Plasticity at the dusk of writing
Subtitle: dialectic, destruction, deconstruction
By: Catherine Malabou ; translated with an introduction by Carolyn Shread ; with a new afterword by the author ; foreword by Clayton Crockett.
Series: Insurrections: critical studies in religion, politics, and culture
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 96
ISBN-13: 9780231145244
Subjects: Derrida, Jacques; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, -- 1770-1831; Heidegger, Martin, -- 1889-1976; Dialectic; Philosophy, French -- 20th century
Work titles: Plasticité au soir de l'écriture.
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 tile 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."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: Foreword / Clayton Crockett; title: Translator's introduction / Carolyn Shread; title: Plasticity at the dusk of writing; title: Afterword: Of the impossibility of fleeing plasticity.