Reading group on Catherine Malabou’s “Destructive Plasticity”

Catherine Malabou is mostly known as the philosopher of plasticity, a concept she drew mainly from her groundbreaking interpretation of Hegel. Not only “the nature of that which is ‘plastic’, being at once capable of receiving and of giving form”, plasticity is also the destruction of form as its non-transcendental condition of possibility. “Destructive plasticity” thus concerns the paramount role of death in life processes: in order to give and take form, subjectivity needs to “explode” from time to time and face its own erasure.

Itself a plastic concept, plasticity strongly informed Malabou’s encounters with some of today’s most pressing issues, like (among others) the neurosciences (whose plasticity-centred notion of subjectivity she showed as strikingly similar to Hegel’s), artificial intelligence, anarchism, feminism.

Our bi-weekly, Spring 2025, online-only, Monday reading group will explore “destructive plasticity” through a selection of texts by Malabou to be commented and discussed during six one-hour seminar sessions, focusing as well on a number of other topics touched upon by Malabou as plasticity-related (feminism, trauma, the affect, etc.), and on the applicability of “destructive plasticity” to cinema.

Sessions will be recorded, and are scheduled for 17h–18h (WEST) on March 31, April 14, April 28, May 12, May 26, and June 9. Please, register in advance. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing details about joining the meeting. Registrants will also receive access to the texts. Further details will be circulated in due course.

Organised by Marco Grosoli

Funded by the European Union (ERC, FILM AND DEATH, 101088956). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.