Plasticity and/as Race: Rethinking Philosophy’s Relationship to the Life Sciences [Special Issue]

Happe, Kelly

This essay engages Catherine Malabou’s provocation that the life sciences can provide a materialist theory of thought (plasticity) that can reimagine agency, identity, and freedom. Paying particular attention to the science of epigenetics and its potential rethinking of origins and history in the name of a radical futurity, I argue that in fact it shows that plasticity is the very mode by which power is enacted and reproduced, specifically anti-black notions of race. I conclude with a brief discussion of Zakkiyah Jackson and her theory of plasticity, to show that Malabou’s argument rests on flawed assumptions about history, the material, and social change.

As philosophers creatively address the nature of bodies, matter, and lived experience, they increasingly turn to scientific theories to help us understand agency and becoming as emplaced, open-ended, and differentiating. One such scholar is Catherine Malabou, who turns to epigenetics (among other areas of the life sciences) as offering a theory of the body that can disrupt any notion of stable, reproducible form (see also Sullivan 2013).

Malabou argues that scientific theories, more than simply pragmatic tools in managing modern life, offer a way to imagine new worlds, new ways of being. Making a distinction between plasticity as flexibility (the conventional understanding) and plasticity as rupture (her preferred use of the term), Malabou asks us to consider…

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