Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou

348 Pages·2015·2.527 MB·English

by  Brenna Bhandar, Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller

Plastic Materialities

Plastic Materialities
POLITICS, LEGALITY, AND METAMORPHOSIS
IN THE WORK OF CATHERINE MALABOU
BRENNA BHANDAR AND
JONATHAN GOLDBERG-HILLER, EDITORS
Duke University Press ■ Durham and London ■ 2015
© 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of
America on acid- free paper ∞
Typeset in Chaparral by Westchester
Publishing Services
Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data
Plastic materialities : politics, legality, and
metamorphosis in the work of Catherine
Malabou / Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan
Goldberg-Hiller, eds.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8223-5845-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8223-5857-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Malabou, Catherine. 2. Philosophy of mind.
3. Adaptability (Psychology) 4. Brain—
Philosophy. I. Bhandar, Brenna
II. Goldberg-Hiller, Jonathan
BD418.3.P53 2015
194—dc23
2014036269
ISBN 978-0-8223-7573-9 (e-book)
Cover art: Greg Dunn, Two Pyramidals, 2010
(detail). Enamel on composition gold; 18"x 24".
Courtesy of the artist.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments, vii
Introduction. Staging Encounters, 1
Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller
1 ■ Will Sovereignty Ever Be Deconstructed?, 35
Catherine Malabou
2 ■ Whither Materialism? Althusser/Darwin, 47
Catherine Malabou
3 ■ From the Overman to the Posthuman:
How Many Ends?, 61
Catherine Malabou
4 ■ Autoplasticity, 73
Alain Pottage
5 ■ Plasticity, Capital, and the Dialectic, 91
Alberto Toscano
6 ■ Plasticity and the Ce re bral Unconscious: New Wounds,
New Violences, New Politics, 111
Catherine Kellogg
7 ■ “Go Wonder”: Plasticity, Dissemination,
and (the Mirage of) Revolution, 133
Silvana Carotenuto
8 ■ Insects, War, Plastic Life, 159
Renisa Mawani
9 ■ Zones of Justice: A Philopoetic Engagement, 189
Michael J. Shapiro
10 ■ Law, Sovereignty, and Recognition, 209
Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller
11 ■ Something Darkly Th is Way Comes: Th e Horror of Plasticity
in an Age of Control, 233
Jairus Grove
12 ■ Th e Touring Machine (Flesh Th ought Inside Out), 265
Fred Moten
13 ■ Interview with Catherine Malabou, 287
Bibliography, 301
Contributors, 325
Index, 329
vi Contents
AC KNOWL EDG MENTS
■ Th e making of this book has been a collaboration of many who have
contributed time, money, and passion. We thank the authors for their
scholarly engagements that led to these chapters. In addition, we would
like to acknowledge the contributions of Denise Ferreira da Silva and
Bradley Bryan, who participated in a seminar with the other authors from
which this book emerged. Th at seminar, held in London, was funded by
the National Science Foundation of the United States, with contributions
from Queen Mary University of London, and the University of Hawai‘i
at Mānoa. We deeply thank these institutions for their generosity and
their trust. Courtney Berger and Ken Wissoker of Duke University Press
have earned our sincere gratitude for their support, advice, and encour-
agement. We sincerely thank the anonymous readers of this manuscript
who off ered intellectual guidance. Finally, we thank Catherine Malabou,
who met our ideas for this project with early enthusiasm and enduring
friendship.

INTRODUCTION
Staging Encounters
Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller
■ Catherine Malabou’s philosophical thought stages a new and restless
encounter with form and so transforms the possibilities of philosophy
for thinking contemporary politics, law, and justice. In a series of books,
most of which have been recently translated into En glish, she has pio-
neered a distinctive mode of reading the Continental philosophical tra-
dition, revealing a new materialism that survives and brings to restored
relevance Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, Irigaray, Deleuze, Foucault, and
Freud, among others. Traversing the philosophical groundwork of these
thinkers, Malabou uncovers and exposes elements of their work that
metabolize and metamorphosize concepts and logics that otherwise ap-
pear to be unmoving, if not static. Th e restless form that survives philo-
sophical critique, which she explores with her signature concept of plas-
ticity, has its material counterparts in socioeconomic structures such as
neoliberal capitalism, the science of neurobiology, the theory and prac-
tice of psychoanalysis, the experience and expression of subjectivity and
identity, and the po liti cal or ga ni za tion of sovereignty. Oriented fi rmly
against the naturalization of these enterprises, Malabou asks us instead
to see each institution engaged with a kind of immanent thought that
materially grounds its potential metamorphoses. Th e form of thought
today, she argues, is ontologically plastic; self- transformation is built
into our bodies, it suff uses our possible readings of philosophy, and it
promises us new perspectives on po liti cal and social change.
De cades after a Continental turn away from structuralism, Malabou’s
scholarship invites us to imagine what we might gain by reconceptualiz-
ing form and bringing it back into philosophical and po liti cal grammar.
In this new metamorphic structuralism,1 might we fi nd an emergent