Ontology of Avulsion: Posthuman Freedom and Accidental Becoming Page: 30
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explosive plasticity".58Malabou is left with one foot anchored in the river and the other in the
explosive plasticity which has the potential to undo it. Malabou captures the accidental and
plastic nature of avulsion within elaborate examples of identity and personality throughout the
text. Within the realm of personality, that which can no longer flee its situation metamorphosizes
from the inside out. Unlike myths of shape-shifters or Kafka's insect, true metamorphosis is not
one of form alone but of form and nature together. According to Malabou, Western philosophy
has a tendency to think form as separate from nature and assume changes of form without the
possibility of changing a nature.59 The accident is a radical metamorphosis, one which changes a
form as well as its being. Radical metamorphosis becomes radical precisely because the suffering
involved emerges precisely as a lack of suffering. There is an indifference regarding the change
that has occurred; the "new form of being, a stranger to the one before" has emerged.60
Destructive plasticity is the avulsion of identity, one of which the product is radically
transformed to the extent that it is indifferent to its own transformation.
Malabou coins the term denegation as a technical term for this indifference inherent in
the process of explosive plasticity. It functions as a "negative possibility".61 Embedded within
the standard understanding of possibility is always an affirmation. In response to Hegel, Malabou
points out that the notion of negation in Western philosophy is always affirmative at its core.
Absolute negation crumbles when we acknowledge that we can say yes to saying no. After this
insight, freedom itself "becomes tied to the possibility of saying yes to no".62 Absolute negation
58 Malabou, Ontology of the Accident, 3.
59 Ibid., 17.
60Ibid., 18.
61 Ibid., 75. Malabou adapts this term from Freud's original use. Freud had used this term to describe patients who
would reject the insight of psychanalytic researchers, enabling it to remain a negative possibility.
62 Ibid., 74.30
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Grossman, Jacob Wayne. Ontology of Avulsion: Posthuman Freedom and Accidental Becoming, dissertation, December 2021; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1873811/m1/36/?rotate=270: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .