Plasticity unites gathering and rupture as the twin powers of Hegelian temporality
Evidence
Doubtless, it is by ‘my’ intervention, but outside the realm of the ‘I’, that an event of reading gave birth to a reading of the event in Hegel’s philosophy. It is clear to me that the living grammar of the notion of plasticity was deeply at work in the speculative content, at once as its structure and as its rhythm. An integrating and informing power, an originary synthetic power, plasticity also requires a contrary power of dissociation and rupture. These two powers characterize perfectly the gait of the Hegelian text: gathering and splitting, both at work in the System’s own formation. They are two inseparable powers, allowing an idea of temporalizing synthesis and an idea of factual eruption to be articulated together. My whole work is invested here, as it tries to show that the Hegelian notion of temporality is located nowhere else but in the economy opened up by this articulation. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1250
Categorization
- XREF: This two-sided plasticity — synthetic power plus rupture — is the very concept the reader is tracing toward her brain-work: plasticity as both receiving and giving form and as explosive dissociation maps onto neural plasticity’s dual capacity for adaptation and traumatic severance. — connects to: Plasticity holds origin and self-abandonment together in one capacity; Plasticity names the unity of spontaneity and receptivity in giving and receiving form