Introduction

This chapter makes cross-disciplinary connections between the fields of material culture and contemporary literary studies of Black literature of the American South. In doing so, it positions Jesmyn Ward's work within the context of cloth and clothing. The interaction between these two disciplines takes material deprivation as its focus, and considers how the presentation of community, body and self bear the imprints of cloth and the material world. These themes are most evident, although not exclusively so, in Ward's text Salvage the Bones (2011) and her memoir, Men We Reaped (2013). Within American literary studies, Christopher Lloyd and Zsuzsanna Lénárt- Muszka's chapters in this collection, and Sinéad Moynihan's (2015) work offer rich readings of Ward's texts that make explicit reference to the body and memory. While attentive to American studies scholarship, the theoretical narrative in this chapter centres on cloth and draws upon Yeseung Lee's (2016) perspective of a concept she calls the ‘garment ego’. Lee presents this as the idea that cloth acts as a second skin by becoming the layer between the body and the outer world. Lee urges us to recognise the weight that cloth holds in the creation of identity. Similarly, Stella North (2013, 64) tightly aligns cloth with the lived experience of human life. Cloth, she writes ‘is at once the layer of the world closest to the body, and the layer of the lived body closest to the world’. North and Lee both talk of the terrific power of cloth to ‘intervene’ between body and world. Another thread in this chapter is inspired by Catherine Harper's (2014) views that cloth is inherently readable and allows for the expression of a tangible language that has the potential to reveal past experiences. While the theoretical link between body and cloth is clear, this chapter pivots this discussion to consider how Black literature of the US South can be viewed through the lens of material culture. Writing as a white, British scholar, I am forever mindful of the fact that I am ‘looking in’ from outside America's Black literary imagination. As such, contextualisation of Ward's work in this way offers a parallel account of material deprivation that gives special attention to Ward's characters’ intimate experiences of skin against cloth.

Organic Form

Criticism of the novel is concerned, above all, with meaning – and, most often, meaning understood as a noun, something that can be extracted from the text or something outside the text to which it refers. Character, plot, scene, motive, development, crisis, recognition, reversal, and other features of the world brought into being by the text are the staple of most accounts of fictional works. Less often, criticism concerns itself with the experience of meaning, how the text does its work of meaning as it is read (which, to my mind, is a better way to think of literary meaning). In either case, when the question of form is being addressed in studies of the novel, and when it's not simply being described, it's almost always assumed to have as its sole raison-d’être the enhancement or complication of meaning in this sense – what we can call ‘referential meaning’, or content. When Samuel Richardson writes Clarissa in the form of letters, it's in order to convey a sense of immediacy and authenticity in the writing; when Dickens switches between first-person and third-person narration in Bleak House it's in order to achieve a contrast between subjective and objective views of the world – these, at least, are the kinds of explanation usually given. And if a critic raises the question of the pleasure to be gained from literary form – a question not often asked, but in my view a crucial question, one which underlies all our reading – the answer is usually also given in terms of its contribution to the referential meaning of the work.

Literary form is most often discussed in terms of the dictum that form and content are inseparable, that the former arises ‘naturally’ from the latter, an idea that goes back at least to the Romantics. The notion of ‘organic form’, introduced most influentially into English literary criticism by Coleridge (in the footsteps of A. W. Schlegel), continues to surface right up to the present.

Jesmyn Ward's third novel Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), like her other writing, reaches into US (southern) history and memory to lay bare the deep legacies of racial violence that still striate the nation's landscape. Through multiple first-person narratives, we follow Jojo, his younger sister Kayla, and their mother Leonie, as they drive to Parchman prison to pick up Leonie's white boyfriend Michael who is being released. This journey through the delta landscape, I argue, is also a journey into the region and nation's past. The family drive across an unrelentingly hot landscape that is also marked by the criminal justice system and the legacies of slavery. As they drive, their bodies are pushed to the limit, and we witness different responses to that claustrophobic geography. The book also is, at the title suggests, about giving voice to the dead, and this novel is a ghost story deeply rooted in incarceration. Sing, like Ward's previous novel Salvage the Bones, can be framed through what I call ‘corporeal legacies’: representations of embodiment in contemporary culture that index or register the ongoing and historical subjugations of, and violences done to, Black lives in the US South and beyond.

