On Plasticity and the active negative subject

 Performativity at the Dusk of Writing and the dawn of plasticity 

Unlike Derrida (and Levinas), Malabou believes that traces can take form. In Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, she outlines the historical metamorphosis of form from Hegel to Heidegger to Derrida. There, she reminds us that, for the latter, all theories about form (be it Form, Gestalt, eidos or morphe) are held hostage by the metaphysics of presence (Derrida 1982: 157–8). Malabou, however, advances a novel, post-deconstructive conception of form as essentially mutable. In order to do so, she revives, but also reconfigures, the metaphysical concept of plasticity. 

It is notable that, to support her claim, Malabou provides an example not from philosophy or theory, but from the plastic arts: that of the Italian sculptor Giuseppe Penone. Still active today, Penone was a member of the Italian arte povera (i.e. poor or impoverished art) movement that emerged in Italy in the 1960s in opposition to both European abstract painting and American Minimalism. Malabou interprets Penone’s work as being dedicated to ‘forming the trace, as if the trace were the raw material of an ultrametaphysical development of the concept of form and hence an ultrametaphysical development of the understanding of sculpture’. This ultrametaphysical conception, which Malabou refers to as ‘the other form’, is one of ‘absolute exchangeability’ or ‘ontological porosity’ (Malabou 2009: 50). In other words, it is characterised not by presence, but by plasticity.

It is important not to misunderstand this by concluding that there is nothing but text. The world is a function of language, but language includes a world- function; all speech constitutes that which it designates in the world, as a thick object to synthesize, a symbol to decode; but these objects and symbols present themselves in an expanse in which they can be shown, and this expanse on the edge of discourse is not itself the linguistic space in which the work of meaning takes place, but a kind of worldly, plastic, atmospheric space in which one must move about, circle around things, to vary their silhouette and be able to offer such and such a meaning that was hitherto hidden. (Lyotard 1985: 83)

‘It is woman who will be my subject’ / ‘Woman, then, will not have been my subject’ (‘La femme sera mon sujet’ / ‘La femme n’aura donc pas été mon sujet’) (Derrida 1978: 37 and 121). 

Playing on the double sense of the word ‘subject’ as both subjectivity and the content/matter of a statement, Derrida suggests that woman can only be defined as a negative subjectivity; her indeterminacy as coherent subject implies that she cannot be ontologised. However, this fact also enables her to disrupt the phallogocentric economy of truth. In ‘Sujet: Femme’, Malabou stresses the commonality between this non-essentialist conception of woman and the anti-essentialism of contemporary ‘postfeminism’ (Malabou 2014: 29) and gender studies (by which she intends a movement that began with Simone de Beauvoir and culminated in Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity). 

While Malabou acknowledges that both the Nietzschean-Derridean lineage and the de Beauvoirian-Butlerian lineage seek to emancipate women, she believes that in both cases the efforts backfire. Her argument is that the deprivation of essence constitutes a form of ontological violence. In order to institute woman-as-subject, Malabou adds the following third component to Derrida’s dyad (‘woman will be my subject’ and ‘woman will thus not have been my subject’): ‘woman negates this negation herself’ (la femme nie cette négation elle-même) (Malabou 2014: 29). In doing so, she posits woman not as a passive non-subject, but as an active negative subject. Anticipating her reader’s reluctance to accept this proposed return to dialectics post-deconstruction, she specifies that her goal is not to revive essentialism, but rather to develop a non-essentialist theory of the essence of woman. By the end of her introduction, the subjects of Malabou’s article emerge as: (1) the dialectical essence of woman, and (2) the dialectical plasticity of essence (Malabou 2014: 30).

In Malabou’s opinion, Nietzsche, Derrida, and Butler are all guilty of an ontological error: In short, they conflate Being (to on, Sein) and essence (ousia, Wesen). It was Hegel, Malabou reminds us, who stressed the difference between these two terms. In Malabou’s reading of Hegel’s philosophy, a subject’s essence is defined by its capacity to transform/be transformed. In her words, ‘essence is the past of Being, its originary power of transformation’ and ‘the plasticity of being, being as plasticity’ (Malabou 2014: 36, 37). These arguments made, Malabou may add a third moment to the Derridean dyad ‘la femme sera mon sujet’ / ‘la femme n’aura pas été mon sujet’ and complete the dialectic by proclaiming that: ‘woman negates this negation herself’ (‘la femme nie cette négation elle-même’). It is because of her plasticity that the (female) subject can negate the negation of her being and establish herself as negative subject. In her logic, to make oneself by negating a negation is the ultimate feminist act –

Giseppe Penone, Gagosian

With just one mention of the word ‘performativity’, Malabou communicates her rejection of the concept/theory. Plasticity, she maintains, exceeds the simulation of performativity, and provides refuge from the ‘violence’ of self-artistry. As a result, we may postulate that a feminism built on the theory of the plasticity of gender is not that estranged from a poststructuralist feminism construed around the notion of gender performativity

“Woman is perhaps only negatively defined, with regard to the violence that is done to her, to the blows struck against her essence, but this negative definition nonetheless constitutes the resistant root which distinguishes the feminine from all other types of fragility, of overexposure to exploitation and brutality.”