»On Destructive Plasticity«: A Workshop with Catherine Malabou on 14 November 2024
The term »plasticity« was coined by the French philosopher Catherine Malabou, which enables us to comprehend the processes of subjectification beyond the dualism of receptivity and activity, still predominant in philosophy, as a simultaneous process of receiving and giving form. Malabou's understanding of plasticity is decidedly located at the interface between philosophy and neuroscience and contains both discursive and concrete material dimensions. On 14 November 2024, the Research Training Group Media Anthropology invites you to a hybrid workshop with the French philosopher from 15:00 to 17:30.
»In her essay The Ontology of the Accident» (2009) Malabou confronts this positive capacity of plasticity with a specific negativity: destructive or explosive plasticity. The philosopher includes such heterogeneous phenomena as war trauma, brain injuries, as well as ageing and sudden radical changes in identity. Destructive plasticity stands for a kind of metamorphosis of the subject's identity, which, according to Malabou, represents a challenge for philosophical thinking: on the one hand, it confronts the subject with a radical outside ("accident" both as chance and destructive incident), and, on the other hand, these metamorphoses leave no scar that points back to the destroyed identity as a trace. Nevertheless, according to Malabou, "a form [is] born of the accident, born by accident, a kind of accident."
Together with Catherine Malabou, the workshop will discuss the question of how it is even possible to theoretically approach the phenomena of explosive plasticity. From a media-philosophical perspective, the question of what role media in general and aesthetic media in particular play in the visualisation of experiences of destructive plasticity is of interest.
The hybrid workshop can be attended both via video conference and on site in the lounge of the University Library (Steubenstraße 6). Prerequisite for participation is the prior reading of the essay, which will be made available after registration. The workshop will be held in English.
Please register by email by 8 November 2024 to: laurien.simon.wuest[at]uni-weimar.de
Contact persons:
Vanessa Franke: vanessa.franke[at]uni-weimar.de
Laurien Wüst: laurien.simon.wuest[at]uni-weimar.de