Catherine Malabou

Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality

Catherine Malabou, Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality, Carolyn Shread (tr.), Polity,
2016, 223pp., $24.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780745691510.

Reviewed by Christopher Watkin, Monash University

Some of the most exhilarating philosophical reads, as well as some of the most important and
memorable, combine three elements relatively simple to achieve in isolation but rarely found
together: sinuous and detailed engagement with texts and ideas, an authoritative and expansive
breadth, and a clear, concisely expressed main idea. This book delivers on all three fronts. Its
main idea is that epigenesis offers us a new way of understanding the Kantian transcendental and
a new paradigm for philosophy in general. Its breadth is extensive, ranging over Kant,
Heidegger, Quentin Meillassoux, eighteenth century biology, contemporary neurobiology and
the present state and future prospects of European philosophy. Its sinuous engagement comes in
extended discussions of Paragraph 27 of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and of Heidegger's
account of time and synthesis.

In her introduction Catherine Malabou explains that her book is about three related subjects, each
of which she introduces with a question. The future of European thought is discussed in terms of
the query "Why has the question of time lost its status as the leading question of philosophy?"
(1). The second subject, namely the relation between philosophy and science, responds to the
question "Why does philosophy continue to ignore recent neurobiological discoveries that
suggest a profoundly transformed view of brain development and that now make it difficult, if
not unacceptable, to maintain the existence of an impassable abyss between the logical and the
biological origin of thinking?" (1) Finally, "The third question concerns Kant's status. This is the
first time that the authority of Kant -- the guarantor, if not the founder, of the identity of
Continental philosophy -- has been so clearly up for discussion, from within this same
philosophical tradition" (2). The common thread drawing together these three concerns is the
Kantian transcendental or a priori (Malabou sees no fundamental difference between the two
terms).

In Paragraph 27 of Kant's first Critique Malabou primarily focuses on the phrase "the epigenesis
of pure reason". What does Kant mean by this in relation to the a priori categories of the
understanding? Is this a clue to the Kantian account of the genesis of the transcendental that his
thought owes us? After all, Malabou notes, the Transcendental Deduction fails to explain the
genesis of the transcendental as such, a lacuna with which philosophy has been struggling ever
since. Recourse to "epigenesis", she explains, allows Kant to avoid two equally unappealing
alternatives. The first is the idealist thesis that the categories of the understanding fit with the
objects of experience because the categories are innate, implanted presumably by some deity in
all human beings and fine-tuned to accord exactly with those objects. The second alternative is
the equally unattractive skeptical thesis that the categories are more or less arbitrary, "machine-
made" artificial constructions. In other words, either the categories are implanted in an utterly
transcendental and somewhat mystical preformation, or they are not transcendental at all. This
innate/constructed dichotomy is the first of a number of oppositions Malabou seeks to overcome
in the course of the book.

Malabou fixes on Kant's brief reference to epigenesis as a way out of this dilemma:

I shall push the Kantian thesis to its limit: what if, in the end, the agreement of the
categories of thought with the real were simply the fruit of biological adaptation, an
evolutionary process at the origin of the theory that some neurobiologists call "mental
Darwinism"? (34)

She follows the development of the epigenesis motif through Kant's three critiques, from its
embryonic form in the Critique of Pure Reason to its blossoming, in the Critique of the Power of
Judgment, into an acknowledgment that the categorical structures are modified upon encounter
with life. This part of the book is precise, sure-footed and authoritative: Malabou is at her
gleaming best when she is jousting over details of Kant, and she takes no prisoners.

She then turns to science. To be sure, one reason for Malabou's appeal to scientific theories of
epigenesis is to help her elaborate the notion of the transcendental she finds in Kant, but she also
feels compelled to do so because, for too long, "continental philosophy has cut itself off from
any scientific concerns" (140). She dwells on two moments from the history of science to
broaden and defend her thesis that the origin of the Kantian transcendental is to be understood
epigenetically. The first is eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of epigenesis, and the
second is late twentieth- and early twenty-first century epigenetics.

