Plastic Scenes: Images from the Future

Abstract

In recent decades, plasticity has gained prominence across various disciplines—from neuroscience, biology and psychology to art and philosophy. Typically celebrated as a metaphor for flexibility, adaptation, and resilience, plasticity has been closely associated with life, growth, and recovery. However, as philosopher Catherine Malabou has shown throughout her work, this optimistic reading of plasticity overlooks the capacity for transformation that results not in renewal but in rupture. This paper investigates destructive plasticity, a philosophical concept that questions the limits of form, the stability of identity, and the temporality of becoming. Drawing on the work of Catherine Malabou, G.W.F. Hegel, Sigmund Freud, and Martin Heidegger, I explore how destructive plasticity not only reconfigures our understanding of time and matter but also offers a way to think beyond biocentric frameworks. By tracing the historical, etymological, and conceptual development of plasticity, the paper argues that at its core, plasticity is as much about vacuity (emptiness of form) as it is about form. The question at stake is not just how things change—but how they might be irreversibly altered in ways that defy restoration, memory, and recognition.

Plasticity has become a celebrated concept across various contemporary disciplines. In neuroscience, plasticity describes the brain's capacity to rewire itself, by reorganizing its functions, structures and connectivity throughout its life; in biology, the ability of organisms to adapt and change in accordance to their environments and internal needs; in psychoanalysis and psychology, it stands for the mind's capacity for the reorganization and overcoming of memory and trauma; and in arts, to the scope to give and receive form, present in diverse materials. In each case, plasticity is often taken to mean flexibility, adaptation, and resilience. Within the life sciences, however, the concept often acquires a more value-laden meaning, one that resonates with broader political and economic rationality. It is framed as the capacity of living beings to reorganise and self-manage in response to uncertainty, aligning biological processes with neoliberal ideals of productivity, efficiency, and self-regulation. Functioning, in this sense, is less a neutral scientific term than as a normative model of life's supposed duty to adapt and be resilient to the perils and aggressions of the external world.

Catherine Malabou's philosophy has given this concept a powerful philosophical and critical depth, asserting that plasticity is not only a constructive and positive capacity of biological organisms but also a destructive power capable of altering the core of their identity. Rather than an adaptive and integrative force, plasticity understood in this sense would be a process of total transformation, not just the power to reshape but also the power to explode, to annihilate a form so that a new emerges in its place. Her notion of destructive plasticity highlights ruptures that offer no return, wounds that time doesn’t heal. Through her analysis of neural damage, psychic trauma, and neurodegenerative diseases, Malabou looks at plastic transformations that shatter one's identity rather than preserve it. In this sense, destructive plasticity focuses on the opposite of adaptation, resilience, and integration with one's environment; instead, it explores the possibility of organisms, brains, minds, and spaces to enter into disruption with what surrounds them. In a form that makes them lose their sense of identity against their own surroundings.

This article builds on Malabou's insight but also departs from it. Malabou emphasises plasticity at the level of the subject—the brain, psyche, and body. By contrast, I argue plasticity must also be read as a condition of space, history, and collective life. Where Malabou limits plasticity to the transformation of organisms or identities, I expand it to include the transformation of worlds, environments, cultural forms, and temporal horizons.

By extending plasticity beyond the biocentric paradigm, I reflect on how it can serve as a conceptual bridge between science, philosophy, and art.

Two guiding questions organise this inquiry:

How does Malabou's notion of destructive plasticity challenge the dominant view of plasticity as resilience?

How can we understand and conceive plasticity not only as a property of biological organisms but as a condition of history and space itself?

By addressing these questions, I propose a conception of plasticity that is fundamentally interdisciplinary: a way to account for both resilience and rupture, continuity and loss.

