Catherine Malabou on Derrida

At the SEP & FEP joint conference in Manchester in September, Catherine Malabou presented two papers as guest speaker. Not knowing much about Malabou's own work I found her talk on Derrida interesting and unexpectedly relevant and pertinent to what I have been considering. Discussing the necessary and contingent, she argued that natural necessity is a priori posited, but the necessity of nature consists only in its facticity so to access the necessary we have to go outside the correlation. Absolute contingency is often defined as pure possibility which is a speculative concept of contingency that remains within chance. The transfinite is the impossible, it totalizes the possible. Radical contingency is an opening of reason that is transfinite which brings a notion of otherness that transcends the possible, or a radical alterity. She argued that Meillassoux cannot escape the fact that the contingent is for him stable where chaos is not disruptive and where the world remains the same. There is a plasticity of the transcendental and the significance of metamorphosis were everything becomes other than itself and where radical otherness can be accounted. Speaking on Derrida this otherness or alterity is an a-topic place that is irreducible and in need of construction. This gap, opening and origin is impossible to access as it is a non-rational other, it cannot be founded on rationality, reasoning itself remains contingent. But it remains possible that it could be deconstructed, but doing so calls for a new language is. Such a language can only be either one of two - the mathematical or the poetic.