Working a concept means varying its scope and importing it across domains.

Evidence

To elaborate (travailler) a concept is to vary both its extension and its intelligibility. It is to generalize it by incorporating its exceptions. It is to export it outside its original domain, to use it as a model or conversely to find it a model, in short it is to give to it, bit by bit, through ordered transformations, the function of a form. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 221

Categorization

• DEFINE: Canguilhem’s method of working a concept — generalizing by incorporating exceptions, exporting across domains — is named and will guide the book; useful anchor definition.
• XREF: Canguilhem’s ‘elaborate a concept’ echoes how ‘plasticity’ itself is treated; also connects to Kuhn-Lakatos notions of concept revision and to how enemies/enmity concepts get stretched across discursive domains.