Towards a Plastic Starting Point: Rethinking Ethical-Political Education with Catherine Malabou

Abstract

Sometime around 500 BCE, Heraclitus is supposed to have said that it is impossible to step in the same river twice. Since then, the problem of being and change has never left Western philosophy. Evidently important in and to education, change continues to be an important field of inquiry. In this text, I approach the concept of change by way of an examination of Catherine Malabou’s philosophy of plasticity. I revisit what I identify as three main moments in her philosophy: Her re-elaboration of Hegelian time and dialectics as the process through which change happens; the open potentiality of the moment as she finds it in Heidegger; and change as driven by, and dependent on, concepts and schematization as she finds it implied in Derrida. By setting change at the center for what might be called her post-post-structural, materialist, yet non-deterministic ontology, Malabou’s three moments could open up for a rethinking of the changeable character of the Nordic model, as well as the character of ethical-political education.