CA

BOOK REVIEWS

Cultural Anthropology is pleased to announce the introduction of a regular book

review section. Beginning with the current issue, each issue of Cultural Anthropology
will feature a selection of reviews of recently published work. I would like to take
this opportunity to introduce myself as book review editor and to give readers some
idea of what to expect in the new review section. The aim of the review section is
not to provide a comprehensive overview of current scholarship, but to focus on
writings that resonate with Cultural Anthropology’s long-standing editorial policy of
promoting new approaches—new empirical foci, new modes of research practice,
engagement with new and emergent theoretical and interdisciplinary currents,
and, not least, new and experimental modes of writing and presentation.
The Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA) has long been associated not
only with new directions in anthropological inquiry, but also with fostering dialogue
between anthropology and its interlocutors outside the discipline. In keeping with
this ethos of intellectual openness, works reviewed will not be restricted to writings
by anthropologists. Cultural Anthropology will also welcome the opportunity to
review works by scholars in other disciplines, works of interdisciplinary scholarship,
works of social and cultural theory, and literary and artistic works that are likely
to be of interest to the journal’s readership. It is also hoped that the review section
will provide a forum for the discussion of scholarship published in languages other
than English and, as book review editor, I welcome suggestions from readers and
SCA members as to recent non-Anglophone writings that might be reviewed in
future issues. I am particularly interested in works (in any language!) that defy easy

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 24, Issue 4, pp. 746–765. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360.  C 2009 by
the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2009.01046.x
 BOOK REVIEWS

categorization and that seek, not simply to inhabit, but to extend and transform
existing paradigms of research and writing.
It is anticipated that the number of reviews will vary from issue to issue.
Accordingly, there will be no rigidly defined format for reviews. Instead, Cultural
Anthropology hopes to feature reviews of a variety of lengths and in a variety
of formats. These might include longer or shorter reviews of individual works,
comparative discussions of two or more works on a related theme, or, in some
cases, more extended review essays. Reviewers should also feel free to experiment
with the review format itself and to explore a variety of ways of entering into
creative dialogue with the works they discuss.
Although the review section does not aspire to be exhaustive in its coverage
of the discipline, I hope nonetheless to provide readers with a selection of some of
the most challenging and innovative work being done in anthropology and other
fields and to foster an expansive and open-minded sense of current possibilities for
transdisciplinary dialogue, creative collaboration, and experimentation.
Publishers are invited to send review copies to the address below. I would
also be delighted to hear SCA members’ suggestions for works to be reviewed in
future issues and also to hear from anyone interested in acting as a book reviewer.
Contact details:
Stuart McLean
CA Book Reviews
Department of Anthropology
University of Minnesota
395 Hubert H. Humphrey Center
301 19th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55455
E-mail: mclea070@umn.edu

When Species Meet. Donna J. Haraway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

2007. 360 pages.
TONY C. BROWN, Department of English, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

What will be the purpose of book reviews in Cultural Anthropology? A respected

academic journal, a leader in its field, one will expect something other than
judgments on whether one should or should not read the book being reviewed.
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One will expect something more, the passing of a positive (two thumbs up) or
negative (two thumbs down) judgment being bracingly unobjective and more or
less useless—what in a Kantian idiom we could call not only without purpose, but
also without purposiveness. An expression of mere opinion, the supposed judgment
could barely pretend to assent beyond the reviewer’s own circumscribed sphere.
And yet, is it not possible that some books will demand exactly such a response?
If Cultural Anthropology was faced with a book calling for a “read it or burn
it” judgment, should the journal cast the book aside as unreviewable, or should it
allow the book to be reviewed but only as if such a demand were not being made?
Casting aside and ignoring would not seem ideal reviewing strategies. Of course,
we all likely practice such strategies inside and outside book reviews each and every
day. As it turns out, the book I am to review here, Donna J. Haraway’s When
Species Meet, deploys them on various occasions, and it is worth noting a concrete
example straightaway for, among other things, it puts obligation and response
center stage. Discussing Jacques Derrida’s late work on the animal, Haraway notes
that Derrida wants to think les animaux beyond their reduction to machines or
merely unknowable entities that may or may not possess consciousness. Haraway
judges the intention worthy but the result unedifying. Citing an episode Derrida
himself makes much of, Haraway argues that he fails to respond adequately to
his black cat, who approached the philosopher one morning as he stood in the
bathroom naked. “With his cat,” Haraway writes,

Derrida failed a simple obligation to companion species; he did not become

curious about what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or
perhaps making available to him in looking back at him. [p. 20]

Now, what exactly would be required for Derrida’s apparent nonresponse to

be the failure Haraway claims? First, that his aim (as we have noted) was to get
beyond the animal-as-unknowable model, and, second, that the field of possible
relations with an animal divides between animal-as-unknowable and animal-as-
person. In short, Derrida would fail if he did not personify his cat. But what
Haraway has cast out and ignored is Derrida’s most far-reaching challenge: to pose
the question of les animaux beyond both animal-as-unknowable and animal-as-
person. For Derrida, his failure to personify his cat keeps open the possibility of
success, even if it does not secure success. Haraway, however, clearly fails the same
challenge, at least at certain points in her wide-ranging book—but even then, and
crucially, her points of failure are not free from ambivalence.