In terms of the development of organisms, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century biology offer a

dichotomous choice between "equivocal generation" and "preformationism". Equivocal
generation argues that life emerges spontaneously from lifeless matter (like flies from the carcass
of a dead animal) without rhyme or reason, and is summarily dismissed by Malabou as "a
theoretical monstrosity that warrants no further consideration" (22). Preformation is the theory
according to which all the form of an embryo is fully developed from its embryonic stage,
gradually unfolding over time according to the dictates of a pre-programmed "code" but without
being changed by outside factors. Once more, epigenesis offers Malabou a way through this
dichotomy without falling into either of its extreme positions.

Moving forward to the epigenetic revolution of recent decades, Malabou's position is once more
structured in terms of a false dichotomy, this time between the "cognitivism" of Jean-Pierre
Changeux and Paul Ricœur's account according to which the brain is "[nothing but] the substrate
of thought" (1). Changeux plays the skeptic insofar as his neural Darwinism cuts epigenesis off
from its transcendental anchoring, arguing as he does that even the truth of mathematics is an a
posteriori truth of evolution. For Changeux there is nothing in the brain that might correspond to
the transcendental. Ricœur, for his part, is cast in the role of the idealist, arguing that the mind
maintains a magisterially transcendental relation to the brain.

Malabou's way through this dichotomy, following an indication from Ricœur, is to develop the
idea of epigenesis as interpretation. Meaning is a game changer: "isn't meaning what makes it
possible to reassert the resistance of the transcendental to its biologization?" (99). If epigenetics
is hermeneutic, akin to the interpretative performance of a musical piece, then it cannot be
collapsed into a pre-determined score. For Malabou, epigenetics as hermeneutics "transcends
strict determinism and places epigenesis and the development of all living beings in an
intermediary space between biology and history" (89). Overall, the importance of Malabou's
engagement with modern and contemporary science emerges in her insistence that epigenesis is
not merely a new analogy to help us understand the transcendental or a new image to describe it,
but a new paradigm for philosophy (180), a paradigm which she unfolds in her critique of, and
proposals for, philosophy's future.

Malabou frames her account of the epigenetic transcendental in terms of "a panorama of the
ultra-contemporary philosophical landscape" (xiv), with the result that her book reads in places
like a philosophical manifesto. Her summary of its current state is not flattering, and she argues
that Continental philosophy remains incapable of knowing what to do with the Kantian
transcendental: "ought we to save it or deconstruct it, transform it or derive it, temporalize it or
destroy it?" (129). This impasse has issued in an unseemly face-off today between a hyper-
normative idealism that desperately seeks to shore up the transcendental, and a hypo-normative
skepticism that dances on its grave.

The cannons of Malabou's critique fire in multiple directions: "Destruction-deconstruction" has

become bogged down "the contemporary impoverishment of philosophy, condemned for so long
to poetic-messianic waiting" (184). As for "speculative realism" (by which Malabou means
Meillassoux's After Finitude), it is ultimately incapable of offering the slightest content -- be it
theoretical or practical -- to the idea of radical contingency. In short, nobody is answering "the
current demand for a rigorous post-critical philosophical rationality" (15).

Meillassoux's After Finitude occupies the skeptical place in Malabou's recurring

skeptical/idealist dichotomy (the idealist spot being taken -- somewhat problematically -- by
Derridean messianicity). Meillassoux's now famous argument about "correlationism" and its
inability to account for "ancestral" time are, Malabou convincingly argues, based on a
misreading of Heidegger. Meillassoux assumes that the synthesis of anteriority and posteriority
in Heidegger must be "necessarily related to a psyche, a subject or an 'I think'" (112) which, in
Heidegger, it is not. Meillassoux again assumes that the early Heidegger and the late Heidegger
are identical, missing Heidegger's own post-Kehre critique of the transcendental. In other words,
he fails to see that philosophy itself develops epigenetically (159, 181). Malabou confronts
Meillassoux's mistake with a lapidary question: after which finitude? (137).

Her own response to the crisis of the transcendental is to insist that "the relinquishing of Kant
must be negotiated with him, not against him" (15), for in turning to Kant's own account of
epigenesis we can find a way to think the transcendental that avoids the dichotomy between
idealism and skepticism. If, as Malabou notes, Meillassoux's After Finitude could be entitled
"After Kant", then Before Tomorrow can be considered as "Kant after Kant", or "the future of
Kant" (xiv, translation altered).

