TY - JOUR
T1 - Plasticity, the genetics of difference, and the repair of utopia
AU - Wagner-Lawlor, Jennifer
N1 - Funding Information:
Sophie Harwood recently completed her PhD in Medieval Studies at the Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds. Her thesis explored women and war in the Old French Troy tradition through the literary and artistic representations of female agency in the Romans d’Antiquité. Her research was fully funded by a University of Leeds 110 Anniversary Scholarship. From 2015–17, she taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Old French, Middle French and Comparative Medieval European Literature at the Universities of Leeds and York. Sophie completed her BA (Hons) in English at University College London in 2005, followed by an MA (with merit) in International Conflict Studies at King’s College London in 2006, a diploma in French from the Paris-Sorbonne University in 2011, and an MA (with distinction) in Medieval and Renaissance Studies at University College London in 2014. Sophie won the White Rose Consortium Poster Competition at the 2015 International Medieval Congress in Leeds for her poster on ‘Women of the Middleton-Laval Manuscript’, and in 2016 she was the proxime accessit winner of the St Andrews Institute of Mediaeval Studies and The Mediaeval Journal’s essay competition for her essay, ‘Swans and Amazons: The Case of Penthesilea and Women’s Heraldry in Medieval Culture’. In 2016 she co-founded and co-organised the three-day Medieval Culture and War Conference in Leeds, which is now entering its fourth year as an international conference.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 The Author(s).
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - In this article, I propose theorizing imaginaries of futurity-rather than 'imaginaries of the future'-in terms of what the French philosopher Catherine Malabou calls plasticity. Since her earliest work on Hegel, Heidegger and plasticity, Malabou has continued to develop concepts of 'positive plasticity' (the giving of form) and 'negative plasticity' (the receiving of form) that adhere, she claims, to the generativity of Life itself. In contrast to Fredric Jameson, Malabou's present is vital, with the potential at any and every moment for 'breaking free' from pre-conceived onto-epistemological constructs. Her work on plasticity locates the vitality of history in the 'strange critical entity, at once philosophical, scientific, and political, that would be a consciousness of the brain' (2008: 2). This statement grounds a new concept of utopia as plasticity. In defining the contribution of Malabou's investigation to identifying a utopian imaginary as plasticity, I revisit Darko Suvin's well-known notion of the novum, which he develops from the work of Ernst Bloch. The novum names a figuration of radical difference, and Suvin maintains its role as the 'breaking-free' that structures difference in, and as, utopia.
AB - In this article, I propose theorizing imaginaries of futurity-rather than 'imaginaries of the future'-in terms of what the French philosopher Catherine Malabou calls plasticity. Since her earliest work on Hegel, Heidegger and plasticity, Malabou has continued to develop concepts of 'positive plasticity' (the giving of form) and 'negative plasticity' (the receiving of form) that adhere, she claims, to the generativity of Life itself. In contrast to Fredric Jameson, Malabou's present is vital, with the potential at any and every moment for 'breaking free' from pre-conceived onto-epistemological constructs. Her work on plasticity locates the vitality of history in the 'strange critical entity, at once philosophical, scientific, and political, that would be a consciousness of the brain' (2008: 2). This statement grounds a new concept of utopia as plasticity. In defining the contribution of Malabou's investigation to identifying a utopian imaginary as plasticity, I revisit Darko Suvin's well-known notion of the novum, which he develops from the work of Ernst Bloch. The novum names a figuration of radical difference, and Suvin maintains its role as the 'breaking-free' that structures difference in, and as, utopia.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85054141288&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85054141288&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.16995/olh.124
DO - 10.16995/olh.124
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85054141288
SN - 2056-6700
VL - 4
SP - 1
EP - 22
JO - Open Library of Humanities
JF - Open Library of Humanities
IS - 2
ER -