Catherine Malabou, Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, trans. Carolyn Shread, Cambridge: Polity, 2012

First published in French in 2009, Ontology of the Accident is Catherine Malabou’s third book to explore the philosophical connotations of “plasticity.” In her seminal What Should We Do With Our Brain? (Fr. 2004) Malabou demonstrated that the contemporary neuroscientific idea of the brain as plastic process has profound implications for philosophy. Neuroplastic in nature, the brain is an organ that both “gets formed, and is formative,” so it is also a dynamic process that poses a major challenge to some of our basic notions about human identity (What 20). Thus plasticity is defined as “the relation that an individual entertains with what, on the one hand, attaches him originally to himself, to his proper form, and with what, on the other hand, allows him to launch himself into the void of all identity, to abandon all rigid and fixed determination” (80). Described in this way plasticity offers a unique model for understanding mental life as the indeterminate performance of deformation and reformation.