In this chapter, I want to extend some of the arguments I have made previously (Lloyd 2018) and tie them to Sing because it exemplifies the analytic of corporeal legacies, but also gestures to other futures and uses of that framework. In short, by thinking through the novel's attention to memory-work, which is activated by attention to bodies and the landscape, I show how Sing's corporeal legacies reveal much about Black life in the US South. By looking at bodies that are coming apart and then tying that corporeal instability to the novel's broader concerns with haunting (both personal and cultural), I show how Ward's novel traces a memorative line through the heart of Mississippi and thus of the nation. I begin by showing how corporeal legacies can be mapped onto Sing's narrative; then analyse key scenes in which bodies are shown to be coming apart; then look at the ghostly figures haunting this family and the US South; before turning to the way that these corporeal representations instruct us about the ways that the novel thinks about regional and national memory.

In late September 1919, a small monument was unveiled in Cookham, in Berkshire, to commemorate sixty-two local servicemen who had lost their lives in the First World War. A Celtic cross, a popular symbol in the years following the conflict, was carved from brick and flint, raised on a stepped base, inscribed with a list of names, and placed on the village green. Working from a photograph in 1922, the former official war artist Stanley Spencer, who himself had served in the Balkans and whose older brother was listed among the casualties on the monument, turned the scene of the dedication into the subject for a painting (Figure 3.1). Spencer lived in Petersfield at the time, in a room that overlooked the churchyard. ‘I am in immediate communication with the dead,’ he observed. ‘They are buried in the side of a bank, so that they only have to push the gravestones a little bit forward and lo! they are in my room, like extinct gentlemen – a very Cookhamesque place, as you can see.’ Unveiling Cookham War Memorial shows what such communication with the dead may have looked like: far from pompous, it is intimate and unhurried. No dignitaries crowd the scene on the village green. Instead, locals in their Sunday best gather near the Celtic cross to commemorate the community's losses, their bodies pressed together, their hands holding leaflets, their necks bent, their entranced faces turned in all directions, except towards the viewer. On a grass patch nearby, four young men lie down, seemingly unaffected by the day's proceedings. With their uncannily long legs, these four slain men, who symbolise soldiers who fell in action, distort the painting's perspective, creating the illusion of bodies piled not only into the narrow frame but on to each other, as if magnetically pulled into the monument's orbit.

At the time, war memorials were often enclosed to protect them from accidental damage through contact with passers-by or grazing animals. The absence of a fence around Cookham's Celtic cross, by contrast, seems to encourage such contact – a way of communicating with the dead. In Spencer's rendition of this moment of disclosure, five young girls are pulled so near the monument that they can touch it.

Institutions and Imaginaries

In this chapter, in order to build on the political participation I described in Chapters 1 and 2, I consider the deeper demands of solidarity. Participation in coalitional action is necessary but not sufficient for a robust ethics that learns from decolonial movements. My inquiry here is partially inspired by Hannah Arendt's theorisation of ‘the fleeting moment of action’ that characterises a ‘space of appearance’, which ‘does not survive the actuality of the movement which brought it into being’. What is at stake in this inquiry is how an ethical turn could gain a sustained political edge. For this to happen, actors need to maintain political action beyond its initial appearance – not participating in a single march but making political responsibility a larger part of their lives, well beyond the start of the movement. Put differently, participation needs to be more than what Ortega has called ‘political excursions’, meaning ‘a type of politically correct tourism – fleeting moments of experimenting with being political while not really being committed to effecting change’. If we are to think of responsibility in terms of our most central commitments, then we must address the shift from coalitions to communities, from contacts to relations, in Glissant's terms. The oppositional action of demanding a right to opacity is important, but it says little about the ‘meanwhile’ present between connected instances of direct action. ‘[P]olitical resistance often begins in a meanwhile’, novelist and artist John Berger writes. Griffin's concept of ‘secondary duties’ speaks to this meanwhile, as does Lugones's concept of ‘complex communication’. Lugones's starting point – not opposition but communication – introduces a sense of ‘relational identity’ that I will expand on in this chapter. It is in living out a relational identity that one moves from participation to solidarity.

