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Crosscurrents

Catherine Malabou and Contemporary French Literature and FilmWitnessing Plasticity

By Benjamin Dalton

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£95.00

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About this book

How do we engage with our metamorphic bodies and brains in ways which resist social and political violences and instead nurture organic forms of freedom, emancipation, community, and even pleasure and joy?

  • Explores how philosophy, literature and film can help us, alongside the life sciences, to understand the mutability and plasticity of the body
  • Analyses the contemporary French thinker Catherine Malabou’s philosophy of plasticity in relation to literature and film
  • Develops concepts of the figure of the witness and of bearing witness in relation to Malabou’s thought
  • Brings Malabou’s philosophy into dialogue with diverse critical contexts, including: queer theory and gender and sexuality studies; medical and health humanities; literary, film and culture studies; and philosophies of science and medicine

Our bodies and brains are radically transformable, mutable and plastic. From the neuroplasticity of the brain to the epigenetic malleability of our bodies and of all organic life, the work of the contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou invites us to consider our plasticity as both a creative resource and an ethical challenge.

This book brings Malabou’s philosophy into dialogue with contemporary literature and film. It reads conceptions of plasticity and neuroplasticity in Malabou through the mutant bodies of Leos Carax’s films; the shape-shifting bodies of Marie Darrieussecq’s novels and theatre; the terrifying, traumatic metamorphoses depicted in the fiction of Marie NDiaye; and the anarchic sexualities and identities celebrated in the cinema and writing of Alain Guiraudie. It argues that, in different ways, Malabou’s philosophy and literary and filmic texts develop modes of bearing witness to plasticity which can supplement, challenge and extend scientific understandings of biological plasticity, constituting ethical and creative sites of exploration.

Reviews

Catherine Malabou is our most important living philosopher, and this book performs an insightful intervention into contemporary film and literature using her notions of plasticity and witness. Dalton focuses our attention on French artists whose work we need to engage: Carax, Darrieussecq, NDiaye, and Guiraudie. An extraordinarily creative synthesis!
Two wonderful books in one: a concise and lucid presentation of Malabou’s philosophy followed by a series of illuminating dialogues between Malabou and four major, contemporary French filmmakers and writers (Carax, Darrieussecq, NDiaye and Guiraudie). Throughout, Dalton delineates an ethics of plasticity, revealing what art brings to Malabou’s thought, what Malabou can bring to the study of art, and what it means to listen, carefully, to the stories told across the sciences and the arts.
The depth of Malabou’s work and the finesse of Dalton’s peregrinations declare plastic moments that are just not products of investigations but intricate experiences of disciplinary conflagrations: films, stories, narrations, texts, philosophy, art, and the sciences in their variegated unfoldment. The book becomes its own witness and the floor for what I see as Dalton’s extraordinary reflections in positive plasticity. Reading Dalton is living in the plastic supplement.
Malabou repeatedly calls for changes to the way we relate to ourselves, to our bodies or brains, to each other, calls for new modes of belonging and organisation, and Dalton argues in this impeccably researched book that literature and film operate both within and upon Malabou’s work as the witnesses who heed this call. [...] Dalton’s book offers a major contribution both to contemporary literary/cinema studies and to the reception of Malabou’s work by taking responsibility for one of Malabou’s most fundamental questions: what exactly are we to do with plasticity?
Table of contents

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

Introduction: Witnessing Plasticity with Malabou, Literature and Film

Chapter One: Plasticity’s Storytellers: Transformation, Narrative, Witnessing
Chapter Two: Mutant Bodies and Moving Images in the Films of Leos Carax: Making Plasticity Appear
Chapter Three: Writing Mutation in the Novels and Theatre of Marie Darrieussecq: Science as a Witness to Plasticity
Chapter Four: The Destructive Plasticities of Marie NDiaye: (Trans)forming Indifferences
Chapter Five: Queer Plasticity in the Films and Writing of Alain Guiraudie: Ecology, Pleasure, Anarchy

Conclusion: Facing Transformation: The Ethics of Witnessing Plasticity

Bibliography

About the author

Benjamin Dalton

Benjamin Dalton is Lecturer in French Studies in the School of Global Affairs at Lancaster University. His work explores intersections between contemporary French and Francophone literature and film, philosophy, and the medical and health Humanities. He has published widely on the work of Catherine Malabou, underlining the importance of her philosophy of plasticity for diverse disciplines and contexts, including contemporary literature and film; queer theory; and the medical and health humanities. Benjamin’s work also explores questions of health and care, with a particular focus on how philosophy, literature and film can help us to re-imagine the hospitals of the future. He has published a range of articles relating to this project, exploring new models for hospitals and clinical environments in the work of Catherine Malabou (Essays in French Literature and Culture, 2021 and Film-Philosophy, 2024), Jean-Luc Nancy (Nottingham French Studies, 2023), Paul B. Preciado (The Senses & Society, 2024), and Anne Dufourmantelle (Paragraph, 2024). He is founder and leader of the Queer Medical Humanities Network at Lancaster University and Co-I on the project ‘The Queer Lives of the Hospital: An Archive of LGBTQIA+ Experiences of Healthcare Environments’.

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