“Plasticity,” writes Malabou, “refers to an equilibrium between the receiving and the giving of form.” It rules out strong determinism, but is compatible with a soft kind of determinism which is naturally associated to recent advances in epigenetics and collectively constructed morphologies. Plasticity is understood “as a sort of natural sculpting that forms our identity, an identity modeled by experience and that makes us subjects of a history, a singular, recognizable, identifiable history, with all its events, gaps, and future”. Malabou recognizes its power to produce unforeseeable, catastrophic changes, as it can refer “also to the plasticity of gelignite, of what can at any time explode or threaten to explode, for example, the self-identity of the present”. She also introduces the concept of “destructive plasticity” to explain the process of becoming other when there’s nothing else to turn to: “Destructive plasticity enables the appearance or formation of alterity where the other is absolutely lacking. Plasticity is the form of alterity when no transcendence, flight or escape is left. The only other that exists in this circumstance is being other to the self.” Nevertheless, being other to the self still requires using the self as the original reference. Plasticity, as commonly understood by science and philosophy, is more a way of maintaining a metastable self through adaptative changes than a set of mechanisms for contingent, radical change. The point of The Thing is not that it becomes other to itself, but that it can freely mutate into (a non-subjective) you.
GERMÁN SIERRA