Malabou's three questions and responses can be summarized in tabular form:

Area of
Question False dichotomy Malabou's response
investigation
Hyper-normative messianic
Why has the question of "the relinquishing of Kant
The future of time (idealism) or
time lost its status as the must be negotiated with
Continental Meillassoux's hypo-
leading question of him and not against him"
thought normative factiality
philosophy? (15)
(skepticism)
Equivocal generation
(skeptical occasionalism) Epigenetics is more
or preformationism important than genetics
Neurobiology
Why does philosophy (idealism)
and
continue to ignore Changeux's "cognitivism"
philosophy
recent neurobiological (skepticism) or Ricœur's Epigenetics as
discoveries? "substrate" account interpretation
(idealism).
This is the first time that The transcendental is either
the authority of Kant innate and given
"transcendental epigenesis
has been so clearly up (preformation: idealism),
Kant is the epigenesis of the
for discussion, from or artificial and
transcendental itself" (157)
within this same manufactured ("machine-
philosophical tradition. made": skepticism)

Overall, this is a very impressive book. Like a virtuoso conductor Malabou brings Kant,
Foucault, Changeux, Meillassoux, Heidegger, Ricœur and others to resonate together in an
impressively coherent and broad ensemble. The book also tidies up some deficiencies in
Malabou's earlier engagements with neurobiology,[1] for whereas notions such as destructive
plasticity always rely on the good will of Malabou's reader to survive the transition from
neuroscience to philosophy, the case for epigenesis as a philosophical paradigm is -- to my mind
at least -- more robust and persuasive. It is amusing (and little more) to speculate on the extent to
which we can now talk about an "early Malabou" of plasticity and a "later Malabou" of
epigenesis. If such a periodization takes itself too seriously it will inevitably trip over its own
shoelaces, for Malabou insists that philosophical development itself should be understood
epigenetically (159).

Some readers may have relatively minor quibbles with aspects of the book: Has "ultra-
contemporary" Continental philosophy really "cut itself off from any scientific concerns" (140)?
What about Bruno Latour for starters? What about Michel Serres? Similarly, the lapidary
judgment that "Destruction-deconstruction has become bogged down in the infinite poetization
of a dreary messianic temporality" (14) flattens out the more nuanced (but still suspicious)
interpretation of the Derridean messianic we find in Malabou's previous work.[2] We might
suspect, in both these cases, that contemporary thought is being dismissed a little summarily.
Malabou is not alone, of course, in offering unfavourable and perhaps ungenerous readings of
those from whom she wants to distance her own thought, but it is still a shame.
More substantial critiques of Malabou's position will no doubt continue to emerge over time, and
here I will sketch the lineaments of only one such possible contestation. Malabou is disappointed
with Meillassoux's insistence that the absolute contingency of laws does not mean that they must
change regularly. "The reasoning is the least convincing moment in [After Finitude]", she argues
"for, after having enjoyed the thrill, it ultimately amounts to being content with the stability of
the world" (146). Beneath this disagreement between Malabou and Meillassoux, however, lies a
more fundamental shared assumption that threatens to undermine Malabou's critique of
Meillassoux and to drag her own position into the skepticism from which she works hard to
distinguish it. Meillassoux and Malabou both assume that, if the world were stable, we would
perceive and understand it as such, and that if it changed we would necessarily recognize that it
had changed. But would we? How do we know that the world cannot undergo hyperchaotic
change without us noticing? Unless the categories of our understanding and our memories are
exceptions to the possibility of change (whether hyperchaotic or epigenetic), then it seems hard
to avoid the conclusion that Malabou's superficial disagreement relies on a more fundamental
affinity with Meillassoux.[3]

