Every organic cell contracts habits, making contemplation a primordial bodily function

Evidence

A soul must be attributed to the heart, to the muscles, nerves and cells, but a contemplative soul whose entire function is to contract a habit. This is no mystical or barbarous hypothesis. On the contrary, habit here manifests its full generality: it concerns not only the sensory-motor habits that we have (psychologically), but also, before these, the primary habits that we are; the thousands of passive syntheses of which we are organically composed. It is simultaneously through contraction that we are habits, but through contemplation that we contract. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 514

Categorization

• DEFINE: Deleuze’s distinction between ‘habits we have’ and ‘primary habits that we are’ gives the reader a precise conceptual lever for separating acquired disposition (plastic receptivity) from constitutive passivity (the passive syntheses we are composed of).
• XREF: The ‘passive syntheses we are organically composed of’ directly parallels the reader’s ch 57 note on plasticity receiving and 63 on habit belonging to every organic being, not just humans.
• QUESTION: If contraction is what we ARE (constitutive) while contemplation is what we DO, this inverts the usual priority claim: agency may be grounded in constitutive passivity — a promising thread for the MOC question of what tips plasticity from screen to agent.