What do you think?
Rate this book
Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture
Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction
Catherine Malabou is a former student and collaborator of Jacques Derrida, and her work has found an early, eager audience among English-speaking readers, especially for its progressive rethinking of postmodern, Derridean critique. Building on her notion of plasticity, a term she originally borrowed from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and adapted to a reading of the philosopher's own work, Malabou transforms our understanding of the political and the religious, revealing the inherently malleable nature of these concepts and their openness to positive reinvention.
Collection: Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture
In French, to describe something as plastic is to recognize both its flexibility and its explosiveness—its capacity not only to receive and give form, but to annihilate it as well. After defining plasticity in terms of its active embodiments, Malabou applies the notion to the work of Hegel, Heidegger, Levinas, Levi-Strauss, Freud, and Derrida, recasting their writing as a process of change, rather than mediation, between dialectic and deconstruction. Malabou contrasts plasticity against the graphic element of Derrida's work and the notion of trace in Derrida and Levinas, arguing that plasticity refers to sculptural forms that accommodate or express a trace. She then expands this analysis to the realms of politics and religion, claiming against Derrida that "the event" of justice and democracy is not fixed but can be shaped by human action.
Collection: Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture
- GenresPhilosophy
136 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2004
8 people are currently reading
251 people want to read
About the author
Catherine Malabou
60 books125 followersCatherine 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
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
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
February 8, 2023
This work, as with Malabou's interpretations of Hegel, Kant, and Heidegger (and especially the latter), is acceptable within its own, self-(in)forming plastic context. But in relation to the larger context of thought? While Malabou may claim the desire to "change" or "transform" how these thinkers are read and thought, her standpoint remains, all too often, mis(in)formed. And this work, with its take on writing and the trace, is no different.
In this work, Malabou disfigures Derrida's project, primarily the form or figure of writing and the trace, by means of a one-sided or reductive (mis)interpretation. She takes the trace to be counter to form, rather than seeing it as anterior to form, conditioning it as transcendental (which remains, paradoxically, an impossible condition of possibility of form). She views writing as a metaphorics of presentation, without realizing that it is always bound to a double movement which suspends the presentational inscription, marking it with the remainder of an insuperable absence. Essentially, it all remains far more complex than Malabou figures it as being (except where she complexifies what is rather simple, as in her interpretation of Heidegger).
The Hegelian form or figure of history has long since been shattered - dusk does not give way to a new dawn, but rather to a night which always remained behind the day. A night which is figurally refracted in the trace, in the presentation of an absence marking the withdrawal of what remains unpresentable (but which is not reifiable into the unpresentable). The dusk (or, perhaps better, the evening, au soir ) of writing only gives onto the night - the night which, as Blanchot has shown us, is not simply opposed to the day, but remains, invisibly, behind it, anterior to it. The dusk or evening, with the setting of the sun and the retraction of its light - this is not the "end" of writing, but perhaps its true "beginning," its detoured return to its "origins" (suspended, of course, in the infinite play of mimesis, which also underwrites and unworks the operations of plasticity)...
Malabou stages a mimetic agon in this work that is entirely fictional - a dream which she neurotically seeks to shape in the form of reality. This dream: writing is finished, and plasticity (which is not derivative of the force of the trace, no...) shall accede to its rightful place (as though there were such a "place" or "essence" - as though writing had not effaced this fiction by exposing its fictive form...). Derrida is behind us; it is my time now. A narcissistic phantasy writ large, this work refers to Malabou's own works incessantly, looking inward constantly, only reaching outside to affirm what it had already claimed as its own within. As though, once more, this "interiority" were not entirely metaphorical, completely void or empty, and thus an elaborate fiction (bound to (the metaphorics of) writing once more). But so it always is with narcissistic neuroses.
Do not be fooled by the games of the mad which take the form of clarity. Clarity int thought often bears the appearance of madness, rather than that of straightforward clarity...