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Let me suggest a moral to the fable. Casting out and ignoring can be detrimental
to one’s integrity, even if one is, as is often thought, constituted through acts of
abjecting what is not-I, acts that serve to mark the scope of one’s possible whole
and undivided condition. In Haraway’s case, her rejecting of Derrida produces a
blockage in her own account. Not having read Derrida closely enough she freely
submits herself to the double bind (à la Gregory Bateson) that Derrida poses as
our challenge: one must not think the animal a machine, one must not think
the animal a person, and yet the language of talking about the animal that is our
inheritance only allows one to speak of the animal as an inaccessible unknown or as a
person.
And yet the remarkable thing about Haraway’s work generally is her intel-
lectual agility. Somehow she makes even her missteps and blockages immensely
productive. Her blockages do not block our reading and thinking. They invite more
reading and thinking, or what Haraway would call curiosity: an engaged opening
to the as-yet unknown or unlived. This is what I mean when I say that the points
of failure in When Species Meet are not free from ambivalence. Haraway’s work
has always been about proliferation—or as she might put it, “proliferatings”—in
performance as in subject matter. And with When Species Meet Haraway invites to
the reader to participate in an electric and elastic thinking—partly because her own
enthusiasm and fascinating, her curiosity, proves so contagious, partly because she
does not shy away from pushing at the limits of her own thinking as of our own. In
other words, When Species Meet is an academic book reviewer’s torment. It is ex-
actly the kind of book that pushes the reviewer beyond the properly circumscribed
realms of appropriate reaction, demanding a response of the order one would not
expect to find in Cultural Anthropology: everyone should read this book! Yes, this is
a two-thumbs-up review.
So if you are reading these words, then Cultural Anthropology will have included
within itself a review forced beyond the pale of expectation by the book being
reviewed. And yet the journal may still not escape with its integrity intact. This
is part of Haraway’s contagious aspect. Indeed, the unexpected review that When
Species Meet calls for instantiates Haraway’s central concept of response: unlike
a reaction, a response cannot be calculated in advance. A response always takes
place in relation to the unpredictable. Hence, when Haraway insists that we need
to acknowledge the imperative to respond to nonhuman animals she is laying the
cornerstone for an ethical relation with animals. If we must respond to animals then
they cannot be machines, if we understand machines as operating in a calculable

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fashion. In many ways When Species Meet is like a bookish dog putting us through the
hoops of agility training.
But Haraway’s contagion is more far-reaching. For right about now Cultural
Anthropology will begin to realize a double bind of its own. If to cast out and ig-
nore Haraway’s book would have caused the journal a loss of integrity (namely
the failure to address an important work with a direct bearing on the field), the
book’s inclusion will, if well reviewed, issue a fundamental challenge to field the
journal represents. When Species Meet demands to be read as an attempt to make
the phrase “cultural anthropology” at best redundant and at worst the incarna-
tion of a commonplace yet violent ideological tactic serving the strategic aim
of securing what Haraway calls the “Great Divide”—the separation of human
from (other) animals that undergirds a malevolent “human exceptionalism.” How
will cultural anthropology, a field whose name we could gloss “the study of the
human in its non-natural activities,” maintain its self-delimitation as it incorpo-
rates a book that argues “we have never been human”? (And as Haraway puts it
at one point, “the notion that ‘the proper study of man is mankind’ is risible”
[p. 70].) Making things worse, Haraway contends that we have never been cul-
tural either, or, rather, we have never been only cultural: the idea that all that
is human is artificial (i.e., nonnatural) is one more symptom of the Great Divide
(p. 11).
As categories, “human” and “cultural” are, like all categories for Haraway,
signs of danger. Categorical thought’s dividing, apportioning force marks Reason’s
attempted domination of what remains a messy, muddy world. We exist, Haraway
says, in “naturecultures,” in an entangled ontology of nature and culture at once,
where neither term preexists the other (p. 4). Our being is cut through by processes
of endless “becoming with,” endless because nonteleological, with because always
amidst complex relations (pp. 16–19). Accordingly, “cultural anthropology” founds
itself in the violent and unwarranted hewing of human from animal, cultural from
natural. If When Species Meet were a dog then we might say it just relieved itself on
the industriously cultivated lawn of cultural anthropology.
One could, of course, chase up Haraway and demand she clean up after her
book. Or, beyond removing the mess oneself, one could let the shit sit, sink into
the soil, and possibly even fertilize the lawn—while hoping the excrement harbors
no parasites that could cause permanent damage. But in the spirit of doing a proper
book review, let’s take a stick, poke around, and see exactly what When Species Meet
has left for us. The book itself is the third volume of the exciting Posthumanities

