Formations

by Catherine Malabou

Catherine Malabou’s elaboration of the concept of plasticity has made her one of the most innovative philosophers working today. Formations collects eighteen of Malabou’s early writings, spanning 1986 to 2003, within which her initial articulations of plasticity take shape.

Though Malabou might be most famous for bringing neurobiological discourse into conversation with continental philosophy, she has always maintained, as the essays in Formation make clear, that “plasticity” circulates dynamically within the history of philosophy. Across readings of Hegel, Marx, Derrida, Rousseau, Heidegger, Ricoeur, Plato, Aristotle, and many others, these essays highlight the deep entrenchment of plasticity within the history of philosophy.

Formations puts on full display Malabou’s associations with deconstruction, her negotiations with structuralism, her interdisciplinary investments in philosophical calibrations of literature, and the unique form of dialectics that will shape her later thought. A critical introduction by Adrian Johnston situates these essays within the contexts of French Hegelianism and Marxism, showing both the continuity of these early essays with Malabou’s later work as well as their singular contributions to the development of these still-relevant critical fields. An afterword by Malabou herself offers a biographical and bibliographic retrospective to these essays.

Never just an archive of precursory traces of a later project, Formations exhibits the plastic metamorphosis of Malabou’s own thought by revealing any oeuvre, including any translation or editorial arrangement of that oeuvre, to be a product constituted by its ongoing formations. In this sense, the title reflects one of the most enduring features of Malabou’s “formation” stands doubly for the rigidity of an identity and the processes by which that identity changes and takes shape.

288 pages, Paperback

Published July 7, 2026

About the author

Catherine Malabou (b. 1959) is a French philosopher. She is a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS and professor of modern European philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University, London. She is known for her work on plasticity, a concept she culled from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which has proved fertile within contemporary economic, political, and social discourses. Widely regarded as one of the most exciting figures in what has been called “The New French Philosophy,” Malabou’s research and writing covers a range of figures and issues, including the work of Hegel, Freud, Heidegger, and Derrida; the relationship between philosophy, neuroscience, and psychoanalysis; and concepts of essence and difference within feminism.

Born in Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria, Catherine Malabou began her advanced studies at the Université Paris-Sorbonne before attending the prestigious École normale supérieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud, where, in 1994, she submitted her dissertation on G.W.F. Hegel under the direction of Jacques Derrida. Her thesis was published in 1996 under the title L’avenir de Hegel: Plasticité, temporalité, dialectique (The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, 2005) with a long preface by Derrida, whom she would later co-author La Contre-allée (1999; Counterpath, 2004). Before arriving at Kingston University, Malabou became assistant professor at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre in 1995 and, as a frequent lecturer in the USA, has taught at UC Berkeley, The New School in New York City, New York State University at Buffalo, the University of Wisconsin in Madison, UCLA, Johns Hopkins, and, most recently, UC Irvine.

Catherine Malabou’s philosophical work forges new connections and intellectual networks that imaginatively leap across existing synaptic gaps between, for example, continental philosophy and neuroscience; the philosophy of neuroscience and the critique of capitalism; neuroscience and psychoanalysis; and continental and analytic philosophy (notably Kant). As well, her work is explosive and iconoclastic, shattering perceived understandings of Hegel, feminism and gender, and the implications of post-structuralism.

Starting with her 2004 book, Que faire de notre cerveau? (What Should We Do With Our Brain?, 2009), Catherine Malabou has argued passionately and provocatively for a connection between continental philosophy and empirical neuroscience. She centers her argument on a highly original interpretation of the concept of plasticity, an interpretation that she first uncovered in her reading of Hegel’s dialectic. Plasticity refers to the capacity both to receive form and to give form. Although the concept of plasticity is central to neuroscience, Malabou’s work shows that neuroscientists and lay people often misunderstand the basic plasticity of the brain, succumbing to an ideology that focuses solely on its capacity to receive form, that is, the capacity of the brain to be shaped in and through its experience of the world to the exclusion of its creative, form-giving power. In other words, the reigning ideology that governs both the neuroscientific community and the broader culture substitutes flexibility for plasticity, and flexibility, Malabou warns us, “is plasticity minus its genius.” The emphasis on flexibility also fits all too neatly with the demands of capitalism under neoliberalism, which demands efficiency, flexibility, adaptability and versatility as conditions of employability in a post-Fordist economy. The creative, form-giving power of the brain—its genius—consists in its explosive capacity, a capacity that unleashes new possibilities, and herein also lies the capacity for resistance. In her conclusion, Catherine Malabou writes: “To ask ‘What should we do with our brain?’ is above all to visualize the possibility of saying no to an afflicting economic, political, and mediatic culture that celebrate