Bibliographic record
Abstract
I am interested in cases in which life’s very viability seems to rest on the destruction of what life, up to a certain point, has been. How can destruction itself be salvific? How might one save oneself, or be saved, precisely by leaving oneself, or by being forced or prompted to leave oneself, behind? As a means of engaging with these questions, I undertake an in-depth examination of Catherine Malabou’s hydra-headed conception of transformation: ‘plasticity.’ Malabou associates plasticity with the production of a ‘way out’ of constraining or subjugating situations precisely when these situations are characterized by an absence of a way out, yet often the subjects she describes as undergoing plastic processes seem worse off for changing. I suggest that this is because they undergo a form of change that is incompatible with the forms of continuity and marks of alterity (traces of the shaping influence of others and otherness) which characterize an alternative type of radical change highlighted within the continental tradition. Malabou, I show, relinquishes the resources she needs to think forms of change which would be radical yet salvific through her rejection of concepts central to Derrida’s discourse (the ‘trace’ and its variants). I indicate why the form of change the latter help render intelligible (‘autoimmune’ change) is central to projects of resistance, as these are construed by Foucault and feminist theorists who have taken Foucault’s key tenets seriously. I argue that this is a form of change Malabou’s theoretical apparatus must accommodate if its own emancipatory promise is to be borne out, and that, to reanimate its promise, we must supplement ‘plasticity’ with the Derridean resources Malabou casts off. Malabou’s own theoretical commitments, I show, constrain her to think this form of change for the sake of her framework’s coherence. Beyond this, ‘plasticity’ will only effectively subvert certain contemporary forms of power if its meaning is broadened in the ways I’ve described. To make this point, I consider, in my final chapter, how plasticity rejoined with autoimmunity can help us politicize depression when contemporary depression discourse (a form of power) does otherwise.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.259 | 0.095 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".