In regard to the question of relational identity, we can immediately raise four concerns. The first is that a focus on the level of the individual and their identity presupposes a neoliberal subject of unlimited growth and change. Yet even when we are discussing how global forces and movements affect cultures, actual interactions always occur on the level of individuals. As the anthropologist Richard Price puts it in an essay on creolisation in the Caribbean, ‘Human beings meet and engage one another; cultures do not. Individuals who claim multiple identities interact with one another; ethnicities do not.’

On 5 November 2020, the University of Southern California hosted ‘Spiritual Protest: The Role of Faith in the Fight for Racial Justice’, an event exploring the role of spirituality within the Black Lives Matter movement. In her keynote speech, Hebah Farrag recalled her experiences of that summer's BLM protests and described seeing ‘protestors clad all in white, burning sage across militarized police lines, chants and the pouring of vivations in front of court houses invoking the spirits of ancestors and those killed by police’ (Farrag 2020). The actions Farrag describes have their roots in African religious traditions such as Ifá, which became syncretised as part of African American spiritual traditions including Hoodoo, and Haitian and Louisiana Vodou. It is these systems of belief and practice – including root work and root medicine, conjuration, and the invocation of loas and other deities – which structure the metaphysical landscape of Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and, for some characters, interact with the sensory disorganisation resulting from drug use, and with traumatic hallucinations. The novel tells the story of the African American Stone family, who live in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. The family comprises patriarch Pop, who in his youth served a jail sentence in the notorious Parchman prison, Mam, who is dying of cancer and practises Hoodoo, the syncretic form of religion native to America's Gulf coast, their daughter Leonie, whose white partner Michael is serving a sentence in Parchman for drug dealing, and Michael and Leonie's children, Jojo, thirteen and Kayla, three. As the novel opens Leonie has received the news that Michael is being released and has decided to take their children with her on a road trip to collect him.

In this essay I map Ward's deployment in her fiction of the practices, language and iconography of Hoodoo, and Haitian and Louisiana Vodou, a deployment that is neither a straightforward documentation, nor uninterested in historico-social specificity. An analysis of Ward's representation of syncretic African-based spiritualities is begun in James Mellis's ‘Continuing Conjure: African- Based Spiritual Traditions in Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad and Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing’ (Mellis 2019). However, here I contextualise Ward's engagement with the intersection between African-based spiritual traditions and political protest, resistance and protection, by placing it in conversation with the manifestation of these practices within the Black Lives Matter movement specifically.

In this chapter, I discuss a relatively novel method of participatory democracy, namely deliberative democracy, and whether and how it could be implemented in the European Union (EU) to achieve a more inclusive and democratic process of policymaking. The reason for this is two-fold: first, deliberative democracy is an increasingly popular method for including citizens in the policymaking process. This popularity is reflected in the everincreasing number of real-life examples of deliberative platforms as well as scientific deliberative experiments. The sheer popularity of deliberative democracy requires a mental and academic exercise on whether and how deliberative democracy could be implemented in the EU. Second, the representative democracy model on its own does not bode well to integrate citizens into policymaking, considering national representative democracies also suffer from chronic citizen disaffection (Doyle 2014; Armingeon and Guthmann 2014). As a result, replicating national representative institutions will not provide the fundamental shift in the EU–citizen relationship which is necessary to improve democracy in the EU.

As I discuss in this chapter, deliberative democracy is more likely to bring a shift in the EU–citizen relationship by providing citizens with a direct voice in decisions that fundamentally affect their lives and well-being. In the introductory chapter of this book, Bremberg and Norman discuss in detail the tensions and trade-offs between multiple democratic dilemmas the EU is facing and between different democratic models advocated to solve those dilemmas. This chapter contributes to this book's overall analysis of the EU's democratic dilemmas by investigating the potential role of deliberative democracy in the EU's governance that is increasingly challenging the status of representative parliamentary democracy as the grand and dominant democratic theory.

In this chapter, I do not call for replacing the EU's established representative democratic institutions and structures with deliberative methods. In its original form, deliberative democracy was not proposed to replace but to strengthen representative democratic institutions (Dahl 1989: 340). Also, I do not perceive deliberative democracy as the ultimate panacea that is superior to representative democracy.

