In the usual order of things, lives run their course and eventually one
becomes who one is. Bodily and psychic transformations do nothing but
reinforce the permanence of identity. But as a result of serious trauma,
or sometimes for no reason at all, a subject's history splits and a new,
unprecedented persona comes to live with the former person - an
unrecognizable persona whose present comes from no past and whose future
harbors nothing to come; an existential improvisation, a form born of
the accident and by accident. Out of a deep cut opened in a biography, a
new being comes into the world for a second time.
What is this form? A face? A psychological profile? What ontology can it
account for, if ontology has always been attached to the essential,
forever blind to the aléa of transformations? What history of being
can the plastic power of destruction explain? What can it tell us about
the explosive tendency of existence that secretly threatens each one of
us?
Continuing her reflections on destructive plasticity, split identities
and the psychic consequences experienced by those who have suffered
brain injury or have been traumatized by war and other catastrophes,
Catherine Malabou invites us to join her in a philosophic and literary
adventure in which Spinoza, Deleuze and Freud cross paths with Proust
and Duras.
