ABSTRACT
Stupidity is on the rise. Even if you cannot quite agree with that, likely you’ll agree that talk of stupidity is increasing. And you may also agree that intelligence is increasingly hard to recognize in this age where so much information is so easily accessible on our smartphones—no wonder the humanities has long focused on deconstructing it, resisting its reduction to a singular, positive account. In Malabou’s three-part lecture on intelligence at UC Irving in 2015, she makes the compelling case that, after Kant, stupidity has in fact been treated better than intelligence by the humanities. In the first lecture, “Intelligence Versus the Intellect,” she argues that philosophy is skeptical of or otherwise unable to bring forward the question of intelligence, characterizing it in the inhuman terms of reduction and automation. As Malabou argues, for philosophy, “Intelligence, being blind to its own source, being incapable to render the reason of its own origin, cannot be the origin of reason. Reason starts where intelligence stops being a question. Reason starts where intelligence erases its own traces.” In other words, philosophy can only recognize intelligence—that is, give it form—at best after the fact, and cannot deduce its origins. We can see this in Kant’s definition of genius, which “deletes itself in order to appear paradoxically as what it is.” The transcendental is a priori; it has no genesis; it is itself without origin such that there is no more to say about it.