‘It was on the train that took me back from Nice to Marseille’, Madeleine Pagès recalled in 1952, ‘that I met, on 1 January 1915, Guillaume Apollinaire.’ The young woman had been on her way home to French Algeria after having spent Christmas with her older brother, a second lieutenant in the French forces. On that wartime morning in Nice, she caught the train carrying bags full of souvenirs for her mother and her siblings, including porcelain figurines the size of a finger and a little vase adorned with blue flowers. Seated across from her was a man reading an illustrated magazine, Le Cri de Paris, with whom she picked up a conversation. They shared a sandwich and talked Villon and Verlaine. Then, ‘very quietly’, as Pagès remembered thirty-seven years later, he whispered: ‘I, too, am a poet.’ They exchanged addresses – one a gunner in training at the barracks in Nîmes, the other a teacher at a girls’ school in Lamur, just outside Oran. Apollinaire promised to send Pagès a copy of his first book of poems, Alcools, which had appeared in 1913. She could not recall whether they ever said a formal farewell, only that she began running, with a feverish haste, as soon as the train pulled into Marseille, desperate to make it to the docks on time. The poet chased her to the exit of the train station: ‘I felt his breath on my neck and his voice whispered: Au revoir, mademoiselle!’

While Madeleine Pagès safely made it across the Mediterranean, Alcools never did. Apollinaire's editor was in the army, his publishing house closed. The poet wrote to her months later, apologising for this delay and wondering if she recalled their serendipitous encounter between Nice and Marseille. On the evening of 4 May 1915, Apollinaire, who by then had travelled from the barracks in Nîmes to the front in Champagne, heard a military postman shout: ‘A parcel from Algeria for you.’ In addition to a letter – ‘But of course, dear Sir, I remember you’ – it contained cigars from Oran, which he readily shared with the men in his unit.

In his groundbreaking 1967 book, Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon describes racism as a kind of ‘collective catharsis’ (1967, 144), and calls attention to the long-standing use of Black men to represent ‘the Wolf, the Devil, the Evil Spirit, the Bad Man, the Savage’ (1967, 146). He discusses his own realisation of this phenomenon: ‘I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships’ (1967, 112). Half a century later, we see similar acknowledgements of slavery's ineradicable legacy in present- day literary depictions of Black masculinity. Ta-Nehisi Coates titled his memoir Between the World and Me, a line he credits to a Richard Wright poem, but which also appears throughout Fanon's book. In the form of a letter to his son, Coates writes of the weight of history on Black men: ‘It is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all our names. But you and I have never truly had that luxury’ (Coates 2015, 8–9). Claudia Rankine takes a similar perspective in her poetic essay, Citizen. She describes the process of writing the sections dealing with Black masculinity in this way: ‘I asked a number of my black male friends to tell me a public private story. And in return I gave them nothing. But I did collect the stories’ (Rankine 2014, poets.org). This act of collecting is a tribute, a gesture of both respect and preservation, particularly as seen in her many references to murdered Black males.

Capitalism has long been understood to generate thorny dilemmas for democracy. Unbridled market dynamics can lead to social and economic inequalities that are in tension with democracy's ideals of equality and equal treatment for all. The historical democratic governance of markets, however, has not necessarily eased those effects, and a true version of democratic capitalism has proven elusive in national settings. Today's European Union (EU) is particularly challenged in addressing the dilemmas produced by the clash between the logic of markets and the values of democracy. While the EU is a deeply integrated single economic space where markets span national borders, the practices and processes of democracy continue to be rooted largely in the nation-state. I argue in this chapter that ‘European capitalism without European democracy’ is a key source of democratic dilemmas in the European order, one that has contributed to the broader challenges of the rise of anti-system and populist parties across Europe.

In assessing these dilemmas, while most EU scholarship has focused on how economic policies are themselves part of the EU's well-known democratic legitimacy deficit, I take a different approach. Instead of seeing the EU as a unique case, I situate the EU's dilemmas within the broader historical trajectory of modern nation-states, specifically, the tensions between freemarket capitalism and the workings of democracy that are endemic to all national political orders. Drawing on an extensive literature in comparative politics, I evaluate some of the key responses that democratic nation-states have taken to meet the challenges of capitalism, namely, regulation and redistribution. I then consider what these national lessons might suggest for the EU today, highlighting the lack of redistribution in the EU context. In particular, I argue that scholars, citizens and political leaders must more directly confront the lack of electoral mechanisms of representational democracy if they wish to strengthen democratic capitalism in the EU through redistribution. Assessing the tensions and trade-offs around markets and democracy is critical to finding a sustainable path forward for the EU and its citizens.