We can further develop this argument in ways that put Malabou's position in this book in tension
with her own understanding of the epigenetic development of our mental apparatus. First, by
virtue of what necessity must an epigenetic development of the categories of understanding
guarantee an increasing approximation to truth rather than, for example, an increased chance of
survival? If the interests of truth and survival were at odds in epigenetic development, how do
we know truth would win out? And if we cannot know that it would, then epigenesis is no
exception to the skepticism Malabou finds in Meillassoux. Surely mental Darwinism will
privilege survival over truth, rather than the other way round. Secondly, even if it did privilege
truth, how could we know it? There is an inevitable boot-strapping involved in any attempt to
exempt epigenesis from Malabou's skeptical argument. The reasoning by means of which I judge
epigenetic development to provide a robust response to the charge of skepticism issues from the
very apparatus which is the object of the judgment. We find ourselves in the self-congratulatory
but ultimately fruitless position of determining whether our wristwatch is accurate by checking
that it displays the current time, a time we have just ascertained by looking at our watch. The
contention here is not over whether epigenetic development does or does not yield a non-
deceptive set of categories, but over whether we could ever know for sure whether it did or not.

There have not been many books published in European philosophy in recent years of which we
can say with some reasonable degree of confidence that they will continue be studied and
debated decades from now. I am willing to wager that this is one of them.

[1]
Notably in Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain?, trans. Sebastian Rand
(Fordham University Press, 2008), Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to
Brain Damage, trans. Steven Miller (Fordham University Press, 2012), Catherine Malabou and
Adrian Johnston, Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience
(Columbia University Press, 2013).
[2]
See Clayton Crockett and Catherine Malabou, "Plasticity and the Future of Philosophy and
Theology", Political Theology 11:1 (2010) 15-34; Catherine Malabou, Counterpath: Travelling
With Jacques Derrida (Stanford University Press, 2004); "Another possibility", Research in
Phenomenology 36 (2006): 115 -- 29.
[3]
I elaborate this "split rationality critique" in relation to Meillassoux at some length in Difficult
Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux
(Edinburgh University Press, 2011) chapter 4.

Marx’s Dyslexia By Agon Hamza MARCH 16, 2018

KARL MARX’S WORK confronts us with a series of philosophical, ideological, political, and
epistemological questions in the form of “difficulties” that concern the validity of his project up
to the present day. The Karl Marx bicentennial, a year after the 150th anniversary of the
publication of Capital, provides a good opportunity to think about Marx’s project of the critique
of political economy.

How should Marx be read today? Or, rather, which Marx do we need to read? The French
Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser famously periodized Marx’s work (a Spinozist operation if
ever there was). His periodization divided Marx into two distinct and opposing periods: the early
humanist and ideological Marx, and the later scientific Marx. The two periods are divided by a
break, which, drawing on the rich epistemological tradition of French philosophy, Althusser
designated as an epistemological break. According to Althusser, this break with Marx’s
“erstwhile philosophical conscience” enabled him to open up a new scientific horizon that
remains comparable to, and of the same scientific status as, mathematics and physics: that of the
science of history, or historical materialism.

While one has reason to be skeptical of Althusser’s ambitious claim, Marx’s critique of political
economy continues to be both philosophically and politically necessary. Moreover, it should be
noted that Marx himself regarded the critique of political economy as a scientific discipline and,
without the slightest modesty, described Capital, his major treatise on the subject, as a work that
is “without question the most terrible missile that has yet been hurled at the heads of the
bourgeoisie (landowners included).”

Determining the scientific (or not) nature of Capital is an intellectual task that far exceeds the
nature of this essay. I shall nonetheless present the following schematic thesis.

The critique of political economy undertaken by Marx is a unique intellectual discipline that does
not fall into any of the established fields of science, philosophy, or the human sciences. Instead,
Marx’s critique is a singular intellectual discipline that has effects and consequences for
philosophy, politics, and so on, without itself belonging to such disciplines.
Does this make Marx our contemporary? Can we simply read Capital as it is and use it as the
basis for thinking the politics of emancipation? Can we find in this monumental work solutions
to the antagonisms and contradictions of contemporary capitalism? Or, instead, does Marx’s
“contemporaneity” lie in the questions and challenges that he posed for philosophy, as well as
the conceptual and theoretical apparatuses he invented (his own “ways of seeing”)?

