Throughout her work, Catherine Malabou has developed the concept of plasticity to identify an irreducible potential for transformation inherent to form as such. Polemically, she has also insisted that this understanding of plasticity allows a model of drastic change free from any reference to transcendent exteriority, thereby recasting strong discontinuity as processually immanent. This talk considers what Malabou’s model might offer to neomaterialist and posthuman conceptions of agency. If such conceptions decouple agency from human-exceptionalist fantasies of ontological transcendence, primarily by severing its link to conscious intention, they also feel themselves obliged on these grounds to sacrifice any account of agency as decisive, prescriptive, or imperative – and so render themselves incapable of thinking specifically political agency in anything other than bland, retrospectively descriptive terms. If Malabou’s plasticity models strong discontinuity as processually immanent, does it by contrast allow an account of agency as both freed from transcendence and decisively oriented toward the future? And if so, does this in turn open the way to an understanding of political agency in which ontological equality could coexist with decisive intervention?