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series edited by Cary Wolfe and published by the University of Minnesota Press.
The series begins from the premise that we live in a posthumanist era rendering
humanism’s explanatory models inadequate: we need to develop a posthumanities
to confront a posthumanist present. That vision of a posthumanities has to date
(there are now eight volumes) been dominated by technology and biopolitics. When
Species Meet holds within that frame. Broadly speaking, the book’s three sections aim
to rethink the place of animals in the modern laboratory, in homes as companion
animals, and in technology, respectively.
The middle section, particularly, and the book, generally, represents Har-
away’s expansion of her Companion Species Manifesto (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm,
2003). Apart from content, When Species Meet carries over from the earlier work
the challenge of understanding “these mortal, finite flows [of life] that are about
heterogeneous relationship—and not about ‘man’” (p. 24). The challenge could be
extended beyond the sciences throughout the humanities and the social sciences.
What would a cultural anthropology that is “not about ‘man’” look like? How could
one practice such a thing? It would require Sidney Mintz, for example, to radically
alter the “humanist frame” organizing his Sweetness and Power: “Commodities, labor,
slavery, spice, medicine, luxury, and much more are all there, but the humanist
frame of Mintz’s anthropology makes it harder to see all the other organisms (and
other nonhumans) actively involved” (New York: Penguin, 1985:387 n. 8).
But here, too, we catch a glimpse of what I mean by Haraway’s productive
ambivalence. I take the claim from the Companion Species Manifesto to suggest, among
other things, a need to guard against personification. What worse way than to try and
make everything “not about ‘man’” by personifying all that is “not man”? So how can
we put this claim from the Companion Species Manifesto comfortably alongside Har-
away’s personification of Derrida’s cat? To suggest that doing so might be productive
clearly indicates that I am not simply wanting to dismiss Haraway’s work as contra-
dictory. I am wanting to suggest that the challenge Haraway enjoins on us is to try and
think how these two propositions might in fact exist in a noncontradictory relation.
What might relatedness look like when we no longer think in terms of identity but in
terms of some as yet unavailable and therefore unpredictable “becoming with” what
remains incompatible? I would suggest that meeting demands of this order would
force far-reaching deviations and alterations in our existing academic practices as
we would need incorporate what might otherwise seem ill placed within our ken.
And such demands represent what When Species Meet leaves on our lawn in its nastiest
form.

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Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion and Postsustainability. Alan Stoekl. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2007. 280 pages.
JUAN M. OBARRIO, Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University

This is a bold book both in scope and breadth of interests. It attempts to ex-
pand Bataille’s concepts on religion, energy, and expenditure onto contemporary
concerns with enviroment(ality), sustainability, and governance. At a crossroads
of emergency, when life on the planet seems torn between the competing forces
of energy and religion, this text aims at illustrating the articulations of both fields,
advocating in favor of excessive expenditure as an alternative to the discourses
of conservation and sustainability, perceived as locked within the dead end of the
depletion of fossil fuel resources.
The book develops the crucial Bataillian question of the “notion of expendi-
ture”: it explores how an absolute (sub)version of practices of spending and a theory
of society based on unconditional luxurious consumption, ultimately even beyond
waste, founds an economic theory of religion. A current in Bataille’s oeuvre, de-
rived from Durkheim and Mauss, presents key philosophical insights in relation to
the concepts of “gift,” “sacrifice,” and “sacredness,” taking Mauss’s interpretation of
potlatch rituals as the cornerstone of his own religious, economic theory of society.
Bataille defined religion as the practices of destruction of surplus resources, or
“apotheosis of the perishable.” Human beings received energy in excess of what it
is needed for their reproduction. He argued that if that excess was not destroyed,
then it would devastate human life. Therefore, it has to be consumed through
sacrificial, lavish expenditure.
The main question posed by the book is how a form of expenditure as extreme
as Bataille’s can provide an ethicopolitical model for the current global crisis
of energy. And moreover, how such a model could allow us to think issues of
postsustainability and a surpassing of the (Hegelian-Kojevian) fulfillment of timely
“Absolute Knowledge”: a time–space beyond environmental sustainability, which
would avoid the specters of a post–fossil fuel “feudalism,” fundamentalism, or
catastrophic global destruction. The text thus also provides material for rethinking
empirical issues about the potentiality of community and the reproduction of its
cultural–natural environment.
Reading this text, sustainability can be thought of as coinciding with history
itself, insofar as it entails duration in time. Kojeve’s emphasis on the theme of the
end of “History” in Hegel, brought about by the emergence and completion of Ab-
solute Knowledge, is here equated with the problematic discourse of conservation.
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Bataille’s project of avoiding the humanism and historicism of Hegelian dialectics, of

carrying Hegel’s system to its limits, are interpreted here as opening the possibility
of a future, after the end of History, or a space, and discourse, of postsustainability,
following the depletion of current reserves of energy. If the theme of the intrusion
of Otherness runs throughout Bataille’s work, as a form of radical alterity defined
as heteronomous matter, the relevance of this thought for our present—indeed, as
the text argues, the solution offered for our near future—refers to the existence
of a different type of energy, ultimately radically dissimilar to the known types
developed and used by the capitalist system, first and foremost fossil fuel.
The text is structured into two parts: the first entails an exposition of Bataille’s
thought on energy, religion, and community, around the figure of the city. The
second part expands Bataille’s themes in the elaboration of postsustainable think-
ing. The first part thus follows Bataille’s ethicoreligious conceptions on matter
and energy (correctly tracing back a Sadean genealogy), preparing the ground for
a discussion of contemporary religion in the second part. Here, its extension of
Bataille toward a challenge to contemporary forms of ecotheology and religious
“fundamentalism,” constructs a capricious, Manichean opposition between “reli-
gions of the Book” (a hasty totalization) and Bataille’s text. Still, the book accurately
describes how Bataille’s fragmentary project develops a destructive interruption
of Hegel’s dialectics and its Christian conceptions of totality, opposing to it the
immanence of a “nonknowledge,” a general economy of scattered writing poised
to counter the restricted economy of the “Book” be it the Bible or, after the death
of God, the Hegelian–Kojèvian post-Historical absolute Knowledge.
The text thus engages the crucial Bataillian issue of the sacred in everyday life,
yet without exploring the back-and-forth transgression of its limits to which Bataille
drives it. Even when the relations between his text and Hegel’s are shown, the
extent to which sacrifice, as an ultimate sacred, sumptuary version of expenditure
is crucial for his Nietzschean subversion of dialectics remains occluded. Indeed,
Bataille’s religion, and his “ethics,” are made of an incessant loss: an inner experience
of the Nietzschean death of god.
The book pivots on the disparity between expenditure and waste amidst the
acceleration of consumption in late capitalism, and its production of incredible
amount of waste. The central issue at stake is the question of energy. Bataille
argued that from the restricted economy of capitalism, its system of exchange,
equivalence, and commodification, which results in alienation, society would have
to move toward a more fundamental general economy, one that would found its
sovereignty in extreme forms of expenditure, luxurious waste, and gift without
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any possible reciprocity. Bataille’s “notion of expenditure” is a radical alternative to

