?
Enacting the Contingency
This review is an attempt to read the main ideas of Catherine Malabou’s book Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality, with a particular emphasis upon the problem of the modifiability of the transcendental and the rejection of the a priori dimension of subjectivity within scientific and philosophical thought of a materialist orientation. Malabou’s thesis of the epigenesis of pure reason evinces the dynamical dimension of the transcendental, integrating structural and evolutionary conceptions of reason. Epigenesis secures the stability of the phenomenal world and allows for the possibility of a contingent metamorphosis of reason, thereby establishing an economy of transcendental contingency. In general, Malabou’s work has many affinities with recent phenomenological thought, although it makes few explicit references to phenomenological philosophers as such.