Malabou’s Life Resistance » non

Malabou is most interested in the fundamental distinction between symbol
and life. Both the symbol and the symbolic have long had an important
role to play in fields like semiotics and psychoanalysis, not to mention
philosophy as a whole. The symbol is a concrescence of meaning. The
realm of the symbolic is the realm of language, the realm of
abstraction, the realm of linguistic universality. The symbol aggregates
and focuses meaning, abstracting it away from particularities in favor
of a more unified, formal point of focus. “Bio-” on the other hand, the
realm of material life, is often characterized in terms of its lived
particularity, in terms of an irreducible material condition.