Plasticity Past-Lives

The term plasticity comes from the Greek verb plássein [πλάσσειν]. It means, on one hand, the ability to change form and be malleable, and on the other, the power to give form and model. ¹ The path of ‘plasticity’ in Modern Languages, especially in philosophy, is debatable or, better said, itself plastic. In her first book, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectic, Catherine Malabou traces the word's journey from its Greek origin to its revival in France and Germany in the eighteenth century. Terms like plasticité and Plaztitzität first appeared in these languages in the contexts of art and sculpture. The term gained its “native land” in the field of art, especially in plastic arts, sculpture, and architecture, which developed alongside the emergence of art history in the eighteenth century (Malabou, 1996, 19–21). However, some scholars trace the term's importance beyond the Franco-German arts and linguistic exchanges of the Aufklärung. They point to natural philosophy and the work of the Greek philosopher Galen (129–ca 216), often considered the father of Western medicine (Hirai 2011; Hunter 1950). In his book Medical Humanism and Natural Philosophy: Renaissance debates on matter, life, and the soul, Hiro Hirai describes it as follows:

[Galen], by “using terms such as ‘mould (diaplattein) and ‘moulding’ (diaplasis) in his embryology, he formulated the expression ‘moulding faculty’ (dunamis diaplastikê). According to the Greek physician, this faculty or force, which cannot be reduced to the qualities of the four traditional elements (fire, air, water and earth), was responsible for a series of highly complex actions in the formation of living beings” (Hirai, 2011, 19).

Hirai makes a case for the equivalence of Galen's notion of dunamis diaplastikê to the notion of formative power [virtus formativa] as the Latinization of the Greek concept and holds that “during medieval ages the discussion of the formation of living beings and natural things was at the heart of philosophical discussions and Galen's notion of moulding faculty in its Latin form, formative power (virtus formativa), was frequently used in embryological discussions among medieval scholastics” (19). Following this possibility, the history of natural philosophy, and consequently the history of natural sciences and biology, would be a history of the concept of plasticity in-translatio, in the etymological sense of a being ‘carried across’ or ‘transferred over’ time. The association of the concept of plasticity to virtus formativa—the capacity or force for formation present in the matter—is at the heart of plasticity as it is understood in natural sciences, but also aesthetics, and the history of art. From this perspective, the birthplace of plasticity would not be arts or the study of arts, but the study of natural phenomena, rocks, plants, and animals, and the question of the emergence of life or animation from (non-living) matter, in straight dialogue with the problem of the nature of the faculty of the soul [potentia animae] at the heart of medieval scholasticism.

Aufhebung and Plasticity

The Problem of Inheritance and the Problem of the Future

Although in Malabou's challenging reading of Hegel, the meaning of plasticity as the spiritualization of matter is kept, the importance of the thinking subject is brought to the fore. Malabou's philosophy of plasticity builds on Hegel's concept of Aufhebung, or sublation. Hegel used this term to describe the immanent movement inherent in the world—the simultaneous cancellation, preservation, and transformation of things. For Hegel, historical change is never pure continuity or pure rupture; it is a process in which the past is both destroyed, carried and transferred over into new forms. Reading plasticity through Hegel shows that rupture is not an exception to history, but it's very rhythm. In an excerpt from the beginning of the long Preface of the Phänomenologie des Geistes, Hegel speaks to (his) historical time, on this very basis:

“It is, by the way, not difficult to see that our time is a time of birth and transition to a new period. Spirit has broken with the previous world of its existence and imagination and is in the process of sinking into the past and working on its own transformation. Although Spirit is never at rest but in ever-progressive movement, just as in a child after a long period of quiet nourishment, the first breath breaks the gradualness of mere increasing progress — a qualitative leap — and the child is born. So too does the Spirit in its formation, matures slowly and quietly into its new shape, dissolving one after the other the structure of its previous world, whose instability is only hinted through individual symptoms” (Hegel, 1980, 14). ²