Marx is sometimes recognized as a thinker of 19th-century capitalism, and more exclusively, as a

thinker of European capitalism. With the transformations of capitalism, so the story goes, Marx’s
analysis has become obsolete. This is the historicist take, advanced by Marx biographers such as
Jonathan Sperber and Gareth Stedman Jones, which limits a given theory or work of art, or any
intellectual work, to the particular historical moment in which it was produced. Against this view
and in spite of the incompleteness of Marx’s project — its conceptual and critical “oversights”
— I shall maintain that through his critique of political economy, and particularly in Capital,
Marx nonetheless remains the thinker of capitalism as such. Marx remains the thinker of the
fundamental principles and elements of the capitalist form of social organization — labor, the
commodity, money, surplus-value, value theory, accumulation of capital, crisis — which
constitute contemporary capitalism, regardless of the shifts or alterations which may be
experienced from time to time during periodic economic crises.

Some theorists, notably Fredric Jameson, refer to the contemporary stage of the historical
development of capitalism as “late capitalism,” or late global capitalism, likely mindful of
Marx’s thesis from The Communist Manifesto on the global tendency of the capitalist form to
universalize itself. Marx was undoubtedly right: with the fall of “really existing socialism” in
1991, this thesis was realized and capitalism became a universal form of social organization.
Paradoxically, however, capitalism did not reach its “late” form in 1991, which still marks a
relatively early phase in its global development. It is perhaps here that Marx’s work gains its full
contemporary relevance, much more so than in his own time.

Reading Capital today confronts us with three difficulties: philosophical, economic, and
political. This tripartite relation, from the perspective of Marxism, determines the way in which
we reconstruct Marx today. For example, there are Marxists who read Capital with the emphasis
on the famous line from the Manifesto that, “capitalism produces its own gravediggers.” For
them, a crisis in capitalism is a crisis of capitalism, in the sense that capitalism produces the tools
for overcoming crisis. For others, Capital is to be read in light of another statement from the
Manifesto, the one about the permanent social revolution brought on through the historical
emergence of the bourgeoisie. For these readers, a crisis is a moment of internal revolution
against outmoded and inefficient forms of economic activity, but one that still ensures
capitalism’s survival, or its self-reproduction.

Which reading is correct? Perhaps neither. The far more frightening realization we have to come
to terms with today is that capitalism reproduces its own logic while running up against an
immanent limit. And yet this limit is neither socialism nor communism, but barbarism: the utter
destruction of natural and social substance — our so-called “commons” — in a “downward
spiral” that fails to recognize any “universal standards.” In this sense, the “gravediggers”
capitalism produces are gravediggers both of capitalism and of communism. For this reason no
emancipatory project can employ capitalism’s immanent logic in order to point the way out, or
patiently await the collapse of capitalism in the hope that we can avoid being dragged down with
it, or “drowned” in what Marx described famously as “the icy waters of egotistical calculation.”

How then should we read Marx? Here I propose a somewhat paradoxical thesis. Although Marx
was neither a philosopher, nor a scientist, today he remains more relevant to contemporary
philosophy than ever before.

The paradoxical thesis I want to defend runs as follows: Marx was not a philosopher and
Marxism is not a philosophy or a philosophical system. However, Marxism, understood as a
critique of political economy, has decisive consequences for philosophy.

This paradox takes on yet another layer, so to speak, with the following proposition: the only
way to read Marx is to subject his critique of political economy to a philosophical reading, while
letting go of, or dismissing, his “early period.” In other words, we should insist on a
philosophical reading of his work at the very point when Marx himself believed he had done
away with philosophy. Interestingly if we adhere to this logic then Marx’s philosophical works
— such as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 that Marx wrote in Paris at the
tender age of 26 — appear to be of little relevance to contemporary philosophy.

Marx had a very peculiar relation with philosophy. His thinking oscillated between anti-
philosophy, non-philosophy, and, as some have argued, an alternative to philosophy. Consider
three of Marx’s famous declarations or theses on philosophy, all of them dating from Marx’s
“early period” of 1845–’46:

1) “Every profound philosophical problem may be resolved quite simply into an empirical fact.”
(Marx and Engels, The German Ideology);

2) “Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as
onanism and sexual love.” (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology);

3) “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however is to
change it.” (Marx, Theses on Feuerbach).

What remains puzzling in each case is Marx’s dismissal of philosophy as a discipline of pure
thought when, along with the political revolutions of the 1840s, philosophy conditioned his
thinking of capitalism and his critique of its political economy. Furthermore, Marx was very well
aware of the abstract and somewhat philosophical nature of capitalism itself. Thus the relation
between philosophy and capitalism is far more complicated than these three theses suggest.

