Catherine Malabou, Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity Carolyn Shread (trans), Polity Press, Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA, Polity Press, 2012. 112 pages, £9.99, €11.50, paper, ISBN: 9780745652610.

Best known for her 2008 book What Should We Do With Our Brains? Catherine Malabou is a rising star across many disciplines, with her bold statements, unapologetic style and above all, her new propositions to longstanding philosophical concepts. Though a self-titled deconstructionist, Malabou aims to transcend Derrida’s différance through an analysis of cerebral transdifferentiation and to apply Hegelian dialectics to describe the relation between matter and consciousness. In her short but complex 2009 essay Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (translated from French in 2012) Malabou presents her own conception of the subject as a neuronal being that is essential as much as it is accidental, and material as much as it is historical; a becoming-self through plasticity.

In this book, Malabou urges us to think about the event-ality of a destructive event and uses the example of neurological trauma to capture the ‘unheard’ history of the subject. She presents an ontology of becoming, but a becoming that does not belong to the positive connotations of plasticity. In What Should We Do With Our Brains? Malabou argued that in science, art and education, plasticity is presented as a delightful form of ‘natural sculpting’ that shapes our identity and makes us subjects of history. After all, we are able to learn, respond to the world and develop into new subjects. This, at first glance, can only imply a positive progression of the life course and a reinforcement of the permanence of identity. Plasticity is an ‘explosive creativity’ that  makes us (2008: 74).

In Ontology of the Accident, however, Malabou offers a frightful warning; plasticity can also act as a ‘plastic bomb’ with the potential to unravel the self in profound ways. If ‘we are our synapses’, as neuroscientist (and frequent reference) Joseph LeDoux (2002) pushes, we are also utterly vulnerable to their mutations and disentanglements. This is what Malabou calls the ‘dark side’ of plasticity, its ability to annihilate form as well as to give it. As a result of trauma—socio-political (e.g. post-traumatic stress or depression) or material (e.g. dementia, a brain tumour)—, or sometimes for no reason at all, Malabou argues, the path splits leaving a ‘deep cut in the biography of the subject, an ontological violence that gives rise to a new being which has nothing in common with its preceding form’ (page 17). The possibility of the destructive accident is within all of us, at every moment of our lives and she urges us to recognise that one day, we might become someone else.

‘Plasticity houses itself beneath an apparently smooth service like a reserve of dynamite hidden under the peachy skin of being for death’ (page 1).

Through the example of trauma, Malabou provides important insights into the wider philosophical questions of brain plasticity—the questions that plasticity poses to us and the demands it might make on us (James 2012). Dark plasticity is presented as a freak event, one that interrupts being in its entirety rather than a gradual transformation we might see in natural ageing, for example (which  is discussed extensively in chapter 4). Malabou says that with a more gradual transformation, the subject can only ever transform into itself. Even though form changes through time—our hair greys, wrinkles become deeper, walking slows—substance will remain. Our personalities may alter over the years but in normal circumstances, our fundamental self stays the same. We see her Hegelian roots shine through here: the idea of a self (or consciousness in Hegel) evolving by recognising its own difference and sublating that particular part or untruth. However, Malabou argues that the destructive accident attacks the plastic abilities of substance so that the subject can no longer inter-relate with its own difference. Through trauma, an ‘absolute other’ emerges which has no relationship with the former self—a complete metamorphosis of being.

Malabou’s work is challenging because she presents trauma as a complete deviation of being, which, she argues, is rare in the western imaginary. She illustrates this point with beautiful literary examples; firstly, with various examples from ancient Greek mythology—the tales of Metis, Peleus, Menelaus and Daphne where godly transformation acted as a trick or a strategy, but one that was always temporary. She then analyses Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, describing the novella as ‘the most successful, beautiful and relevant attempt to approach this kind of accident’ (2012, page 14). Gregor waking up as a giant insect without cause or understanding is an example of destructive plasticity; an inexplicable transformation and sense of possible danger. However, Malabou argues that we have learnt from metaphysics that form can always change but the nature of being persists. She argues that in Metamorphosis, though Gregor changes form in a dramatic way, he largely remains the same in substance. His ‘inner monologue does not appear to be transformed in substance’ (page 18), which, Malabou argues, is why he suffers—because he has the memory of himself. With this, Malabou introduces the main provocation of her thesis—‘But imagine a Gregor perfectly indifferent to his transformation, unconcerned by it. Now that’s a completely different story!’ (page18).

The destructive accident breaks the conception of metamorphosis having a circular nature because trauma changes identity completely; it does not allow it to return to prior forms and displaces the meaning of a life. To support this provocation, Malabou gives several examples—the couple who cannot recover from an infidelity, the well-off woman whose son abandons to live in a squat, people with Alzheimer’s disease. She argues that once a metamorphosis takes place, its effects are always unexpected, ‘breaking all etiological links’ with its cause.

‘All of a sudden these people became strangers to themselves because they could not flee. It was not, or not just, that they were broken, wracked with sorrow or misfortune; it was the fact they became new people’ (page 13).

The destructive accident reveals a being that cannot be affected; suffering is caused by the absence of suffering, a pain that is indifferent to its own pain. Malabou maintains that coldness and indifference are key characteristics of destructive plasticity and draws on Antonio Damasio’s work and its affinity with the earlier work of Spinoza. She notes that both writers recognise the essential importance of the nervous system, notably the emotions, to the hunger for life (or conatus in Spinoza). For Spinoza, the preservation of the conatus and its persistence to exist is expressed in the form of affects—joy affirms this, sorrow diminishes it. In addition, Malabou explains, developments in neurobiology have shown that reason and cognition cannot develop normally if they are not supported by affects—‘reasoning without desiring is not reasoning’, because there is no value attached to it (Malabou, 2012b: 22). Things must have a weight to them in order for reasoning to discriminate.

According to Damasio (1999), instinctual reactions (or ‘gut feelings’) operate outside of consciousness (or higher order reasoning) in the ventro-medial sector of the brain (the frontal lobes, the brainstem nuclei and the somatosensory cortices). It is only when we become aware of these neural reactions that they can be reconstituted as feelings, which can then produce emotional biases and influence decision making. Without this process, which Damasio says occurs in some cerebral injuries, reasoning becomes ‘cold-blooded’ (2012: 22), a point upon which Malabou leaps. She gives the example of Romain Dupuy, a former mental patient who in 2004 viciously killed two nurses simply because they were the  closest persons to him in the residence where he stayed. Several other patients witnessed the crime without saying a word. Malabou justifies her engagement with neuroscience here because, she argues, it is not possible to grasp the coldness of the murderer or the indifference of the spectators ‘without referring to brain injuries that cause the sometimes total and irremediable loss of emotion’ (page 28). After the destructive accident, the event cannot be reintegrated retrospectively; the psyche loses its sense of recall, emotional judgement and, in many senses, the subject becomes a ‘living dead’ (page 34).

When a trauma occurs, the entire affective potential is influenced, sorrow is not even possible anymore; the patient falls, beyond sorrow, into a state of apathy that is no longer joyful or despairing (page 27).

At times, I find Malabou’s empirical examples hard to digest. Her claim that all traumatic injuries provoke this ‘indifferent’ behaviour (page 23) is highly questionable. Her empirical cases are very selective and mostly as the extreme end (the indifference of a murderer, complete amnesia, abused children). She does not consider that while the majority of brain injured patients experience this kind of apathetic, catatonic state immediately after the accident, this is often temporary. Consequently, metamorphosis can still have that circular nature Malabou openly dismisses. The aspect of the book I find most problematic is that  it pays no attention to the stages of trauma, the spectrum of subjectivity we find with different kinds of injury and different severities of the accident. Further, ‘destruction’ is a word that carries a lot of weight and I think it is perhaps used too flippantly in Malabou’s analysis. Though there is destruction going on to identity itself—the lesion disrupts affectual capacity which can profoundly ‘unmake’ our sense of self (Romanillos, 2012)—, when a trauma occurs it can ‘bring to life’ autoaffectual capacities to heal, or even care, which may not have surfaced in normal circumstances.

Malabou describes the traumatic subject as ‘less than nothing because nothing is a word that still resembles too much’ (2012, page 70). These kinds of comments compromise her self-given title of materialist. In the traumatised subject, particularly those affected by a medical trauma (e.g. brain tumour, embolism, dementia) matter is far from nothing; it is lively, it keeps the body alive as much as it destroys it. The brain may suffer but it is also at work. It seems Malabou focuses only on what is happening to identity and personality, rather than to a subject that is also material. She says that the psyche cannot stage knowledge of the accident itself because ‘the event is completely blind to the hermeneutic dimension’ (2012b: 15). However, the brain can and does stage this knowledge through the autoaffectual mechanisms outlined in The New Wounded. Malabou previously argued that the brain and psyche are one but here she reverts back to a dualism in many points of her argument.

In the last chapter of Ontology, which I found the most poignant, Malabou says her task is to think through ‘the void of subjectivity’ (page 24), because after all, ‘the brain damaged identity, which even as an absence from the self, is nonetheless well and truly a psyche’ (page 9). Such void is articulated as a possibility; the accident is a way for life to say ‘no’ to itself and ‘no’ to continuity through affirmative plasticity. Here we see Hegel crop up again when she asks:

‘is there a mode of possibility attached exclusively to absolute negation?’ (page 73).

Freedom here becomes tied to this ability to say ‘no’; absolute negation can be thought of as affirmative.

Malabou plays around with dialectics in an exciting way. She remains loyal to Hegel in that they both argue that negativity is needed for transformation and differentiation. However, a Hegelian would argue that negation is needed for ‘self-correction’ and desire to live. For Malabou, however, the traumatic subject has lost this desire in their indifference.  Throughout the book Malabou maintains the idea that construction must always be balanced by a form of destruction. She is committed to the fact that ‘all creation can occur at the price of a destructive counterpart [and this] is a fundamental law of life’ (page 4). In this sense, Ontology could be seen as an unafraid, unabridged picture of reality—people get diseases, lives are re-routed, death happens. It is a part of life itself and we must deal with it. 

References

Damasio A (1999) The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Inc.

James I (2012) The New French Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press.

LeDoux J (2002) Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are. London: Penguin.

Malabou C (2008) What Should We Do With Our Brain? (New York, Fordham University Press)

Malabou, C (2012) Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Malabou C (2012b) The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage. New York: Fordham University Press.

Romanillos J-L (2012) The New Wounded: From neurosis to brain damage: A Review. http://societyandspace.com/reviews/reviews-archive/malabou-new-wounded/