Catherine Malabou, "Stop Thief!: Anarchism and Philosophy" (Polity Books, 2023)
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Why do many philosophers value anarchy but avoid calling themselves anarchists?
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Hello and welcome to New Books in Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Sarah Tayson, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Carrie Fichtor, Robert Talise, and Malcolm Keiday. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Catherine Malibu, professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. Her book, Stop Thief, Anarchism and Philosophy, is just out from Polity Books. Why do so many philosophers value anarchy but refuse to call themselves anarchists? Why don't philosophers draw on the classical anarchist tradition?
How can we think de facto anarchism is distinct from dawning anarchism? What is at stake in doing so? Does philosophy need anarchism? To answer these questions, Instop Thief, Malibu reads submerged counter revolutionary themes in the texts of several key philosophical thinkers. By doing so, she helps us understand the ways in which philosophy has left anarchy unthought, while also stealing from it and disavowing it. What emerges in Malibu's analysis is the importance of the nongovernable, not just as a problem for philosophy, but as what opens towards other ways of sharing, acting, and thinking. Catherine Malibu, welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
Hello. Good evening. Thank you for having me. I'm very honored and very pleased to be to do this podcast. So thank you.
Yeah, me too. I'm so excited to talk about this book. Um So will you start off by telling us a bit about your background as a philosopher and how you came to write on anarchism?
Um well I I I have a background in continental philosophy. Start of course I started my studies in France at Ecole Normale Superior and then I wrote my thesis under Derrida's supervision on Hegel and this is uh where I discovered this concept of plasticity. That is very seldom in Hegel, but I transformed it into a hermeneutical key. And then I got interested in the brain. When I discovered that in fact plasticity was also a central concept in neurology. And for that reason, I needed to expand my horizons because France was not really I mean, the philosophy departments were not really welcoming for that kind of research. So, um this is when I started traveling to the US, getting many visiting professorships here and there, and then I got my job at Kingston.
and then at UCI. So I have a kind of uh exiles trajectory. Uh and uh yes. So uh about the end of your question, how did I end up working working on an anarchist? In fact, this thread of plasticity is what guided me all the time throughout all these years.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why do many philosophers value anarchy but avoid calling themselves anarchists?
0:00–5:21
2
How did Catherine Malabou’s background in continental philosophy lead her to write on anarchism?
5:21–11:14
3
What does Aristotle’s politics reveal about the tension between democracy and anarchy?
11:14–15:31
4
Why does Malabou focus on six thinkers (Schürmann, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Agamben, Rancière) to expose anti‑anarchist currents?
15:31–22:01
5
How does the concept of the ‘non‑governable’ differ from ‘ungovernable’ in her analysis?
22:01–28:36
6
Why is the experience of anarchism described as traumatic and what examples illustrate this?
28:36–34:17
7
What future directions does Malabou envision for a philosophy of anarchism and its relation to heteronormativity?
34:17–39:43
8
How does the conversation conclude on the possibility of a new, non‑mastering form of politics?
39:43–44:57
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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