In this passage, Hegel answers the necessity of the metronome of the world, which, through its ticking, sets the law and the measure necessary for timely action. Hegel's Preface was published with the first edition of the Phänomenologie des Geistes in 1807. This date coincides with the period of Napoleon's occupation of Prussia, the long Napoleonic Wars, and the culmination of France and Great Britain's economic warfare, marked by the signature of the Berlin Decree in 1906, in which Napoleon successfully proclaimed a blockade of British goods, monopolising trade throughout most of the European Continent. As is widely known, Hegel was in the process of writing this same book when Napoleon arrived in Jena during the Jena Wars and famously recognised him as the World Soul [Weltseele]. ³ At the same time, we enter the new world announced by the French Revolution, and the waning of the feudal remnants of the state it announced is both gradual and exhausted leaving in its trail a sense of detachment from the old political forms. Whilst this book was written more than two hundred years ago, the contemporaneity of its call is difficult to miss. Hegel is reannouncing a world transformation, one where the world is about to reshape itself into a new form. In Hegel's terminology, central to Malabou's philosophy of plasticity in the 20th and 21st centuries, the World Spirit [Weltgeist] is about to sink and descend into the past to work on its own transformation. While the process of the world's transformation is slow and gradual, involving the dissolution of previous forms of life towards new ones, it is simultaneously a dive into anteriority, a step back into the past in the form of the future to come. Put more simply, Hegel describes this anteriority as what both creates the possibility of the future and what must be overpassed for the new future to take place. It is a future transformation made out of the ruins of the past and the destruction left behind. The future is not a progressive adaptation of the past into a better, renewed form, but a process that incorporates trauma and perishing.

The Plastic Avalanche

Until this point, I have focused on the temporal dimension of the concept of plasticity by tracing its historical trajectory and its relation to the Hegelian Aufhebung, without delving into its concrete destructive dimension. As previously stated, the concept of destructive plasticity elaborated by Malabou in her following works, since L’avenir de Hegel, proposes a form of destructive, non-positive, negative plasticity that defies the unambiguous reading of plasticity as a constructive, formative, and positive force that works in favour of something. ⁴ In her philosophical work, Malabou frequently plays with the French term plastiquage, which carries the double meaning of both the characteristic of something plastic and a bomb or explosive. ⁵ Taking this semantic wordplay into account, in her book Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, Malabou explores this explosive and destructive aspect of plasticity. The power of plasticity [le pouvoir de plastiquage] “that houses itself beneath an apparently smooth surface like a reserve of dynamite hidden under the peachy skin of being for death” (Malabou, 2009, 9). The book deals with uncontrollable metamorphosis; metamorphosis which “disrupts the snowball that one forms with oneself [l’on forme avec soi-même] over lived time, that big round ball: full, replete, complete.” Bringing forward figures that “rise out of the wound” [qui surgissent de la blessure] “or out of nothing, an unhitching from what came before” (9–10). The argument traversing the book does not intend to oppose destructive plasticity to constructive plasticity, or to analyse the negative features of plasticity in the brain and in bodies; even if it does speak of both, the philosophical argument is, however, more subtle. Malabou reflects on how any kind of plasticity or transformation of form supposes a form of loss—something that is not retrievable. The focus on the clinical realities of neural damage, degenerative diseases, and psychic trauma, where either due to “serious trauma, or sometimes for no reason at all, the path splits and a new, unprecedented persona comes to live with the former person, and eventually takes up all the room” (9), shows this loss and irretrievability taken to a familiar extreme. Transformation in living beings is usually understood through the temporal continuity of a living structure, turned and curved inward, like a ball. This is how the term ‘plastic’ is usually applied in the context of natural sciences: the capacity of something to change and adapt while working under the rule of identity, i.e., while remaining the same thing. On the other hand, destructive plasticity, as proposed by Malabou, explores the possibility of turning and being turned into another without the possibility of returning to an original form, to the same identity. It represents the loss or the destruction of the cast. In a factory or design production, this would equate to damaging the mould that enables the production of a certain series, resulting in a series of ‘damaged goods’ or simply breaking the continuity of the production line. This is a form of metamorphosis that comes as a thunder, cutting one's life into two, either in the form of an event or over time, inventing the appearance of a stranger in the scene—an alter ego. It is the encounter with the accident, as Malabou writes in another text, “La plasticité en souffrance,” that defines plasticity in these terms (Malabou, 2005, 35). As an avalanche, this accident escapes total predictability, and through slab movements, metamorphic changes, and erosion, destruction arises, opening for a moment of absolute otherness in the landscape. It is the loss of identity in the form of unrecognition that is put into question, and at the same time, the assurance that there is a certain uncanny depth in the subject that never comes fully understood under the category of the first person.