mere squander, one that should be, paradoxically, less destructive at a larger scale.
In an era confronting fossil fuel depletion, “sustainability” without expenditure
would seem infeasible according to the author. Excessive spending, rather, would
give way, therefore, to a (utopic?) era of “postsustainability.”
The notion of a general economy of sacrificed or sacred matter, nurtures
Bataille’s conception of another type of energy—one that would have its source in
the sun, with all its material yet also mystical implications—as instantiation of the
célèbre accursed share of various economic arrangements: so expansive a surplus,
so radical a leftover, that it could not be, at any cost, brought back into the sphere of
exchange, nor recuperated into the restricted economies of energy conservation,
capital accumulation, or dialectical sublation. The argument is heavily informed
by a Heideggerean reading of Bataille. Yet this approach seems unwarranted by
Bataille’s work, which better aligned with a predecessor like Nietzsche than a
known contemporary as Heidegger.
In particular, the text is centered on the interesting concept of “orgiastic re-
cycling,” or expenditure beyond waste and the reuse of reserves. It postulates that
the surplus heteronomous matter, or “Nature,” which is to be consumed through a
religiously economic (sovereign, nonservile) expenditure might regenerate com-
munication with a lost intimacy. But if this concept is going to prove to be a useful
prolongation of Bataille toward a new environmentality, rather than referring to
the (Heideggerean) historicity of an alternative near future at hand, a careful solic-
itation of Bataille could develop the concept of the “Eternal Return of the Same,”
in a postsustainable time beyond the Hegelian end of History. This exploration of
Nietzsche, crucial for an interpretation of Bataille’s thought, is absent in this text.
More surprisingly, although global late capitalism is the crucial context for the
crisis of sustainability, the text barely discusses energy in relation to capitalism’s
complex intricacies. Capital functions here as mere far background, losing sight of
Bataille’s vital arguments on the fundamental difference between the temporality
of a restricted economy based on everyday exchange value and on long-term, large-
scale accumulation, on the one hand, and the immediacy of a general economy,
one that would absolutize the use value of “primitive” communities or communism
toward an unlimited form of expenditure, on the other hand. To the “creative
destruction” of Schumpeterian capital, Bataille opposed the total annihilation of
sovereign consumption.
The main success of this text is to present Bataille’s concept of energy as
being crucial to explore an antidialectical conception of knowledge that frees
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“unemployed negativity” from any possible abstraction that both conserves it under
reserve and elevates it: the potential Aufhebung of energy-matter. Bataille privileged
heterology, the nonknowledge of impure, sacred matter, over an economy of
calculation of the use value of energy. This formless matter, source of a different
kind of energy, constitutes a landscape opened to a religious “inner experience”
of donation that evades use, utility, and usury, reestablishing through certain
practices—eroticism, sacrifice—a contact with a lost sense of community.
The text successfully refers to this thought to contest current discourses
on conservation. Unfortunately its scope refers only to late advanced Western
societies, whereas the situation in the postcolonial world is absolutely different
and more critical.The text also correctly follows Bataille’s mimetic revolt against
Hegelian dialectics, with its ultimate religious conception of “Man” finding its
climax in the end of history of Absolute Knowledge. It leaves an open space to
think further about what an inoperative, posthumanist community of those having
nothing in common might mean.
Despite certain shortcomings and omissions, this text is an audacious attempt
to transport Bataille’s thought from its central role in the 1930s and its recent
canonization as key “proto poststrutucturalist” thinker, to near-future matters of
energy and sustainability. This ambitious book dares to take all the risks that await
every project of domestication of this complex character, who was perhaps the most
conspicuous representative of what James Clifford once defined as “ethnographic
surrealism.”

Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories. Michael Feige.
Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009. 328 pages.
HADAS WEISS, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago

The ebbing tide of fundamentalism in the Middle East has drawn ample media
attention, but the spate of sensationalized reportage has not yet been accompa-
nied by comparable ethnographic engagement. The lapse is unfortunate because
anthropology is uniquely positioned to vex the popular notion of fundamentalists
as embodiments of primordial belief systems and antimodernist agendas by contex-
tualize them within a broader social and historical dynamic. With respect to Jewish
fundamentalism in Israel’s occupied territories, Michael Feige’s intervention is a
timely and important attempt to fill in that gap. The fruit of two decades of research
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on settlers who emerged out of the national-religious movement Gush Emunim,

