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

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?