Plastic Symptoms and the Blur of Internal Life

This notion of plasticity as a form of transformation that comes from within and splits the identity of something through its own destruction is in direct conversation with Sigmund Freud's hypothesis of the death drive [Todestrieb]. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud posits the death drive hypothesis, as the inherent tendency of living organisms to return to inanimate matter, working as a repetitive tendency towards death and destruction. It works not only as a principle of destruction and dissolution originating in the core of the living organism but as a counter-narrative to the organic teleology of progressive development. Exposing the fragility of form not through contingency or accidentality, but through the ineluctable return of a past that was never properly named. This return, compulsively enacted through repetition, marks a scene of destructive plasticity avant la lettre: a metamorphosis that preserves nothing of the original mould, and whose temporality is that of return to nothingness. It is important to state that, for Freud, the archaeological terrain of the death drive hypothesis is not only destructive behaviours such as masochism, suicide, and other self-destructive tendencies, but also an attempt to explain certain behaviours in patients that offer resistance to therapy by not remembering and unconsciously repressing traumas.

It is, in fact, the psychoanalytic tradition that will provide me with an entrance to plasticity as something that transcends subjective life, or which blurs the lines of the single individual. Freud adds another dimension to plasticity by theorising how trauma transforms and blurs the borders of psychic life. As said above, his notion of the death drive anticipates Malabou's destructive plasticity: a tendency not toward adaptation but toward dissolution and the return to inorganic states. In his Studies on Hysteria, written in collaboration with the psychoanalyst Joseph Breuer in 1895, Freud described how his patient, Frau Emmy, experienced past traumas not as vague memories but as sharply vivid images: scenes that returned before her “in plastic form,” intense as reality itself. These images were not simply recollections; they had the power to reshape her present experience, blurring the line between memory as an internal experience and external reality.

“In reply to a question, she told me that while she was describing these scenes, she saw them before her, in a plastic form [in the original Szenen plastisch— author's note] and in their natural colours. She said that, in general, she often thought about these experiences, and had been doing so in the last few days. Whenever this happened, she saw these scenes with all the vividness of reality. I now understand why she entertains me so often with animal scenes and pictures of corpses.” (Freud and Breuer, 1991, 67)

“Plastic scenes” is the term Frau Emmy uses to designate the irruption of traumatic experiences into waking life. These scenes appear before her with hallucinatory vividness—dream-images that press themselves upon perception with a force equal to reality. Freud glosses this account with a therapeutic aim: “My therapy consists in wiping away these pictures so that she is no longer able to see them before her” (67). He then asks her: “Why are you, yourself, afraid of these images?” [warum sie sich vor diesen Bildern so geschreckt?] (72). In Freud's method, the symptom is not hidden but instead offers itself to sight, to hearing, to reading: it becomes a legible disturbance. The symptom, then, is a paradoxical entity, a plastic medium—an intrusion that belongs neither wholly to the external world nor to inner life. It functions as a bridge, allowing the analyst to move from the visible trace toward the repressed unconscious content. Plasticity thus marks the bridge itself, the hinge that makes transmission between conscious life and unconscious inscription possible. It designates a liminal condition: at once stubborn and transformable, the scene mediates between psychic reality and analytic interpretation.

Later psychoanalysts, such as Sándor Ferenczi, long-term associate and letter correspondent of Freud, extended this idea by showing how trauma can materialise in the body as stigmata or somatic symptoms—a kind of plastic representation of psychic pain. In a text from 1919 called “The Phenomena of Hysterical Materializations,” later compiled and edited into English in the form of the book Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psycho-Analysis, there he analyses what he calls “materialization phenomenons,” somatic symptoms, stigmata, and bodily phenomena which he analyses occurring in hysterical patients as the realization “of a wish, as though by magic, out of the material in the body at its disposal and—even if in primitive fashion —by a plastic representation, just as an artist moulds the material of his conception or as the occultists imagine the ‘apport’ or the ‘materialization’ of objects at the mere wish of a medium” (Ferenczi, 1994, 96). The plastic scene of the symptom breaches the realm of the unreal, memory, trauma, and anteriority, challenging the mercilessness of reality. It demands remembrance, and because of this, it creates an erosion of space and time, and, in its extreme, it changes them completely. It is a different movement, from the plasticity of excavation and carving of space, which all things make just by existing. In the form of the self-contraction of all beings in space. This is the plastic dimension present in space that we usually take for granted and never think about unless we are doing a phenomenological exercise of reduction and concentration. Most of the time, we think of plasticity as a property of something either living or non-living and not a dimension of places.