this volume revisits the major signposts of the movement’s settlement project and
legacy with a sensitivity to norms, rituals, and perceptions that enriches existing
accounts. We are treated to masterful semiotic readings of settlers’ hikes and hol-
idays, marches and demonstrations, built environments, everyday practices, and
local discourses. The goal is to delineate the complex self-understandings of settlers
who are otherwise depicted as the empty bearers of messianic beliefs backed by
Israeli state power, with disastrous outcomes. It proves an invaluable resource for
anyone interested in gaining an intimate perspective on a group largely neglected
by anthropologists.
Feige conceives of ethnography as a means of grasping the deeper meaning of
the settlement project (p. 15) and indeed, his account is most powerful precisely
where it is most traditionally ethnographic. Specifically, in a chapter on the settle-
ment Hebron, where Jews live in close proximity to Palestinians and where ongoing
friction, violence, and threats of evacuation generate a “concentrated reality” (p.
166) that intensifies the force of symbols; and in a chapter on the settlement Ofra,
where suburban banality is idealized, normalcy valorized, and pragmatism renders
it “simultaneously a key event in Jewish history and a pleasant place to raise children”
(p. 193). Both the dead seriousness of the former settlement and the self-irony
of the latter are compelling insofar as they are grounded in distinct lifestyles and
circumstances. A similar duality is replicated in the comparison between the dis-
mantling of Sinai Peninsula settlements in 1982 and that of Gaza Strip settlements in
the summer of 2005. The emotional confrontations of the more recent evacuation
are put into relief against the backdrop of its predecessor, whence settlers were
willing to leave in return for a chance of peace with Egypt, and only struggled to re-
ceive equitable compensation: “the evacuees from Sinai found themselves pioneers
in a different sense: the greatest symbol of the privatization process that, from
the mid-1980s, engulfed the country was the use of land for profit rather than for
agriculture” (p. 207). It is a pity that Feige does not push this line of inquiry further,
given that his most intriguing insights revolve around the normalization of Jewish
life in the occupied territories. Some of its ambiguity could have been dispelled
by extending the effects of socioeconomic privatization onto the realm of belief
and practice, as suggested in the provocative idea that “settlements were able to
accumulate such rich symbolic significance because in one important respect—the
transformation of the individual who resides in them—they have none” (p. 72).
The themes and contrasts so elegantly set up, however, seem to hang in midair.
How do the stark differences between settlements, events, and mobilizations figure
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into the political trajectory? Disjointedness between the ethnographic vignettes of

discrete moments and communities, and the broader issues they are implicated in,
fails to satisfy the reader seeking clues about the role of the settlement movement in
the Israel–Palestine conflict. The book’s subjects are a minority among the Jewish
residents of the West Bank, about half of whom are neither religious nor driven
by a collective cause, and even among religious settlers, the largest constituency
is a nonnationalist ultraorthodoxy. Yet Feige asserts that “it would hardly be an
exaggeration to claim that the [Gush Emunim] movement has changed the history
of the Middle East” (p. 35). He talks of Gush Emunim as if it were a living force,
where in truth it disintegrated back in 1977 into bureaucratic and administrative
daughter institutions with fluctuating efficacy and waning popularity; and of so-
called Gush Emunim settlers as somehow representative of settlers at large. This
decision has the effect of ascribing disproportionate agency to a nationalist theology,
and the subtle rendering of Ofra notwithstanding, it is Hebron that is depicted as
iconic. With all of the famous well-spoken ideologues interviewed for this book,
one wonders how run-of-the-mill settlers perceive the loaded symbolism and
grandiose visions. If the carefully wrought solemnity of a hike is undercut by
an uncontrolled informal world of playfulness and individualism (p. 109), one
might imagine similar disruptions in other top-down tenants, but this subaltern
streak is not pursued. Discussion of second generation settlers focuses on hilltop
youth and outpost vigilantes (“the flower children of the hills”), even as juvenile
delinquency and teenagers disavowing their parents’ zeal are acknowledged. The
romance of youthful unruliness is fascinating, but it is misleading to single it out as
the mark of the generation. In highlighting the high drama of violence, evacuations,
and messianic beliefs, this ethnography is not all that different from journalistic
accounts of fundamentalisms anywhere. It comes as a surprise, therefore, to learn
that settlements are promoted as sound investments rather than as realizations of
collective ideologies (p. 273).
The book’s title, Settling in the Hearts, refers to settlers’ oft-repeated assertion
that their success hinges on convincing the Israeli public of the desirability of their
project. Feige implicitly supports this conviction when he subjects to a hermeneutic
reading an ideology of questionable hold, coherence, and efficacy. Yet against the
logic of his own analysis, he attributes the impracticability of further evacuations
in the West Bank to settlements’ size and sedimentation, and to the inability of
ideological groups to exert an influence in a thoroughly privatized society (p. 276).
If so, what does determine settlements’ proliferation, and what will dictate their
fortune? After 328 pages, the question remains open.
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What Should We Do with Our Brain? (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy). Catherine

Malabou (Sebastian Rand, trans.). New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
(Originally published as Que faire de notre cerveau? Paris: Bayard, 2004.)
PETER SKAFISH, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley

