Survival and speechlessness in Malabou: Oedipus or Eurydice?*

Abstract

How to speak of wounding, of survival? Regarding a new “recently adopted apocalyptic tone in philosophy” and the multiple crises of the twenty-first century this question, which has shaped Occidental philosophy after Auschwitz, seems to have gained increased urgency. In her book “The New Wounded” (orig. 2007) Malabou addresses this question of the (im)possibility of the symbolization of traumatic injuries. The paper develops Malabou's understanding of survival as dis-continuity and the problem of the speechlessness of the survivor implicit to it: What can, in fact, be said, when the “in-dividual” is suspended from the chronological order of time and its mode of survival consists precisely in this suspension? By also considering the work of Dufourmantelle and Derrida on this matter, I intend to open up a yet underexplored perspective on deconstruction's contribution to a thinking of survival.