The Plasticity of Form and the Form of Plasticity as Time: An Initial Reading of Catherine Malabou’s Hegel

Abstract

In the following article, we intend to examine the analysis that Malabou develops in her doctoral thesis on Hegel, concerning plasticity, time, and their dialectical relationship. The aim is to discuss the status of form without transcendence in relation to plasticity — a plasticity that thus renounces any abstract character in order to embrace and become temporality. Malabou does not separate form  from the receptivity of form, and this allows her to distance herself from the philosophies of the trace and the event, insofar as this receptivity of form is time temporalizing itself as that very receptivity. To do so, we will follow the dialectical movement of her analysis and bring into discussion several fundamental points, with the aim of showing the radical importance of this element that makes it possible to include temporality as plasticity, without having to invoke it as a transcendental moment.