Catherine Malabou is professor of philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London, and of comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. Her many books include What Should We Do with Our Brain? (2008); Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction (Columbia, 2009); and Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality (2016). Carolyn Shread is lecturer in French at Mount Holyoke College and teaches translation studies at Smith College. Her translations include several works by Catherine Malabou.
Catherine Malabou is one of the rare philosophers who seriously engages contemporary biological research in her explorations of human experience. In this book, she turns her attention to the core question of intelligence, and with spectacular results. At stake is the very future of human thought, and Malabou is led to reflect on machine intelligence for the first time, generating singular insights. As ever, Malabou's prose is precise and elegant, deftly expressed in Carolyn Steadman's fluid translation.--David Bates, author of Plasticity and Pathology: On the Formation of the Neural Subject In this remarkable book Catherine Malabou focuses on the transformations of intelligence as it moves from genetics to epigenetics to automatism. Historically grounded, philosophically astute, and engagingly written, this book is highly recommended for anyone interested in intelligence--artificial and natural--and in contemporary configurations of what counts as human.--N. Katherine Hayles, author of Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious