Formations

Catherine Malabou, Tyler M. Williams, D. J. S. Cross

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781531513764
  9781531513757
• eBook ISBN:
  9781531513788
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory

Catherine Malabou's elaboration of the concept of plasticity has made her one of the most innovative philosophers working today. Formations collects eighteen of Malabou's early writings, spanning 1986 to 2003, within which her initial articulations of plasticity take shape.

Though Malabou might be most famous for bringing neurobiological discourse into conversation with continental philosophy, she has always maintained, as the essays in Formation make clear, that "plasticity" circulates dynamically within the history of philosophy. Across readings of Hegel, Marx, Derrida, Rousseau, Heidegger, Ricoeur, Plato, Aristotle, and many others, these essays highlight the deep entrenchment of plasticity within the history of philosophy.

Formations puts on full display Malabou's associations with deconstruction, her negotiations with structuralism, her interdisciplinary investments in philosophical calibrations of literature, and the unique form of dialectics that will shape her later thought. A critical introduction by Adrian Johnston situates these essays within the contexts of French Hegelianism and Marxism, showing both the continuity of these early essays with Malabou's later work as well as their singular contributions to the development of these still-relevant critical fields. An afterword by Malabou herself offers a biographical and bibliographic retrospective to these essays.

Never just an archive of precursory traces of a later project, Formations exhibits the plastic metamorphosis of Malabou's own thought by revealing any oeuvre, including any translation or editorial arrangement of that oeuvre, to be a product constituted by its ongoing formations. In this sense, the title reflects one of the most enduring features of Malabou's thought: "formation" stands doubly for the rigidity of an identity and the processes by which that identity changes and takes shape.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface: In the Usual Order of Things
• Introduction: The Taking Shape of Malabou
• 1. The Duplicity of Memory: Hegel and Proust
• 2. Images of the Elsewhere in Rousseau’s Political Philosophy
• 3. Literary Time and the Thought of Time: Proust, Reader of Ricoeur
• 4. To Paint the Sea with Another Sense of Direction: Proust and Elstir
• 5. Photocopies of Consciousness: Hegel, Copyright, and the Right of the Author
• 6. Speculative Plastique
• 7. Economy of Violence, Violence of Economy: Derrida and Marx
• 8. Hegel’s Science of Logic: Translator’s Foreword to the Preface to the Second Edition (1831)
• 9. The Times of Experience: Aristotle’s Style
• 10 .What Good Is It to Be Sparing of Life When There Is Almost None Left
• 11. From Pascal to Heidegger: Vincent Carraud’s Pascal et la philosophie
• 12 .Writing the End of Love: Proust, or Genre Put Away
• 13. Derrida’s Way: Noblesse oblige
• 14. Negatives of Dialectic: Between Hegel and Heidegger’s Hegel (Hyppolite, Koyré, Kojève)
• 15. The Metamorphosis of Constancy: A Reading of Nietzsche and the Shadow of God
• 16. Gré
• 17. The Ungraspable in Question, or Take to Dying
• 18. Dialectical Negativity and Transcendental Pain: Heidegger’s Reading of Hegel in Volume 68 of the Gesamtausgabe
• Afterword
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author