What makes man exemplary is being an insistent accident, not his humanity.

Evidence

Just as Hegel’s notion of habit cannot be called anthropological, so his use of man as paradigm does not include an anthropologizing notion of substance. In truth, what is exemplary about man is less human-ness than his status as an insistent accident. If the animal is not able fully to present the genus, the flaw is not in the genus, because the genus will always be in excess over its individual way of being: rather it is due to the accidental nature of the example. Because the individual animal is nothing but a natural accident it can only respond to the genus in its substance by means of another accident: the generation of another animal. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 597

Just as Hegel’s notion of habit cannot be called anthropological, so his use of man as paradigm does not include an anthropologizing notion of substance. In truth, what is exemplary about man is less human-ness than his status as an insistent accident. If the animal is not able fully to present the genus, the flaw is not in the genus, because the genus will always be in excess over its individual way of being: rather it is due to the accidental nature of the example. Because the individual animal is nothing but a natural accident it can only respond to the genus in its substance by means of another accident: the generation of another animal. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 597

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains why ‘man as paradigm’ in Hegel is not anthropocentrism: humanity’s exemplarity lies in its accidental, contingent status.
• XREF: The excess of genus over individual recalls the reader’s interest in how universal structures (like neural architecture) always exceed any individual instantiation. — connects to: Human beings are processes of their own actions, not fixed essences — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1256; Man’s failure and self-distance are preconditions for any ethics; Anguish reveals that one’s original choice is unjustifiable and contingent — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1120
• QUESTION: What exactly does ‘insistent accident’ mean as a category, and how does the animal’s generational response (‘another accident’) relate to the plastic individual’s habitual response? Worth chasing how Malabou frames accident as the motor of substance.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 597

Broader Connections

• Human beings are processes of their own actions, not fixed essences #expands (0.80) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1256
• Man’s failure and self-distance are preconditions for any ethics #expands (0.75)
• Anguish reveals that one’s original choice is unjustifiable and contingent #complicates (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1120