feminist canon, after all. I look forward, however, to further contributions by Malabou to these debates.