Catherine Malabou

Catherine Malabou (; born 18 June 1959) is a French philosopher. She is a professor at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University, at the European Graduate School, and in the department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, a position formerly held by Jacques Derrida.

Education Malabou graduated from the École Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines (Fontenay-Saint-Cloud). Her agrégation and doctorate were obtained, under the supervision of Jacques Derrida, from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Her dissertation became the book L'Avenir de Hegel: Plasticité, Temporalité, Dialectique (1996).

Work Central to Malabou's philosophy is the concept of "plasticity", which she derives in part from the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, but also from medical science, for example, from work on stem cells and from the concept of neuroplasticity. In 1999, Malabou published Voyager avec Jacques Derrida – La Contre-allée, co-authored with Derrida. Her book, Les nouveaux blessés (2007), concerns the intersection between neuroscience, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, thought through the phenomenon of trauma.

Coinciding with her exploration of neuroscience has been an increasing commitment to political philosophy. This is first evident in her book What Should We Do With Our Brain? and continues in Les nouveaux blessés, as well as in her book on feminism (Changer de différence, le féminin et la question philosophique, Galilée, 2009), and in her forthcoming book about the homeless and social emergency (La grande exclusion, Bayard).

Malabou is co-writing a book with Adrian Johnston on affects in Descartes, Spinoza and neuroscience, and is preparing a new book on the political meaning of life in the light of the most recent biological discoveries (mainly epigenetics). The latter work will discuss Giorgio Agamben's concept of "bare life" and Michel Foucault's notion of biopower, underscoring the lack of scientific biological definitions of these terms and its political meaning.

In May 2022, Edinburgh University Press published the first authorized collection of Malabou's shorter writings, entitled Plasticity: The Promise of Explosion (ed. Tyler M. Williams with an introduction by Ian James).

In February 2026 she received an honorary doctorate from Leiden University.