Plastic onto-logic of relation and non-relation: Ghosh avec Malabou

Abstract

This article connects Ranjan Ghosh’s arguments on the plastic matter in The Plastic Turn (2022) with Catherine Malabou’s work on plasticity. It compares the logic of plastic matter with the notion of plasticity as not only giving and receiving of forms but also as decimation of forms. The article shows how the relation between plastic matter and plasticity encounters a dialectical tension when Malabou’s “destructive plasticity” as a logic of non-relation is juxtaposed with the structure of plastic hyper-relationality in Ghosh. Malabou’s idea of “destructive plasticity” underscores the non-relation of death, while Ghosh’s reading of plastic intertextuality privileges continuity over disruption. By reading modernist and contemporary examples of intertextual collage and cut-up poetry and re-reading Ghosh’s chosen intertextual work, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, in The Plastic Turn, this article finally argues for the significance of non-relation in the intertextual poetic structure and connects this rupture with death and destructive plasticity.