“Humans make their brain,” the beginning of this book by the philosopher Catherine
Malabou reads, “but they do not know it.” This phrase could at first be taken
for a banal characterization of the fact of neuroplasticity—the brain’s capacity
to reshape itself and cognition through rearranging and repairing the network
of its synaptic connections—were it not, however, for its author’s immediate,
unexpected explanation of it as an attempt to reformulate Marx’s dictum that men
are unwitting of how they make their own history so that it reflects the political
(and potentially revolutionary) implications this neurobiological concept holds for
the current, neoliberal incarnation of capitalism.
“The bond between the brain and history is now established with certainty,”
Malabou declares, and “runs so deep that it involves identity” (but not “analogy”)
because the organ’s constant susceptibility to transformation entails biology no
longer being a matter of destiny or a viable refuge for foundationalist justifica-
tions of political order, but a mutability so profound that the contingencies of
time are instead shown to be always, indissociably at work in it. “Brain plastic-
ity,” she continues, teasing the thought out from Jean-Pierre Changeaux’s work
(along with that of Antonio Damasio and Joseph le Doux) “constitutes a pos-
sible margin of improvisation with regard to genetic necessity” in human and
other animal life for the reason that the cerebral map continually redraws itself
in response to external events once the genetically given, “general architecture”
of the brain (“the organization of its [basic] areas” and their corresponding func-
tions) has congealed, and this renders obsolete the old distinction “necessity vs.
chance” that has long overdetermined the problem of life, sociality, and freedom:
because the events the brain encounters are either integrated into its form as
slight modifications or else provoke disintegrations and reformations in this, even
biological life evinces—as language and history have for some time been alone
thought to—that necessity and contingency can always be converted into each
other or trade places such that essences become accidents and accidents become
essences.
This last thought, uniquely Malabou’s, is the fruit of her conceiving neural
plasticity in terms of her own general, philosophical concept of plasticity, which she
developed elsewhere as a rehabilitation of speculative dialectics and the motifs of
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form, transformation, and synthesis so central to it: after explaining that plasticity
expresses the tension in the real between, on the one hand, a being’s powers of
giving and receiving form, and, on the other, its “capacity to annihilate form” (its
own included), Malabou shows that interpreting the one in light of the other brings
out the reality that we are always subject to change and the freedom that results
from undergoing it. The brain’s ability, that is, to sculpt, modulate, and repair itself
in response to or against stimuli from its milieu entails our being ever available for
being changed from the outside, as well as the possibility of a specifically “neuronal
liberation” from forms given us from there that have become intolerable.
But could a politics capable of resisting and transforming capitalism really
be based in the brain? The response this inevitable question receives at Malabou’s
hands will largely come as a surprise. Being the practitioner of dialectical thought
she is, it gets turned back on itself and identified as an ideological inversion of
reality: there already is, she argues, a politics of the brain to the (quite far) extent
that post-Fordist, neoliberal capitalism, “like neural cohesion, . . . is not of a central
or centralizing type but rests on a plurality of mobile and atomistic centers” (p. 42),
a highly supple reticular “network,” that is, which constantly reorganizes in the face
of crisis as organizations and individuals are continually forced to adapt, as neurons
do, to new locations and roles. Hence not only do the “biological and social mirror
in each other” this recent form of politicoeconomic power, but its operation turns
out to be anchored in the gray matter of the former as much as in the practices and
institutions of the latter. The real question, then, turns out to be the one effectively
posed in the title of the book (as the echo of another, revolutionary one): What is to
be done, with the brain, if its power of metamorphosis is to be socially effectuated
such that it “does not coincide with the new spirit of capitalism” (p. 12)?
No doubt the fortunes of both this book and Malabou’s further efforts toward
a philosophy of the brain rest on which of the above two questions will be deemed
more perspicacious with respect to the theoretical and politicoethical stakes of
neurobiology; given the wideness of the terrains in which biological and other
natural sciences are conceived as contributing little to critical thought (unless as
its targets) and philosophical invention considered mostly suspect, the incredulity
expressed in the first of them should be expected to be directed at this project,
and the chances of the second being widely taken up considered small. Now this
situation seems to me particularly unfortunate for the reason that it puts us at risk
of missing out on what Malabou shows us here about both our docility in the face
of capitalism—our often being, precisely when we think we are not, “obedient
individuals who have no greater merit than that of knowing how to bow [our] heads
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with a smile” (p. 79)—and how plasticity might be, precisely in both its theoretical
and neural dimensions, a conceptual resource efficacious for resisting this order.
So against the dismissal of Malabou’s question and the thoughts she furnishes to
address it, what follows will draw out these, their two central strengths.
These emerge as we discover with her the tangled problem at the core of
the book. If the plasticity of the brain indeed involves its being capable of literally
deprogramming itself of the majority of the programs that have been set running
in it and then treated as intrinsic to human beings, what ought to be done, she
tells us, is to create a widespread “consciousness of the brain,” an awareness that
the only essence even biological knowledge can now ascribe to the human being
is mutability or transformability. This task, however, proves extremely difficult
because a pervasive and specifically “neuronal ideology” has us believing the brain
the “command center” through which we are biologically determined; this view
leaves us “ignorant of” and “alienated” from our specifically neuronal capacity for
transformation. “If we are not conscious of plasticity,” goes her assessment, “this
is because . . . it is in fact so familiar that we do not even see it . . . it has become
the form of our world” (p. 9) in the present capitalist dispensation (or so it seems),
such that the freedom offered by the brain is blocked us on two fronts.
Foremost in preventing this cognizance of plasticity, Malabou tells us, is its
“ideological avatar,” the sociopsychic “flexibility,” as she calls it, demanded so per-
vasively today (p. 12). The economic need for individuals adjustable enough to be
fitted to an array of roles and self-regulating enough to accept these of their own
accord creates a situation in which neuroplasticity is drawn on to the point that it
appears to be the characteristic trait of what is instead an almost exclusively flexible
game. Although “at first glance,” she explains, “the meaning[s] of these two terms
[appear] the same”—flexibility is commonly defined as “elasticity,” “suppleness,”
and “the ability to change with ease to adapt oneself to circumstances”—nonetheless
they sharply diverge insofar as these cognates for pliability correspond only to the
one of plasticity’s powers solicited by contemporary capitalism, that of receiving
form, and not its other two capacities of giving and annihilating this (p. 12). Be-
cause the hypermobility and extreme versatility required for employment, that
is, are generally not counterbalanced by any pressure toward constancy, they
amount only to a general docility—one must “adapt to everything, . . . be ready for
all adjustments”—through which a perverse “polymorphism” of limitless, unmiti-
gated change is imposed on us (p. 13). Among the consequences are the extreme
existential “precariousness” and anxious “fragility” that result from constantly facing
the prospect of being cut off from the network upon failure to so adapt, as well
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as the depressive burnout that often follows successful mastery of this situation.
But the worst of them is our “according an overly central role to the absence of [a]
center” in ourselves (p. 53), since this has us believing that the displacements or
delocalizations of self destroying us in fact transform and free us. What we fail to
realize is that maintaining stable forms while annihilating the constant succession
of “masks,” “postures,” and “attitudes” (p. 72) imposed on us will be integral to our
freedom. We confuse flexibility with plasticity.
Yet given, Malabou next asks, that the destructiveness of flexibility is largely
fueled by neuroplasticity, how could the latter really be conceived as carrying “a
capacity to resist [this] excess of polymorphism?” (p. 68) At first, neuroscience
and related endeavors would seem to provide the answer: having understood
plasticity, it would be reasonable to expect them to be capable of diagnosing as
pathological capitalism’s amplification and exhaustion of the malleability of the brain
and of proposing a clinic of resistance instead. Instead, however, “the ideological
presuppositions” of flexibility turn out to “govern the neuroscientific field” as
well (p. 11); not only, we read, does biomedical psychiatry basically conceive
the depressed person as a disconnection or “break in transmission in the fluidity
of the network” whose “appetite for mobility” thus needs to be pharmacologically
restored (pp. 51–52), but also neuroscience itself scarcely realizes the consequences
of neuroplasticity when it describes the latter as merely endowing us with greater
“efficacy” and “adaptability” than was heretofore thought possible (p. 31). More
specifically, when certain neuroscientists attempt to account for the transition
between neuronal and social forms, they simply equate this problem with that of
how individuals with “power and a capacity for success” come to be, and thereby
tacitly assume the flexible world to which these correspond the natural result of
the brain. So if there is to be resistance to socioeconomic flexibility, it will also
have to be toward the part of neuroscience “that . . . naturalizes the neural process
in order to legitimate a certain social and political functioning” (p. 68).
The weapon Malabou forges for this fight is an account of how the mutual
shaping of brain and socius renders both permanently unstable. “But in order to
understand such a construction,” she contends, “we must leave the domain of
pure description and agree to elaborate a theoretical petition,” which is to say a
conceptualization of the brain well beyond what the natural sciences alone (or
empirical analysis of them) can accomplish (p. 70). The primary problem with
neurobiology, she begins from this perspective, is that its ideological dimension
leaves it oblivious to the fact that forms only exist by virtue of contradiction, the
conflict between their being simultaneously closed and open to being changed by
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the other forms pressing on them from without. The plasticity of the brain as well
as of any identity

