Plasticity and Residual Resistance. A Political Reading from the Thought of Catherine Malabou

Abstract

The following paper seeks to think, from the notion of "plasticity" of the French philosopher Catherine Malabou, the political and resistance –that we have called "residual"– in its contemporary temporality and
spatiality. To account for this objective, the article is organized into four central sections. The first of them
seeks to deepen plasticity as that instance that shapes the relationship between the future and time. A second
section, and in the context of Malabou’s linking to plasticity as that which fixes, dissolves and finally exploits, we will insist on life and death as a condition attached to plasticity itself. A third moment holds the idea that plasticity is returned to itself plastically, generating a circuit where what is observed is a substantive possibility for the thinking. Finally, plasticity is explored as an alternative of residual resistance (since it would always operate as a posteriori) to the politic, within geopolitics that is founded on the expansive drive of the superpowers and the predominance of violence.