The Plastic Turn by Ghosh, Ranjan (review)

In Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction (2005; 2010), Catherine Malabou argues that “the concept of plasticity is becoming both the dominant formal motif of interpretation and the most productive exegetical and heuristic tool of our time,” supplanting older theoretical paradigms such as “writing” and “the trace” (57). Almost twenty years later, the truth of this statement is certainly confirmed not only by Malabou’s own developing elaboration of this concept and the growing body of works inspired by her creative adaptation of neurological theory in the realm of philosophy, but also by the proliferation of studies that seek to reflect on the ecological, anthropological, ethical, or political consequences of what has been termed the “Plasticene.” There is no doubt, then, that we are witnessing yet another “turn” in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the plastic turn coming to displace or supplement a host of currently competing theoretical tendencies: i.e., the material turn, the affective turn, the cognitive turn, and the mimetic turn, among others.