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Sois mon corps: Une lecture contemporaine de la domination et de la servitude chez Hegel

Malabou’s parts of the book have been translated into English as ‘“You Be My Body for Me”: Body, Shape and Plasticity in Hegel's Phenomenology Of Spirit’, in Michael Baur and Stephen Houlgate, eds, A Companion to Hegel, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2011, pp. 611–640. ISBN 140517076X4.

Malabou responds to Butler’s argument that in Hegel’s master/slave dialectics, the master's injunction to the slave is: "You be my body for me". Situating Butler’s interpretation alongside those by Kojève and Derrida, Malabou argues that Hegel’s text is not a neo-Platonic ‘devalorization’ of the body, but rather a demonstration of the impossibility of auto-affection. Hegel shows that ‘hetero-affection’ is constitutive of subjectivity. This leads to a discussion of ‘plasticity’ as the subject’s ability to give and to receive form. Is there a concept of the body in dialectics, or does the body always appear through its dialectical disavowal?