Plasticity: The Promise of Explosion

Catherine Malabou is one of the foremost, most innovative intelligences working in contemporary French philosophy today. Her work articulates a coherent conceptualisation of 'plasticity' by merging recent neurobiology and medicinal sciences with the history of philosophy and political theory. Across the essays gathered in 'Plasticity: The Promise of Explosion', Malabou carves a philosophical space between structuralism, deconstruction, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis and speculative realism. By demonstrating the plastic transformability at the heart of these disciplines, a change that always promises future explosion, Malabou, as a female philosopher, also articulates the need to 'change difference' within patriarchal concepts of tradition itself.

Catherine Malabou is Professor of Philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University (UK) and in the Departments of Comparative Literature and European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She took her PhD under the supervision of Jacques Derrida at Ecoles des Hautes Etudes. She is the author of Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains (Columbia University Press, 2019), Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality (Polity, 2016), Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience (Columbia University Press, 2013), Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (Polity, 2012), The New Wounded, from Neuroscience to Brain Damage (Fordham University Press, 2012), Changing Difference, The Feminine and the Question of Philosophy (Polity, 2011), The Heidegger Change: On the Fantastic in Philosophy (SUNY, 2011), Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction (Columbia University Press, 2010), What Should we do with our Brain? (Fordham University Press, 2008), The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic (Routledge, 2005) and Counterpath: travelling with Jacques Derrida (Stanford University Press, 2004).

Ian James is Fellow in French at Downing College, University of Cambridge.

Tyler M. Williams is Assistant Professor of English, Humanities, and Philosophy at Midwestern State University. He is co-translator of Marc Crépon's The Trial of Hatred (EUP, 2021) and The Vocation of Writing: Literature, Philosophy, and the Test of Violence (SUNY, 2018). He is editor of Plasticity: The Promise of Explosion by Catherine Malabou.