Plasticity of the Subject

Plasticity of the Subject, as coined (following Malabou's reading of Hegel) in McGowan's Emancipation after Hegel, names the condition the subject achieves at the moment of Absolute Knowing: a state of complete openness to transformation in which no founding first principle anchors identity, making the subject radically malleable and revisable. For Malabou, plasticity is Hegel's own term for the capacity to receive and give form simultaneously—the subject at the absolute is neither rigidly determined nor formlessly indeterminate, but capable of being shaped and reshaping itself without limit.

However, McGowan's argument does not simply endorse this reading. The theoretical move of the surrounding passage is precisely to identify Malabou as a misreader of Hegel's Absolute—one who converts the traumatic recognition of inescapable contradiction into a euphorically open-ended promise of self-fashioning. Against this, McGowan insists that Absolute Knowing is not a horizon of pure possibility or harmonious transformation but the forced sacrifice of the dream of pure substantiality. Plasticity of the Subject, on this reading, is therefore a concept introduced in order to be critiqued: it names what the absolute would mean if Hegel were an optimistic philosopher of becoming, but which in fact forecloses the properly emancipatory—because genuinely traumatic—recognition that contradiction is ontologically necessary and cannot be overcome by any degree of transformative openness.

This concept appears once, in todd-mcgowan-emancipation-after-hegel-achieving-a-contradictory-revolution-colum (p.179), in the context of McGowan's polemic against overly optimistic rehabilitations of Hegel. It sits at the intersection of two canonical concepts: Absolute Knowing and Contradiction. With respect to Absolute Knowing, Plasticity of the Subject represents Malabou's positive, transformative gloss on that culminating moment—where the canonical synthesis (anchored in McGowan and Žižek) holds instead that Absolute Knowing names an acknowledged gap, not achieved self-transparency or openness. With respect to Contradiction, Malabou's plasticity is precisely what fails to register contradiction's ontological necessity: if the subject is simply "plastic," it can absorb and transform contradiction rather than being constituted by it. McGowan positions Plasticity of the Subject as a paradigm case of the Misreaders category—specifically, an overly optimistic rehabilitator who domesticates Hegel's most disturbing insight (inescapable contradiction) into a philosophy of creative self-transformation. The concept is thus not developed positively in the corpus but functions as a critical foil that clarifies, by contrast, what Absolute Knowing and Contradiction actually demand of the subject.

Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory RevolutionTodd McGowan · 2019 (p.179)

For Malabou, when we reach the absolute, we reach a moment of complete openness to transformation or what she terms (following Hegel himself) plasticity.

The phrase "complete openness to transformation" is theoretically loaded because it opposes McGowan's core claim: the absolute is not a horizon of possibility but a forced recognition of contradiction's inescapability. By attributing to Malabou the view that plasticity means complete openness—with no remainder, no trauma, no sacrifice—the quote marks the precise point at which an optimistic reading of Hegel diverges from the emancipatory-traumatic one McGowan defends.