Inside, Outside and Otherwise than Catherine Malabou's Thought: A Conceptual Epigenesis of Plasticity

Wormald, Thomas

Inside, Outside and Otherwise than Catherine Malabou's Thought: A Conceptual Epigenesis of Plasticity

Files

Primary wormald_thomas_phd_2025_thesis.pdf (1.52 MB)

Date

2025-11-26

Authors

Wormald, Thomas

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation provides what it characterizes as a conceptual epigenesis of the idea of plasticity. Plasticity is a concept that has ascended to prominence in contemporary thought through the work of French philosopher Catherine Malabou. In Malabou’s account, plasticity is a concept that is discovered in and developed out of the work of G.W.F. Hegel. From the margins of Hegelian philosophy, Malabou develops a robust philosophical materialism that integrates the insights of German idealism, Heideggerian phenomenology, Derridean deconstruction, contemporary biology and neuroscience, feminist philosophy, psychoanalysis, and anarchism with ‘plasticity’ as its metabolic, imaginative center. The question that originally animates this dissertation is the validity of Malabou’s origin story of plasticity. Without an epigenesis of the concept, it appears as if plasticity appears because of immaculate conceptual gestation. The dissertation offers an epigenesis of the concept as it appears within Malabou’s work---giving my own form and account of its development---as well as attempting to provide an answer to the epigenesis of plasticity prior to Hegel: that is, where did this concept become available to Hegel, and what is its own history?

Summary for Lay Audience

The idea of plasticity has been popularized in modern academic discourse through the work of contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou. Plasticity, in its most basic sense, aims to characterize and highlight a being or entity’s capacity to, at once, give and receive form. For instance, we characterize passive material like clay as plastic, highlighting its ability to be susceptible to formation or shaping. Yet, we also employ the same adjective to describe something active such as a plastic sculptor or plastic surgeon, naming someone who actively shapes or forms a passive material. Plasticity then interestingly enfolds or states apparently contradictory attributes or ideas as inhering in or being constitutive of the same entity. In Malabou’s account, she finds the idea in the work of nineteenth-century philosopher G.F.W. Hegel and credits him with its formal conceptualization. The question that prompted this research is whether or not there was a conceptual history of the concept prior to Hegel. That is, if we subscribe to the materialist position that forms—whether they are biological or symbolic, whether they are things or ideas—become, that is, progressively develop and differentiate through time and do not just miraculously appear, then plasticity itself must have its own conceptual epigenesis or historical becoming. The dissertation then is organized in two parts, one explicating the ‘internal epigenesis’ of plasticity—an account of plasticity as it develops within Malabou’s own work—and an ‘external epigenesis’ that seeks to provide a historical backdrop of sources and materials that influenced Hegel’s appeal to the idea of ‘plasticity’ in his own work which Malabou has identified as such a monumental transformation in the history of modern thought in terms of its rethinking of, but not exclusive to, philosophy, subjectivity, nature, politics, gender, aesthetics and Being itself.

Keywords

Plasticity, plastics, plastic nature, Catherine Malabou, epigenesis, materialism, Early Modern philosophy, Cambridge Platonism, German Romanticism, German Idealism, post-Kantian philosophy, 20th-century philosophy, continental philosophy, deonstruction, phenomenology, ethics, anarchy, politics, G.W.F. Hegel, F.W.J. Schelling, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Luc Nancy, Ernst Bloch, Judith Butler, Elena Pulcini