Omar Quinonez

Catherine Malabou’s work on plasticity represents a new encounter with materiality. As a paradigm for conceptualizing the nature of change in non-teleological terms, plasticity endorses a theory of becoming based on matter’s own malleability rather than on unrealized potential. However, notably absent from her work is any direct engagement with Marx’s historical materialism, other than encouraging a “re-molding” and “re-forming” of his thought from plasticity’s perspective. This essay envisions what such re-molding may look like. It maps a strategy by drawing on Malabou’s four aspects of plasticity (giving form, receiving form, explosion, and resistance) to trace the resemblance between plasticity and historical materialism. I suggest that labor, the prototypical Marxist concept, works plastically, building from the inherent malleability of the human rather than from pre-established principles. For the paradigm of plasticity, to re-form Marx, one must start with labor.

The influence of Catherine Malabou’s concept of plasticity has grown considerably. However, recent commentaries increasingly trace disagreements in the literature to Malabou’s own ambiguous uses of the concept. This paper weaves together these criticisms and places them in the Hegelian context out of which Malabou developed her views. Plasticity is Malabou’s argument for reimagining Hegel’s Aufhebung as a non-teleological view of change in which the “suppleness” of material plays an important role. As presented in The Future of Hegel, Malabou lays out her view of plasticity through the very Hegelian process of aufheben she is actively rethinking. Original lessons about change drawn from examples of material transformation are developed into an ontology of “becoming.” I argue that the charge of ambiguity in the literature stems from the lack of appreciation of this move from limited examples to novel ontology, something Malabou later acknowledged. I suggest distinguishing between plasticity and what I call “neoplasticity.” The former refers to concrete examples of material change, inspired by the plastic arts, in which the role of material suppleness is explicit. The latter refers to cases of transformation in which the role of malleability in the process of change is implicit and requires being considered in light of her ontology of non-teleological change.

Abstract:This article discusses Hegel's claim that nature is the idea (Idee) having become external (äußerlich) to itself. Usually taken to signal a type of limitation in Hegel's philosophy, the author argues that recent interpretations of nature's externality are not entirely successfully because they reconstruct nature by either looking back to logic or forward to spirit. Instead, the article offers an interpretation that starts off from Hegel's argument that nature is "weak" (ohnmächtig) as it is not, nor can become, thoroughly rational. It then traces the implications of this view in Hegel's inorganic philosophy of mechanics and physics. There, in a discussion that culminates with matter as fundamentally "brittle," a picture of externality emerges as the likelihood in nature of "deformed" or "damaged" determinations. What is ultimately unique about nature vis-à-vis logic is a setting in which partial rational determination makes sense at all.

This article suggests a frame for thinking together Hegel and Schelling’s competing mature approaches to metaphysics. It argues that both reject modern metaphysics’ belief that there exists such a thing as the “world’s ontology.” In their mature philosophies, Hegel and Schelling develop metaphysical approaches based on what I call the “accountability gap.” For Hegel, reason is a matter of thinking under conceptual presuppositions we come to know and evaluate in hindsight. Hegel gives up on the modern rationalist idea that reason can in principle account for what the world is like without introducing assumptions. In the Logic, he concludes that metaphysics should be reconsidered along the lines of normative authority by freeing it of the commitment to thorough accountability. I describe a similar process in Schelling’s post-1809 metaphysics. In his middle period, Schelling describes traditional metaphysics as unable to account for reason’s creative basis. Reason gets its bearings creatively in a way systematic thinking cannot account for from within. Schelling concludes that reason’s authority arises from “creative storytelling” and not from laying out the world’s ontology. This paper argues for an accountability gap as a helpful construct to draw out the stakes of Hegel and Schelling’s metaphysics.