Self-destruction at each change is what enables identity to persist

Evidence

Paradoxically, if we were flexible, in other words, if we didn’t explode at each transition, if we didn’t destroy ourselves a bit, we could not live. Identity resists its own occurrence to the very extent that it forms it. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 245

Categorization

• XREF: This sharpens the plasticity vs. flexibility distinction the reader is tracking — plasticity’s self-canceling explosion is exactly what flexibility (mere docility) lacks. — connects to: Rapid adaptive change can preserve an underlying fixed identity — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 649; Cameron treated psychiatric destruction as a precondition for creating a new self — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 81
• DEFINE: Defines flexibility negatively by what plasticity adds: the explosive, self-destroying critical test.