In an interview in 2014 at the Manchester Literature Festival, Jesmyn Ward underlined the importance of place to her writing when she stated her belief that, ‘place determines nearly everything about a writer and about a character’. Ward's three fictional works to date, Where the Line Bleeds (2008), Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), take place in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, broadly based on her home town of DeLisle in the same state and as Kelly McKisson highlights, Ward's novels, ‘follow the intimacies of this imagined place, Bois Sauvage, situated at the level and scale of human (and often animal) bodies that make up its community’ (McKisson 2021, 279). The natural world is deeply inscribed in the novels in which place, indeed, determines everything. As soon as we enter the fictional world of Bois Sauvage, we are introduced to rivers, bayous, trees, birds, family and community livestock, dogs, the climate, weather events, and the red dirt that is an intimate feature in all her characters’ lives. The natural world within the novels is not setting, however; rather, it is as important as the characters – and in many ways, inseparable from them. The influence of William Faulkner's fictional world of Yoknapatawpha on Ward's writing is well rehearsed, with Ward herself remarking that the way his writing captures the American South is something she recognises in her bones. For both writers, the landscape and the history inscribed upon it is the vehicle that drives both character and plot and we see the most intimate synergies between Ward's writing and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, the novel that made Ward hesitate in her own writing. As with Faulkner's novel, the landscape of Ward's world is an agent in the action and the boundary between character and setting is blurred. Ward's literary project moves away from and is distinct from Faulkner's in several ways, however. Most obviously, and most regularly discussed, is that Ward's novels attend to the lives of the Black population of Mississippi, giving life to the Black characters that Faulkner leaves flat, creating for us an alternative South attentive to the history of racial exploitation that has formed the landscape.

In a 2017 NPR interview, Jesmyn Ward describes her practice of writing about the realities of her region and home town of DeLisle, Mississippi, approximated in her fiction as Bois Sauvage. Ward does not shy away from the harsh realities that the Black community faces, including struggles with drug addiction, generational poverty and systemic racism. On the one hand, Ward appreciates the town and community because of her connections to family. On the other hand, Ward expresses frustration towards people in power who disregard the plights of her community (Briger 2017). In other words, elected representatives and others in power further marginalise poor communities of colour, exacerbating their struggles. These issues plague many of the characters in Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). Ward's novel is about not only traumas on personal and collective levels, but also how the characters battle societal oppression frequently recalled through flashbacks that intersect with and interrupt their present circumstances. An example of such a character is the novel's protagonist Jojo, a thirteen-year-old biracial boy who comes of age in Bois Sauvage. Though still a child, Jojo is compelled to figure out what it means to be a Black man in America, especially in the South. Additionally, by exploring the adversity Jojo's family seeks to overcome, Ward's novel demonstrates how pervasive generational trauma can be within one family and, by extension, within the Black community. I argue that examining the representation of overlaps in traumatic experiences between Black men, women and children can advance the study of African American literature in trauma studies, as well as demonstrate how other forms of trauma and violence such as racism and incarceration stem from white privilege and white supremacy. To advance my argument, I utilise and repurpose canonical trauma theory and primarily, Shoshanna Felman and Dori Laub's Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992), drawing on their discussions of witnessing and testimony in relation to traumatic experiences in Sing. Felman and Laub's text is foundational in trauma studies and widely cited by scholars, though like many early studies of collective trauma it focuses on genocides such as the Holocaust.

Jesmyn Ward's recognition that grief and rage at Black death are felt and shared globally is among the striking but unsurprising things about her account of witnessing global Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of her husband's death from COVID-19 and George Floyd's murder in 2020. Her grief-filled encounter with ‘the revelation that Black Americans were not alone in this’ – something she knew all her life but had never experienced in this way – is also about the power of witnessing. ‘They witness our fight too’, she says, ‘see our hearts lurch to beat again in our art and music and work and joy. How revelatory that others witness our battles and stand up. They go out in the middle of a pandemic, and they march.’ Echoed here are the contradictory experiences of struggle, loss, hope and resilience amidst systemic discrimination and violence that are central to Ward's work overall. The final words of Ward's essay are ‘we here’, an African American vernacular declaration of solidarity through presence and a homonymic affirmation of hearing/listening.

