True plasticity requires already being formed, not merely receiving any shape.

Evidence

Only a reader who is already ‘formed’ could recognize the cancellation of form and ‘inform’ this very cancellation. In the first stage, the reader definitely lets go every and all form, like the wax one has been modelling: the reader loses the form of the ‘knowing I’, which had represented the self ‘relating to the content as to an accident or a predicate’. At the same time the reader, as a ‘particular Self’, disappears. But this ordeal, in which the ‘Self’ ‘sinks’ into the content, is only the first phase of the speculative fall. Plasticity is not polymorphism. In the second stage, the reader must recover from (se relever de) this decline so that the efficacy of its advent can be manifest, in the assumption of the meaning of the proposition. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1224

Categorization

• DEFINE: Malabou’s crucial negative definition: plasticity is NOT polymorphism — only someone already formed can undergo the speculative fall and recover.
• XREF: This is the theoretical root of plasticity as both giving and receiving form (explosive and sculptural senses) — bears directly on the reader’s brain-plasticity research. — connects to: Forming the self must be reimagined through plasticity, not flexibility or rigidity. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 61; Plasticity designates at once the capacity to receive and to bestow form.; Plasticity includes a closed sense of receiving a definitive, irreversible form. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 62 (+1 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The distinction plasticity-not-polymorphism, plus the two-phase ordeal (sinking then recovering), condenses the entire Hegelian account of subjectivity as formative self-loss and self-return — paradigm-shifting density.

Broader Connections

• Forming the self must be reimagined through plasticity, not flexibility or rigidity. #expands (0.85) — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 61
• Plasticity designates at once the capacity to receive and to bestow form. #corroborates (0.80)
• Plasticity includes a closed sense of receiving a definitive, irreversible form. #qualifies (0.80) — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 62
• Plasticity means both receiving and giving form, unlike mere malleability #corroborates (0.80) — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 39