In the first two chapters we saw that Badiou and Meillassoux each make a particular, determinate human capacity the gatekeeper of full-orbed humanity: for Badiou it is the capacity for affirmative thought and for Meillassoux it is the capacity to think the eternal principle of factiality. Such host capacity accounts of the human struggle both with defining humanity so as not to exclude some of those least able to raise their voices in protest and also with the subtleties of an anthropocentrism from which they consider themselves freed. We also saw that, despite their claims to materialism, neither Badiou nor Meillassoux makes efforts to account for the relation between the thought that is so central to their anthropology and the human brain to which (for Meillassoux at least) it is immanent. In the present chapter we turn to the thought of Catherine Malabou in order to explore how contemporary materialist thought might move beyond the problems inherent in a host capacity approach to the human, and how it might fill this lacuna with an account of the relation between thought and brain.

Malabou appropriates the terms ‘new materialism’ and ‘speculative realism’ at different times to describe projects with which her own thought is in sympathy. In the early Plasticité she interweaves her central notion of plasticity with materialism, arguing that ‘it is not possible to conceptualise plasticity without elaborating anew a certain type of materialism; that is to say, without bringing to light a determinate relation or ensemble of relations between matter and spirit’ (Pla 11; my translation).