Habit is what lets the subject know its own finitude and so be sane

Evidence

Since habit is the precondition for the existence of ‘self-feeling’, without habit there would be literally nobody to live or to die. Human beings are those who, in order to be, must observe that speculative clock which is habit, a clock which makes it possible to ‘see (what is) coming’, meaning that the end can be brought forward and, at the same time, postponed. The soul analysed in the early sections of the Anthropology, a soul not yet habituated, cannot see itself dying, and does not know it is finite: it is, therefore, mad. But the real soul, on the other hand, knows how to tell time (sait lire l’heure). — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 611

Categorization

• DEFINE: Habit defined as the speculative clock that temporalizes finitude — the condition of self-feeling itself
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s brain/plasticity theme: habit as the temporal scaffolding of a self — connects to: Habit is the precondition for knowing one’s own finitude
• DEEPTHINKING: Dense, paradigm-shifting reversal: that which blunts and kills is simultaneously that which makes a self possible at all — a genuinely sit-with-it paradox
• QUESTION: Is the un-habituated soul ‘mad’ only from the position of the already habituated? What does madness of the pre-habituated soul mean for plasticity?

Broader Connections

• Habit is the precondition for knowing one’s own finitude #corroborates (1.00)