What both Freud and Ferenczi reveal is that memory transgresses the limits of the internal individual life: it takes form, materialises, and alters the space of the body and the texture of lived time beyond the borders of the subject. Trauma returns in forms that cannot be simply erased or understood; it demands recognition and leaves lasting imprints. This psychoanalytic insight aligns with Malabou's notion of destructive plasticity: transformation that does not restore a previous shape but instead produces a rupture, a cut, a bruise in identity. What I want to emphasise, however, is that these “plastic scenes” also point beyond the individual psyche. They show how memory and trauma open spaces that reshape environments—personal, social, and cultural. Just as a patient's traumatic image reorganises her experience of reality, collective traumas reorganise social worlds, leaving behind new landscapes of meaning and possibility.

Sculpting

Heidegger's reflections on sculpture and space reveal another dimension of plasticity. Sculptural form is not only material but spatial: it delimits inside and outside, presence and absence. Space itself, Heidegger suggests, is plastic—it opens and organises the emergence of forms. Building on this, Malabou acknowledges the uncanny and disruptive qualities of space, where absence and loss become manifest. Extending her insights, I argue that plasticity must be understood not only as the transformation of organisms or identities but also as a condition of environments and collective worlds. In this sense, space itself undergoes plastic ruptures, reorganising the conditions of habitation. In a small publication entitled Der Kunst und der Raum. In L’art et l’espace, a bilingual German-French edition translated by Jean Beaufret and François Fédier, Martin Heidegger reflects on art, sculpture, and space in conversation with the work of the Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida. Heidegger speaks of the plastic body [plastische Körper], the sculpture, as something that embodies [verkörpert] something (Heidegger, 2007, 5). ⁶ I will stress here, that the definition of plastic used throughout this text is thought under the limits of plastic arts and particularly sculpture [die Plastik]. Nonetheless, the text traces important considerations to a broader reflection on the concept of plasticity and the conceptual limitations of understanding plasticity as a property of bodies and things rather than of spaces and environments. Heidegger starts by writing that while the mass of the sculptural body is made of different materials and moulded in diverse forms, its forming occurs through a delimitation of inclusion and exclusion [Das Gestalten geschieht im Abgrenzen als Ein- und Aus- grenzen] (5) of what belongs or does not belong to its form. Their formation and (in)formation are designed from the point of their limits: of what is inside and what is outside their sculptural bodies. And while the plastic body embodies something, the space receives it as a closed volume. Heidegger proceeds to question: “Does it embody space?” Or in other words, does it embody nothingness or emptiness? Is the plastic body a hollow vessel that absorbs spatiality? Does the delimitation of bodies, sculptures, lives, actions, supposes or answers to the same concept of space understood as a “uniform extension” [gleichförmige], “equivalent in all its directions” [nach jeder Richtung hin gleichwertige], possible to be measured and calculated but “not perceptible to the senses”? (5–7) The question of what space is, is not posed without thinking of what is or who is in space, or to whom the space belongs. The understanding of sculpture in the text is closely linked to the notion of plasticity, understood as the capacity to give and receive form. While plasticity proposes the transformation of forms and figures, the question I am raising here is whether plasticity is a characteristic of something or a capacity present in spaces. In the text, Heidegger differentiates three kinds of space that characterise the common understanding of spatial relations: 1) the interior of the figure, 2) the limits and enclosing of the figure, and 3) the exterior of the figure or the space itself. After this identification, Heidegger proceeds to question, “Are these three spaces in the unity of their interplay [in der Einheitihres Ineianderspielens], not always merely descendants [Abkömmlinge] of the one physical-technical space?” (8). The physical-technical space is first of all geometrical space, understood as an empty continuous that serves as a stage for the existence and activity of things. At the end of the text, Heidegger writes that which constitutes the common understanding of space, emptiness, “is a nothing and it is also not a lack or default. In the plastic embodiment, emptiness plays a role in the search and design of places [Die Leere ist nicht nichts]. Sie ist auch kein Mangel. In der plastischen Verkörperung spielt die Leere in der Weise des suchend-entwerfenden Stifens von Orten” (12). The space across its plasticity opens place to the emergence of things, it delimits, articulates, and enables the possibility for the habitation of all things. It is in this sense that “things are in themselves places and not only belong to spaces” (11). ⁷ The plasticity of spaces is the dimension of the emergence of all things from nothingness; it is the strangeness inherent to the inhabitation and cohabitation of things in space. In Malabou's work, this strange or uncanny dimension of space as a characteristic of its plastic dimension is also explored. In his article about the relationship between Malabou's philosophy and the therapeutic space (the space of the hospital), Benjamin Dalton states this by writing, “Malabou embraces space precisely for its strangeness: space's ability to make absence and loss manifest.” (Dalton, 2021, 196).