Philosophy has always had an interest in capitalism, although capitalism has no interest
whatsoever in philosophy. Can philosophy be of assistance to us, first, in understanding, second,
critiquing, and, eventually, doing away with capitalism altogether?
It is not difficult to declare capitalism as a non-philosophical, if not anti-philosophical,
enterprise. It is non-philosophical because capitalism as a social system of production has
abandoned any philosophical ambitions it might otherwise have had by declaring itself
utilitarian. Indeed, this is the ideological “truth” of capitalism: by declaring itself to be the only
social system that “works,” capitalism manages to represent itself in neutral terms. Indeed, such
is the extent of its domination that its social relations of domination appear completely and
unashamedly out in the open.

Louis Althusser, whose controversial reading of Marx I am drawing on here, believed that
philosophy could make a decisive contribution to doing away with capitalism. For Althusser,
philosophy was the corrective ingredient for reading and understanding Marx’s critique of
political economy, for gauging its true revolutionary significance. Critics might and indeed
have alleged that philosophy, for Althusser, was akin to a pair of rose-tinted spectacles that
enabled him to subvert the true meaning of Marx’s work and twist it toward ends that had little to
do with changing the world, and everything to do with interpreting it. No wonder his critics
labeled his reading of Marx an “imaginary Marxism.”

However, Althusser was far more sensitive to the substance, if not the actual letter, of Marx’s
works than his critics would ever give him credit for. For in arguing that Marx’s philosophy was
still incomplete, and that Marx was, so to speak, a philosophical dyslexic unable to discern the
revolutionary implications of his own scientific invention, Althusser was arguing something
fundamental about philosophy. Namely, that true knowledge is far from systematic; that it
arrives unexpectedly in moments we can scarcely anticipate. For Althusser, this “time lag” is part
and parcel of philosophy’s power, since Marx’s philosophical oversights in his time are the
symptoms of the insights he bequeaths to us in ours.

What philosophical insights? How can one correct the philosophical dyslexia that still manages
to afflict certain “Marxist” readings of capitalism? One possible approach would be to argue that
capitalism moves beyond philosophy, that capitalism’s productivity and circulation have
marooned abstract philosophical contemplation in the ivory towers of elite universities, whose
contribution to “knowledge” today consists of nothing apart from providing raw material for the
reproduction of bourgeois social relations. After all, doesn’t philosophy emerge at night, when
all other practical activities (politics, science, art, et cetera) have had to call it a day? And didn’t
Marx have to abandon every philosophical pretension in order to understand capitalism, which
he characterized as the most revolutionary of all hitherto social formations?

Although Marx’s intentions may have been to transform philosophical problems into practical
ones, and therefore do away with philosophy, in actual fact his intentions were reversed. With his
critique of political economy, Marx opened up a new set of philosophical problems that cannot
be confined to economics. In a certain sense, with the critique of political economy, philosophy
has never been the same. In the aftermath of Capital, the categories of ontology, logic, and
representation have taken on new meanings and been set to work on new terrains. Not only do
Marx’s discoveries shift the ground on which historical analysis can occur, but they also
transform the meaning of such analysis. After Marx, philosophy is no longer the same; there is
no “going back” to a time before, apart from with the aid of some “imaginary Marxism” that
would allow us to encounter dinosaurs in their natural habitat. As tempting as it may be to
imagine Marx as a bourgeois intellectual who, in spite of his great genius, was irredeemably a
“product of his time,” the challenge today is not to think “like Marx,” but instead to think
capitalism, and thus beyond it, in as revolutionary a way in our time as Marx did in his.

Agon Hamza is the author with Frank Ruda and Slavoj Žižek of Reading Marx; author of
Althusser and Pasolini: Philosophy, Marxism, and Film; and with Slavoj Žižek From Myth to
Symptom: The Case of Kosovo. He is the editor of Althusser and Theology: Religion, Politics
and Philosophy and Repeating Žižek, as well as co-editor with Frank Ruda of Slavoj Žižek and
Dialectical Materialism. He is co-founder and co-editor-in-chief with Frank Ruda of the
international philosophy journal Crisis and Critique.