In this work, Malabou disfigures Derrida's project, primarily the form or figure of writing and the trace, by means of a one-sided or reductive (mis)interpretation. She takes the trace to be counter to form, rather than seeing it as anterior to form, conditioning it as transcendental (which remains, paradoxically, an impossible condition of possibility of form). She views writing as a metaphorics of presentation, without realizing that it is always bound to a double movement which suspends the presentational inscription, marking it with the remainder of an insuperable absence. Essentially, it all remains far more complex than Malabou figures it as being (except where she complexifies what is rather simple, as in her interpretation of Heidegger).
The Hegelian form or figure of history has long since been shattered - dusk does not give way to a new dawn, but rather to a night which always remained behind the day. A night which is figurally refracted in the trace, in the presentation of an absence marking the withdrawal of what remains unpresentable (but which is not reifiable into the unpresentable). The dusk (or, perhaps better, the evening, au soir ) of writing only gives onto the night - the night which, as Blanchot has shown us, is not simply opposed to the day, but remains, invisibly, behind it, anterior to it. The dusk or evening, with the setting of the sun and the retraction of its light - this is not the "end" of writing, but perhaps its true "beginning," its detoured return to its "origins" (suspended, of course, in the infinite play of mimesis, which also underwrites and unworks the operations of plasticity)...
Malabou stages a mimetic agon in this work that is entirely fictional - a dream which she neurotically seeks to shape in the form of reality. This dream: writing is finished, and plasticity (which is not derivative of the force of the trace, no...) shall accede to its rightful place (as though there were such a "place" or "essence" - as though writing had not effaced this fiction by exposing its fictive form...). Derrida is behind us; it is my time now. A narcissistic phantasy writ large, this work refers to Malabou's own works incessantly, looking inward constantly, only reaching outside to affirm what it had already claimed as its own within. As though, once more, this "interiority" were not entirely metaphorical, completely void or empty, and thus an elaborate fiction (bound to (the metaphorics of) writing once more). But so it always is with narcissistic neuroses.
Do not be fooled by the games of the mad which take the form of clarity. Clarity int thought often bears the appearance of madness, rather than that of straightforward clarity...
May 29, 2022
Catherine Malabou is a French Philosopher. She is a professor at the Philosophy Department at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, she is a former student and collaborator of Jacques Derrida. Her work - on this book- focuses on plasticity - a concept which was originally built by Hegel in Phenomenology of Spirit. We start by looking at the conceptualisation of masks and how they relate to embodiment. She then crosses through a range of works by Hegel, Heidegger, Levinas, Levi-Strauss, Freud and Derrida to show us the state of being or ontological process of writing as plasticity or a procedural aspect of change, double negation and deconstruction (in which the kernel - so to speak- of change is already embedded in all that is. She illustrates it by first de-coupling form from Aesthetics or as she termed it by “deasthetic form” and then by applying it to non-artistic areas of politics and religion. She considers plasticity from a philosophical and scientific perspectives (from both ontological and epistemological approaches) - to find that plasticity overwhelms writing.
She then works to recast plasticity as both a process of temporisation at the heart of subjectivity (Hegel) and absolute ontological exchangeability (Heidegger) to conclude that from a scientific viewpoint the concept of plasticity acts as self-organisation, based on the organism’s ability to experience and modify experience, to “momentarily characterise the material organization of thought and being.” Boom! I think this can be beginning of a process that far exceeds writing. A previous understanding of Derrida, Hegel and Heidegger would assist prospective readers. This book gets a 4.5 stars from me and a recommendation (for those who love philosophy) to read it.
She then works to recast plasticity as both a process of temporisation at the heart of subjectivity (Hegel) and absolute ontological exchangeability (Heidegger) to conclude that from a scientific viewpoint the concept of plasticity acts as self-organisation, based on the organism’s ability to experience and modify experience, to “momentarily characterise the material organization of thought and being.” Boom! I think this can be beginning of a process that far exceeds writing. A previous understanding of Derrida, Hegel and Heidegger would assist prospective readers. This book gets a 4.5 stars from me and a recommendation (for those who love philosophy) to read it.