Plasticity is often celebrated as the power of adaptation: the capacity of organisms, brains, and societies to recover, to remain flexible, to endure. Catherine Malabou unsettles this optimism by insisting that plasticity also entails rupture and irretrievability, what she calls destructive plasticity. Her work shows how transformation can shatter identities, producing a future that no longer carries the form of the past. In this article, I have argued that plasticity must be understood even more broadly. Beyond Malabou's emphasis on the brain, the body, and the psyche, plasticity also operates at the scale of space, history and relations. It is not only organisms that are plastic; environments, cultures, and temporal horizons also bear the marks of rupture and transformation. Plasticity is therefore not only a biological or psychological property, but a condition of historicity itself: the way the past persists, fractures, and re-emerges in new forms that cannot be fully anticipated.

Three conclusions follow. First, philosophy can clarify plasticity's meaning across disciplines, turning it into a shared conceptual tool. Second, Malabou's notion of destructive plasticity allows us to move beyond the dominance of resilience, acknowledging the force of rupture and loss. Third, by extending plasticity beyond the biocentric paradigm, we gain a framework for thinking transformations that shape not only individuals but also worlds—climatic, cultural, and historical. Thinking plasticity at this broader scale allows us to reframe how change is understood across fields. In neuroscience, plasticity must not only signal the brain's resilience but also its fragility in the face of trauma. In climate science, plasticity can refer not only to ecosystems’ capacity to adapt, but also to tipping points beyond which environments are irreversibly transformed and become other. And in philosophy itself, plasticity becomes a way to think of time as both continuity and break, preservation and interruption. Plasticity, then, is not merely resilience dressed in new language. It is a way of naming the fragility of forms, the instability of identities, and the uncertain futures that emerge when both living beings and collective spaces undergo irreversible change. By recognising this, we open a language for interdisciplinarity that does not gloss over fracture but instead learns from it, thinking change as both continuity and rupture, both preservation and the possibility of something entirely new.

I will conclude this text by returning to the beginning and Hegel's image of the World Spirit sinking into the past. This is not a philosophy of progress but of a mode of historicity attuned with rupture and the unforeseeable folds of time. As such, it may offer a more honest language for our historical moment: a moment shaped not only by emergence, but by fracture, exhaustion, and the slow unravelling of the past. As Alexandre Koyrè writes in the article “Hegel à Jena,” the past traditional forms of a civilisation, when dead and having lost their value, become false. Discarding them, destroying them, and leaving again, recreating and reforming the content of this life, then becomes the philosopher's task” (Koyré, 1935, 427). ⁸ Following this line of thought, the task of philosophy is both to destroy the crystallised old forms of life and to generate new forms from the pieces of what was previously destroyed. Because of this, the task is humbler than it appears, since there is no new world to come—one must only learn how to reorganise the shattered pieces.