Individuality advances through metamorphoses where new formation still carries the past

Evidence

The absolute totality restricts itself as necessity in each of its spheres, produces itself out of them as a totality, and recapitulates there the preceding spheres just as it anticipates the succeeding ones. But one of these is the greater power… . It is necessary for individuality to advance through metamorphoses, and for all that belongs to the dominant stage to weaken and die, so that all stages of necessity appear as such stages in this individuality; but the misfortune of this period of transition (i.e. that this strengthening of the new formation has not yet cleansed itself absolutely of the past) is where the positive resides. And although nature, within a specific form, advances with a uniform (not mechanically uniform but uniformly accelerated) movement, it still enjoys a new form which it acquires. As nature enters that form, so it remains in it, just as a shell starts suddenly towards its zenith and then rests for a moment in it; metal when heated does not turn soft like wax, but all at once becomes liquid and remains so - for this phenomenon is the transition into the absolute opposite and so is infi- nite, and this emergence of the opposite out of infinity or out of its nothingness is a leap (ein Sprung). — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1311

Categorization

• XREF: The idea that every new form retains an un-cleansed residue of the past maps directly onto neural plasticity — new wiring never fully erases prior circuitry. — connects to: Biological individuality increases as species evolve upward; Art form shifts with the conception of the individual each age produces; Individuality emerges from the layering and clash of overlapping social types — Janet Burroway; Elizabeth Stuckey-French; Ned Stuckey-French, Writing Fiction, Tenth Edition: A Guide…, 284 (+6 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the ‘misfortune’ of transitional impurity is itself ‘where the positive resides’ is a genuinely dense dialectical inversion worth sitting with.

Broader Connections

• Individuality emerges from the layering and clash of overlapping social types #expands (0.85) — Janet Burroway; Elizabeth Stuckey-French; Ned Stuckey-French, Writing Fiction, Tenth Edition, 284
• Forms of interaction retain identity across varied contents and historical settings #corroborates (0.78) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 202
• Individual identity forms dialogically through a constitutive outside, not autonomously. #qualifies (0.75) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 363
• Individual identity is stabilized only within collective cultural networks #qualifies (0.75)