In Sing Unburied, Sing, Ward uses the ghost Richie to imagine the opposite: the inability to access the land ‘across the face of the water’, where the people sing ‘the most beautiful song’. Richie ‘can't understand a word’ of this song though, and recognising that he has no access to ‘that golden isle’, he tells us, ‘Absence. Isolation. I keen’ (Ward 2017, 242).

The river Tiber runs through Shakespeare's Roman plays as it runs through Rome, and as the Thames runs through London. Both symbolising and dividing the city, the river is a rich source of allegory for Rome's historical internal conflicts, such as that between Caius Martius and the hungry plebs in Coriolanus. Beyond its evocation of division, the river's allegorical potential stems from a tradition of describing crowds as unruly bodies of water requiring management. Though this commonplace is illustrated in several of Shakespeare's plays, as in Hamlet, when Claudius describes Laertes as leading an ‘ocean’ (4.5.100) of followers, it is particularly salient in Coriolanus, where controlling the plebeian crowd is often spoken of as a water-engineering problem. As Paul Menzer and others have discussed, such imagery was also applied to playgoing audiences. In this chapter, I will argue that the structural similarities between Coriolanus's plebeians and London's playgoing crowds amplify the play's water-engineering metaphors and help turn them into allegories of thought. The leap from water as a crowd allegory to water as a mind allegory is facilitated by the Hydra figure, this chapter's master metaphor.

Much of this chapter's discussion will involve making educated assumptions about how an early seventeenth-century London audience would react to various stimuli. To reduce the specula-tive character of this approach, I will place it within the conceptual frameworks of Cognitive Metaphor Theory, which, as seen in Chapter 2, holds that metaphors grow out of embodied experience, and Jungian archetype theory, which holds that literary works strike the imagination by activating shared internalised symbols. Both theories will be modified by historical and contextual considerations. Building on these frameworks, I will submit that Coriolanus's water-based allegories of thought come into being when imagery is ‘plugged into’ a sensing and moving audience, with memory and imagination at the ready.

The Context: Hungry Plebs and Thirsty Londoners

Coriolanus's entire plot is powered by plebeian hunger, which triggers the showdown between the people and Caius Martius, later Coriolanus. The topicality of the hunger theme, in the context of the 1607–8 Midland corn riots, has long been noted in the play's critical history.

The tension between preformationism and the freedom of morphogenetic development, which we observed in examining Ruyer's work, also guides Catherine Malabou's philosophy. Malabou examines this tension through the notion of ‘plasticity’, which means the capacity of the living being to receive form and to give form, and also the capacity to explode form. Plasticity refers to the qualitative change that takes place both at the level of cells (cell plasticity) and the brain (neuroplasticity), and that can be either creative or destructive. It is destructive plasticity that is the most interesting for neurological and philosophical investigations, because it reveals the rupture between the cerebral and the mental, or between cerebral auto-affection and mental auto-affection. In these cases, we discover something that Malabou names the ‘cerebral unconscious’ – cerebral activity without consciousness. These discoveries open a gap between the brain and the mind, or between the biological and the transcendental origins of thinking. Deleuze and Guattari already started questioning the central role of the mind and asserted the importance of cerebral cognition. In a similar tone, Malabou argues that reason, or the field of the transcendental, is not something pre-formed and pre-given but is subject to epigenetic development. Reason is evolving, developing and changing in the same way as a living being is. In this sense, Malabou refers to the ‘epigenesis of reason’, which allows us to question the universal and necessary nature of transcendental reason.

Plasticity and Potentiality

The notion of plasticity first appears in Malabou's doctoral thesis on Hegel, which was later published under the title The Future of Hegel. Although originating from a close reading of Hegelian dialectics, the notion of plasticity is detached from the Hegelian vocabulary and, as Jacques Derrida pointed out in his ‘Preface’, extended to the realm of the living in general (Malabou 2005: xxiii). Malabou discusses plasticity as a general characteristic of life that defines the living being as capable of receiving form and also of giving form to its environment. However, to exercise its vital functions, an organism has to transform the reservoir of energy into something else; in other words, it has to make this energy explode to acquire new vital qualities. Here the word ‘plasticity’ acquires a third meaning, that of explosive substance (deriving from the French words plastiquer or plastiquage).