Catherine Malabou

Catherine Malabou (born 1959) is a French philosopher working in the continental tradition. Her research centres on German philosophy, particularly Hegel and Heidegger, and on the dialogue between philosophy, neuroscience and politics. She is best known for developing the concept of plasticity.

Trained at the École Normale Supérieure in Fontenay-Saint-Cloud, she wrote her doctoral dissertation under Jacques Derrida, which became L'Avenir de Hegel (1996). She has taught in France, the United States and the United Kingdom, including at Nanterre, Berkeley, Buffalo, the New School in New York and Kingston University. With Derrida she co-wrote La Contre-allée (1999), a meditation on travel and destiny.

Her central idea, plasticity, draws on Hegel's sense of a form that changes without losing its identity, and links it to neuroplasticity and developmental biology. In Que faire de notre cerveau? (2004) she argues that the brain can be understood as shaped by history and society, opening a political reading of neuroscience. From there she has explored trauma in Les nouveaux blessés (2007), feminism in Changer de différence (2009) and social exclusion in La Grande Exclusion. Her influence reaches contemporary philosophy, where the notion of plasticity is used to think about identity, change and the relation between body and society.