entails a necessary split and search for an equilibrium between the preservation
of constancy . . . and the exposure of this constancy to accidents, to the outside,
to otherness in general. . . . What results is a tension born of the resistance
[that] constancy and creation mutually oppose to each other . . . every form
carries within itself its own contradiction. And it is precisely this resistance
that makes transformation possible. [p. 71; translation slightly modified]

This is because resistance to the other’s form enables elements of it to be

impressed into one’s own without the latter losing its basic shape, even as the
resistance of the other to being resisted is what, whenever this prevails, cause
the breaks and “explosions” in our own forms that force us to reconstitute and,
through that, markedly change. Transformation only occurs, that is, at and through
this conflictual “midpoint” between persistence and destruction internal both to
forms and their conjunctions. It is neuroscience’s failure, Malabou contends, to
understand this tension and its creativity that allows it to conceive the relation
between brain and socius as involving placid continuity and not the “deflagarations”
and morphings that would have to result from their pressing on each other to their
respective breaking points. So against the presumption of a simple isomorphism
extending between brain and world, it must be understood that “only an ontological
explosion could permit the transition from one order to the other,” a “rupture”
or “gap” from which their forms can never emerge unscathed or unchanged (pp.
72–73). And on the basis of this thought from the brain, we now finally know how
to refuse the society of the pliable: we must not only unleash our power to resist
and thereby “cancel the fluxes” of capitalism, but also “lower our self-controlling
guard” so as to “accept exploding from time to time”—“this is what we should do
with our brain” (p. 79).
But will the charge be taken up? The ethical force of Malabou’s understanding
of transformation and the broad scope of the critical perspective it opens on
advanced capitalism merits giving the injunction of What Should We Do With Our
Brain? serious consideration. Yet some will cite these two aspects of this book as
the very reasons its argument should be outright rejected or else qualified until
its specificity is lost, a situation that, given my obvious agreement with has been
presented of it here, I would like to address, starting with a criticism that will likely
come from within anthropology.
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Although Malabou’s materialism and sustained engagement with neurobiol-

ogy will be welcomed in certain, basically Foucauldian circles in the discipline for
breaking with the rejection of technoscience by much of deconstruction and even
Derrida (whose student, friend, and close collaborator she long was), her thought
will nonetheless be regarded in them as an unwarranted fiction to the exact ex-
tent that it is conducted through a speculative and quasi-hermeneutic philosophical
method. Such an approach, an abbreviated version of this criticism would run,
attempts to understand the relations between scientific discourse and socioeco-
nomic institutions through a textual interpretation of how dialectical themes are at
work in them, one making little to no reference to concrete practice; it would thus
see general forms, isomorphisms between them, and social totality where there
exist only piecemeal relays between social spheres whose logics are necessarily
divergent from belonging to an ever-fragmented modernity, and, hence, offer an
ethics inefficacious in responding only to the former mirage, not the latter reality.
Although an explanation of the motives of this school of thought is not
possible here, what should be noted is that it has attempted to continue Foucault’s
last project—of achieving a modern, Enlightenment version of the sort of ancient
ethics in which the subject transforms itself through realizing truth—by making
the contemporary life sciences the source of that truth. Now because a “conversion
of logos into ethos,” as its characterization of this ethical project goes, is exactly
what Malabou achieves (by recognizing, that neuroscience offers a significant truth
about the subject, converting this truth through a work of thought into the very
form of the subject’s self-relation, and then proposing the beginnings of a collective
politics on the basis of this), and because she accomplishes this through speculative
thought, rather than social analysis, the insistent claims from this camp that theory
amounts to delusion lose whatever force they might once have been able to hold.
Were Malabou, that is, without a conceptual means of tracking how the real as
such gathers together, as and across its different domains—that is what a logos
is—it is quite unlikely she would perceive the brain as being itself an ethical
form bearing on so many things “outside” it; moreover, her presumption that the
systematicity of such a gathering can indeed be accounted for is precisely what
yields Malabou a more profound vision of the character of advanced capitalism
than a supposedly ethical refusal of totalization would (if this is untrue, then just
why has this school not offered an account of how their preferred mode of doing
research—in decentralized, “collaborative” teams, at the same breakneck speed as
just-in-time production, and through adjusting to constant novelty—permits them
critical distance from the very neoliberalism it seems to evince?). Local, inductive
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probing proves, in the face of her book, far less discerning than it is supposed
to be.
The real, more formidable criticisms will come from deconstructive quarters
of the humanities (incl. anthropology), and will be to Malabou’s avowed aims, both
here and throughout her work, of making plasticity take difference’s place as the
core motif of contemporary thought, and of accordingly turning its attention away
from language and writing and toward the empirical domain—neurobiological
matter—most endowed with, and thus exemplary of its logic of transformation.
What will be found most objectionable about the prospect of plasticity taking on
this role is that an ethics based on it would accord as much (if not more) weight
to inflexibility and resistance toward the other as commonly is to openness to
alterity and would also therefore endorse Malabou’s view, implicitly made here,
that the philosophies of difference basically conceive change as “continuous . . .
without limits, adventure, or [effective] negativity” (p. 79; as “bad infinity,” as she
puts it elsewhere) because they deny form any (quasi-) transcendental, logical, or
ontological primacy. Not only, that is, will the centrality of the other in the United
States (with the stress on the objective genitive) cause Malabou’s criticism to be
seen as conflating or too closely identifying a specifically philosophical claim about
form—the motor of transformation, as Derrida and Deleuze each say in their own
way, lies in the displacement or opening of forms by difference—with capitalism
passing off its flexings for transformations, but her emphasis on the ethical necessity
of “self-fashioning” will also be construed as retrograde for coming just as thinking
has finally begun facing the alterity of the very societies and modes of thought it once
completely excluded from itself. And these criticisms may in turn lead Malabou’s
at once biological and historical materialism to be reduced to a mere biologism
premised on disinterest toward questions concerning postcolonial societies and a
“scientistic” disavowal (that would itself be ideological) of the continued power of
language and literature to unleash difference in these societies.
As this is no place to consider further how plasticity might recast more
ontological matters of form, transformation, and actuality commonly thought
settled by the old philosophies of difference, these criticisms will be addressed in
their empirical dimension. We should not find form or its partisans so circumspect:
Malabou’s insistence on the political necessity of maintaining a tension in ourselves
between immobility and explosion finds a precise echo in work concerning a quite
different context. In his Spectral Nationality (New York: Columbia University Press,
2003), Pheng Cheah also conceives a manifestly dialectical and biological version of
form—the organicist conception of the state as Kant and Hegel articulated it—as the
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primary means of shielding people in postcolonial countries from some other kinds
of continuous change—the opening of new labor markets, their forced migration
into these, increased structural violence—which get passed off as transformations.
The fact that the conceptual resources of biological form have been employed to
counter two very different faces of the same global capitalist system suggests that
the time has indeed come for considering whether the transformations needed
today will come from an alterity devoid of all content and actuality or through
resisting form with form, so as to make them transform.
As for the problem of whether neurophilosophy is at bottom ethnocentric, this
much should be said: even if we refuse to believe that it is impossible to distinguish
between what today remains capable of sociality and historicity and what has been
reduced to unqualified, “bare” life by the present global order, the vulnerability of
everyone to this latter violence indeed makes our biological existence our most
immediate common bond. So discovering that, outside its irreparable destruction,
the neural part of us is never denuded of what, for a long time and until recently,
seemed our eminently social capacities for self-formation and transformation ought
to allow us to believe once more in the possibility of political collectivity beyond
imperial and capitalist order. The brain may offer us, as Malabou says, “the image
of another world to come,” one in which forms press onto forms until they collapse
in on themselves, have their elements pushed to their margins until these break,
and then draw back in and recongeal, the stamp of the others now on them, before
pushing back on each other once more; a world in which the irresolvable conflict
of the brain would bring about paradoxically divided unities and the permanent
revolution of their constant overturning.

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