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Malabou on erasing traces

Been reading the beautiful La plasticité au soir de l'écriture, an old book by Malabou. She advocates clearly there that we have witnessed a movement - a transformation - from a graphic to a plastic paradigm. She does that by defending a thoroughly immanent conception of change where there is no outside. It's a clear counterpart (or opposition) to the idea that change - and in fact, negation - comes from addition (from the exterior). She argues that the graphic times are over and the plastic times are considerably different - she does that by pointing at a convincing convergence between the Hegelian post-historical and the Heideggerian ultra-metaphysical, by pointing at the relative capacity of form to be indifferent to traces, by appealing to epigenetics and by looking at the synapses of the brain where there is a transformation that cannot concern only writing. I tend to think that even if the time of the graphic is over, there should be a figure of excess like that of supplement in the graphic paradigm. In other words, Malabou fails when she argues that forms are independent. Heidegger and Derrida seem to imply that forms are only meaningful when they are not by themselves (fully present, metaphysical). There ought to be an outside even if it works in a way that is non-graphic (not through traces).

A crucial feature of Malabou's characterization of plasticity (and of evening) is that traces are erased. Now, in our research on the logic of supplement, we make clear that when something is added as a supplement everything changes - that the premises are kept without inferring what they did before shows that they have no longer the same impact. This seems to me as equivalent to erasing traces. Maybe the brain undergoes changes where the past is fully removed - but it seems to me that memories are removed, that presences are removed, traces with their capacity to make new differences they are kept somewhere even though they mean something very different. True, there could be a plastic dimension that emerges from traces, but it seems unclear to me that erasing everything makes any sense unless the assumption that there is no outside is enforced. The trouble, it seems to me, is not plasticity itself but rather that it does away with the outside (as supplement, as exteriority, as transcendence and as excess).

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