Description:
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.Brief description: Clayton Crockett (PhD, Religion, Syracuse) is Professor and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author of Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and Event (Columbia, 2013 and Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism (Columbia, 2011); the coauthor (with Ward Blanton, Noelle Vahanian, and Jefffrey Robbins) of An Insurrectionist Manifesto: Gospels for a Radical Politics (Columbia, 2016); the editor of Secular Theology: American Radical Theological Thought (Routledge, 2001) and Religion and Violence in a Secular World: Toward a New Political Thdeology (Virginia, 2006); and the coeditor (with Creston Davis and Slavoj Zizek) if Hdegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic (Columbia, 2011). He is also a coeditor of the series Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture (Columbia).
Review Quotes: 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.--Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldeberg-Hiller "Theory and Event"