Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction

Catherine Malabou

Published by Columbia University Press 2009

Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing

Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction

Catherine Malabou
Translated by: Carolyn Shread
Preface by: Clayton Crockett

In the series Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture

https://doi.org/10.7312/mala14524

Overview
Contents

About this book

A former student and collaborator of Jacques Derrida, Catherine Malabou has generated worldwide acclaim for her 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 Hegel's own work, Malabou transforms our understanding of the political and the religious, revealing the malleable nature of these concepts and their openness to positive reinvention.

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 susceptible to human action.

Author / Editor information

Catherine Malabou is a member of the philosophy faculty at the Université Paris-X Nanterre and visiting professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her books in English are The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectic, What Should We Do with Our Brain, and Counter-Path, with Jacques Derrida. Her work mainly concerns articulating the concept of plasticity at the crossing of philosophy (dialectic and deconstruction) and neuroscience.

Carolyn Shread is visiting lecturer of French at Mount Holyoke College. She has translated both scholarly (Frederic Vandenberghe's Philosophical History of German Sociology) and literary (Fatima Gallaire's House of Wives, Marie Vieux-Chauvet's The Raptors) texts and has published articles on translation studies, feminist theory, and contemporary French and Francophone literature.

Clayton Crockett is associate professor and director of religious studies at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author or editor of four books, most recently Interstices of the Sublime: Theology and Psychoanalytic Theory. He is a coeditor, along with Slavoj iek and Creston Davis, of Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and the Dialectic.

Reviews

Peter Gratton:
transformative

Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldeberg-Hiller:
Malabou has provided a tantalizing glimpse of the ways in which philosophy at the dusk of writing must increasingly become our own way to recognize our potentials in an era of plasticity.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Foreword Clayton Crockett Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
Translator’S Introduction Carolyn Shread Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xxvii
Variations I for Jacques Derrida Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Afterword of the impossibility of fleeing – plasticity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	65
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	83

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 136

eBook

Published: November 16, 2009
ISBN: 9780231521666