November 1, 2018
This was my first read of Malabou. I definitly did not get everything she is saying in that short book, but I think a got the general idea. Malabaou's plasticity tries to establish between the classical essentialist and the postmodern pure flux position of thinking. That thought is definitly worth tracing further and seeing how she diverges from e.g. Deleuze/Guattari. It seems like in her new materialist account there is no further "force" like life in Deleuze, but form transforms itself.
January 31, 2019
Maybe not the best choice for the first book of this author, though she could at least admit in the beginning: Don't start reading before acquiring knowledge from my previous work. Not understandable, ironically too plastic, makes you think that this concept is simply a bottomless pit.
January 12, 2024
Un libro interesante por las articulaciones entre la deconstrucción, la destrucción y la dialéctica. Algo pretensioso, pero bueno, vale la pena.
March 15, 2019
An extension/addendum historically (& in anterior absence) of ‘interpretive ontology/essentialism’; though not a simple containment, reflexive regression [while mediations between Heideggerian ‘death mask’], or semantic paronomasia’’. Would be interesting for Malabou & Braidotti to provoke ‘disjunctive holes’ in each other’s corpora.
A commentary that interjects between existence of irreducible being & an active presence, sein/seyn, existence and existent for Levinas (interpretive perhaps): ‘‘Everything that comes into presence arrives changed, substituting itself for itself. This is the original ontological phantasm. Presence originally exchanges itself in return for its modification (73)...Dialectical teleology can therefore be interpreted as a process of self-appearance of the self of the Self, that is, the production of its image. If sublation can sublate itself, it is precisely because in the end it sees itself and can therefore miss (itself) (77)...the fantastic is seen less as the main thread or theme than as a way of appearing of things once metaphysics has been fulfilled and superceded. Their image is double, divided, dissociated, dislocated, yet articulated’’(80)’
For Malabou, out of the necessity being finds ‘itself’ (memoir-esque -or autobiography, this question is contingent upon the thesis- tones are explicitly suffuse) poses claims/refutations to the central ‘motor-scheme’ of metaphysics (Being/being), a ‘schizology’ (‘an irreducible dialectic’) with relation to Dasein, Aufhebung/sublation, traces of a transcendent radical otherness in Derridean thought (& an ‘illusory’ exteriority, -M condemns the graphic model, the trace as ‘‘no longer a suitable scheme to express and describe such a mutability’’ (136); global capitalism modelled on onto-theological economy -exchange, circulation, valuation, a deferred gratuity, implying fetishistic inconvertibility (Marx); while enacting disappropriative theft [of fashioned beings, not of the ‘unfathomable’ capitalized, simulated, substitutive simulation of B(eing).
The critique, not dismissively/tangentially depracated as only this, resolutely compelling, ‘is’ especially pertinent (for ‘me’) due to ‘my’ opposing predicatory ‘conscious-aware’ justifications of formlessness over continual transmutations, an anti-essentialist position that could be argued to be non-’divinely’ factual without materiality – at this stage resides mutual embroilments, consider similarities between flexible plasticity & formlessness by presence-in-absence (both ‘by definition’ are incoherent, ungraspable except in passing, evanescent; persistent alterations). And so requires re-readings, reinterpretations, retranslations – that timidly represent this fluidity.
‘‘Indeed, it seems now that plasticity imposes itself, gradually but surely, as the pervading figure of the real in general… neuronal traces don’t proceed as do writing traces: they do not leave a trace; they occur as changes of form.’’ (139) – shots fired at Derrida’s classical monopoly (whether intentional or not) on deconstruction.
