Nier la continuité du biologique au culturel – si l'on fait de la plasticité un fil directeur – est impossible et philosophiquement intenable.

This second of two chapters on neurological transformations of the human will focus on epigenesis, a particularly fruitful notion for the elaboration of a non-reductive materialist account of the self. At the end of the previous chapter I drew a distinction between the mind–brain problem and the self–brain problem; in the present chapter I will take up that distinction in order to pursue the question of the identity of self (rather than the mind or brain) over time. In the previous chapter I considered how Malabou can overcome the tethering of the question of humanity as such to the possession of determinate capacities or qualities; in this chapter I move with Malabou beyond the question of narrow host capacities and towards an ecological account of the self as neither merely neuronal nor conceived apart from the neuronal.

In her 2014 Avant demain Malabou continues to elaborate a nonreductive account of the human being. Whereas previously she was happy to own the label of materialism, she now distances herself from the term altogether, preferring rather to stress the affinities between her own thought and the concerns of speculative realism: ‘Realism is a way out of the dilemma between materialism and idealism. Sartre said it already: “I am neither an idealist nor a materialist, I am a realist”’ (PLR). In contrast to both idealism and materialism, she insists, realism does not depend on the subject/object dichotomy which it is part of the purpose of Avant demain to move beyond.