A fundamental plastico-philosophical-fictive ‘‘new materialis[t]’’ piece foreboding futurity, trace & form convertible, reconstituting, bestowing, dissimulating & destroying ‘itself’
A commentary that interjects between existence of irreducible being & an active presence, sein/seyn, existence and existent for Levinas (interpretive perhaps): ‘‘Everything that comes into presence arrives changed, substituting itself for itself. This is the original ontological phantasm. Presence originally exchanges itself in return for its modification (73)...Dialectical teleology can therefore be interpreted as a process of self-appearance of the self of the Self, that is, the production of its image. If sublation can sublate itself, it is precisely because in the end it sees itself and can therefore miss (itself) (77)...the fantastic is seen less as the main thread or theme than as a way of appearing of things once metaphysics has been fulfilled and superceded. Their image is double, divided, dissociated, dislocated, yet articulated’’(80)’
For Malabou, out of the necessity being finds ‘itself’ (memoir-esque -or autobiography, this question is contingent upon the thesis- tones are explicitly suffuse) poses claims/refutations to the central ‘motor-scheme’ of metaphysics (Being/being), a ‘schizology’ (‘an irreducible dialectic’) with relation to Dasein, Aufhebung/sublation, traces of a transcendent radical otherness in Derridean thought (& an ‘illusory’ exteriority, -M condemns the graphic model, the trace as ‘‘no longer a suitable scheme to express and describe such a mutability’’ (136); global capitalism modelled on onto-theological economy -exchange, circulation, valuation, a deferred gratuity, implying fetishistic inconvertibility (Marx); while enacting disappropriative theft [of fashioned beings, not of the ‘unfathomable’ capitalized, simulated, substitutive simulation of B(eing).
The critique, not dismissively/tangentially depracated as only this, resolutely compelling, ‘is’ especially pertinent (for ‘me’) due to ‘my’ opposing predicatory ‘conscious-aware’ justifications of formlessness over continual transmutations, an anti-essentialist position that could be argued to be non-’divinely’ factual without materiality – at this stage resides mutual embroilments, consider similarities between flexible plasticity & formlessness by presence-in-absence (both ‘by definition’ are incoherent, ungraspable except in passing, evanescent; persistent alterations). And so requires re-readings, reinterpretations, retranslations – that timidly represent this fluidity.
‘‘Indeed, it seems now that plasticity imposes itself, gradually but surely, as the pervading figure of the real in general… neuronal traces don’t proceed as do writing traces: they do not leave a trace; they occur as changes of form.’’ (139) – shots fired at Derrida’s classical monopoly (whether intentional or not) on deconstruction.
A fundamental plastico-philosophical-fictive ‘‘new materialis[t]’’ piece foreboding futurity, trace & form convertible, reconstituting, bestowing, dissimulating & destroying ‘itself’
June 18, 2025
Évoquant un masque à transformation tribale qui a des volets qui sont identifiés avec Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, ce compte-rendu relate une entreprise de la continuation « ultramétaphysique » d'une autre forme de pensée qui sera la plasticité—après que le savoir absolu a eu lieu, dans le sillage de la destruction et la déconstruction. La métaphore graphique de cette dernière, trouvée par Jacques Derrida, s'élabore en l'image fantastique de la philosophie émergente qui se transforme et se reengendre comme une forme et une figuration incorporées, élastiques, explosives.
Davantage aux interprétations très originales, ponctuelles et astucieuses de ces penseurs, l'auteure les nomme ses identités internes. Ils se promènent avec légèreté, parfois très loin de leurs topoi réguliers. Tel le Pot-au-Noir outre-océan. « Bonjour, je suis Hegel, je suis Heidegger », là où ils se donnent la main : après et avant l'histoire. Ce parcours s'est imposé pas à pas, dont la nécessité est démontrée avec la rare clarté et le style vif.
Davantage aux interprétations très originales, ponctuelles et astucieuses de ces penseurs, l'auteure les nomme ses identités internes. Ils se promènent avec légèreté, parfois très loin de leurs topoi réguliers. Tel le Pot-au-Noir outre-océan. « Bonjour, je suis Hegel, je suis Heidegger », là où ils se donnent la main : après et avant l'histoire. Ce parcours s'est imposé pas à pas, dont la nécessité est démontrée avec la rare clarté et le style vif.
July 28, 2011
I'm sure that this is a fine book for someone who has a sense of Malabou's work, but as someone who has never read her before this "critical autobiography" of her plasticity theory wasn't very clear. Also, one needs to have a pretty intimate knowledge of Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida (especially Malabou's readings of these theoists), none of which I do. Most of the book was incomprehensible to me, simply because I don't know much about her ideas and she doesn't lay them out clearly here.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews