Beautiful Monsters: On Destructive Plasticity

Julie Reshe

by Kikyz 1313

Catherine Malabou claims that both neuroscience and psychoanalysis fail to take
destructive plasticity into account, but they do it, just in different ways. Freud has no
middle term between the plasticity of gaining form and elasticity as the erasure of all
form; therefore, he failed to take into account the possibility of the formation of new
identity through the work of destructive power. As for neurobiology, although it deals
with transformations of identity resulting from brain lesions or traumatic events, it
merely observes such transformation and fails to theorize it. Within the framework of
both neurology and neurobiology, the formation of identity through destruction is simply
invoked as a morbid eventuality. Neurobiology has never developed destructive
plasticity as a self sufficient concept: it recognizes the phenomenon, but not the law.

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Neurobiology employs the concept of neuronal plasticity that refers to the positive and
constructive sense of the malleable character of synaptic connections. But there is no
concept that characterizes the process whereby these connections are pruned or
inhibited. A generally accepted scientific definition of plasticity captures only one side of
it: a positive coherent formation. The other side, that is, formation through destruction, is
simply excluded. Within the framework of neuroscience, which employs such concept of
plasticity, pathological metamorphosis is seen as always endowed with a coefficient of
reconstruction and healing. The destructive significance of plasticity remains in the
shadows, or, at least, it is always oriented toward its redemption. So, destructive
plasticity, which is plasticity without remedy, is excluded from this perspective.

Once it comes to destructive plasticity, neurologists and neurobiologists either hasten to

discuss a cure and remission, or hastily return to "good" compensatory plasticity. Once
the theme of destructive plasticity is evoked this goes without saying it has to be
supplemented by the discussion of cure. Such a trend is a manifestation of a more
general tendency of neurology, neurobiology and psychoanalysis to normalize.
They determine what is normal and healthy, justifying their existence by promising to
regain health or normality. However, from Foucault, we know that the concepts of illness
and health are socially constructed. The difference between the normal processes and
the processes that are considered abnormal is, to a great extent, culturally variable and
historically changeable.

Mini Copernican Turn

As an example of victims of destructive plasticity, Malabou suggests not only patients

with brain lesions, victims of various cerebral lesions or attacks, including degenerative
brain diseases such as Parkinsons and Alzheimers, but also those who suffer with
post-traumatic stress disorder. For Malabou, although destructive plasticity has creative
powers, its work is evil it creates monsters. I agree with Malabous thoughts on
destructive plasticity, though I would like to expand this concept further so that it will not
just supplement a concept of positive plasticity, but will start to be seen as even more
significant in comparison to it.

I suggest to begin with mini Copernican turn. As it is known, the person who inspired, so
to say, some of Malabous books was her grandmother who suffered from Alzheimer's
disease. In the preamble to The New Wounded, Malabou states: In the first place, this
book is a belated reaction to the ordeal of depersonalization to which my grandmother
was subjected as Alzheimers disease operated upon her (Malabou C. The New

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Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage. New York: Fordham University Press,
2012, p. XI). Although Malabou reflects on those who suffer from destructive plasticity,
that is to say, on those who are traumatized without remedy, like her grandmother,
arent Malabous thoughts a result of her own unhealable trauma of experience with her
grandmother?

Later in the preamble to The New Wounded she continues: this was a stranger who
didnt recognize me, who didnt recognize herself because she had undoubtedly never
met her before. Behind the familiar halo of hair, the tone of voice, the blue of her eyes:
the absolutely incontestable presence of someone else. This other person, however,
was strangely absent. My grandmother no longer cared about anything anymore; she
was indifferent, detached, cool. In the end, she spent whole days creasing and
uncreasing a corner of her blanket (Ibid., p. XI-XII). Isn't it obvious that those thoughts
are a result of an authors own pain that changed her dramatically? More than this, she
is not the only one who was changed, since the readers of her books can actually feel
this pain and it inevitably changes them, too.

My more general point here is that we shouldnt so readily distinguish between the
victims of destructive plasticity, whose personality is formed as a result of work of
destructions, and those who we consider normal and healthy.

The Child

In this context, what I want to suggest is to expand the concept of destructive plasticity
in such a way that it will be possible to reconnect it to the concept of childhood. This
claim is somehow controversial since Malabou frequently points out that destructive
plasticity is opposite to the plasticity of a child, which is seen exclusively as a positive.

This issue hinges essentially on what definition one employs for the word "child". It is
true that according to the prevalent philosophical interpretation, the concept of child is
identified with a positive formation: it symbolises inner healing powers that have to be
restored through therapy. According to such interpretation, in fact, to be healed is to
become a child.

I dont like this concept of a child. Fortunately, philosophy offers alternative

interpretations of childhood, such as Lyotards vision of childhood as a primordial
susceptibility. According to him, childhood persists into adulthood and it remains there
as a defenselessness and vulnerability. Thus, childhood persists as a constitutive of
adulthood, precisely as a state where the adult turns out to be without defense.

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The inner child in Lyotards philosophy is also radically different from the concept of the
inner child as it occurs in pop psychology. The latter encourages adults to heal their
inner child, whereas the inner child in the philosophy of Lyotard is, in principle,
unhealable; moreover, she is the opposite of any healing and therapy she is the
traumaticity itself, which must persist for any form of affirmative becoming to occur.

My thinking about the concept of child comes from my own incurable experience. While
Malabou reflects on her grandmother, my material for reflection is my daughter. She
was diagnosed with an attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). She is much
better now and her behavior is not pathological anymore. At the moment she can be
described by the word troublemaker, but some years ago she was an indescribable
disaster with her endless tantrums that closely resembled suicide extended in time. She
was literally destroying the world around her, including herself. The most terrifying thing
was my inability to help the most precious human being I have. I was doomed to see
that the life that I had given her was unbearable for her.

Such a tendency to destruction and self-destruction is not exclusive to my daughter, but

it is also obvious in other children. According to Foucault, philosophy is about doubting
the obvious. What can be more obvious than the fact that little children cry a lot? It was
not obvious to me when I gave birth to my daughter. Not so much because I am a
philosopher; I just didn't have any experience with children. I didnt know if it was in the
order of things that she cried so much; I perceived her as a grown-up person. If one saw
a grown-up person who cried like that, they would think that something terrible had
happened to her, maybe even so terrible that she would prefer to die than to live with
this experience. Clearly, my child was not a representation of positive plasticity, she
rather represented a process of self-destruction.

It is also important to take into account that human experience is subjective, thus there
is no such thing as a good experience per se (one might wrongly consider weddings or
the birth of a child as a part of this category) or a traumatizing experience per se (one
might wrongly consider the death of a close person to be such a kind of experience). I
have a friend whose most traumatic experience was his wedding, and Im more than
sure he is not the only one. For example, the day my grandmother died, my 5 year old
daughter saw me crying and asked me what happened. I told her that I just lost a very
important person. She still didn't get it and asked me: Why are you crying then? It is
she who is dead, not you. Later on the same day, my daughters balloon popped (she
is obsessed with balloons) and that was the moment when the intensity of her suffering
began to coincide with mine.

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Stress and Trauma

The process of learning and psychological formation of the child and subsequent
formation that occurs throughout life are not usually seen as causing traumatization,
although I think that the ancient Greeks were right in considering that to learn is to
suffer. It is widely agreed, though, that the condition of stress is very important for the
process of learning. Stress is a reaction to new circumstances (including exposure to
new information) which initiates adaptation (including the assimilation of new
knowledge).

The distinction between stress and traumatization is quite conditional. Since Freud,
psychic traumatization is understood by the analogy of physical traumatization, that is,
with the occurrence of a foreign body that cant be fully integrated into the organism and
become assimilated by it. At the level of mind, a foreign body is represented by an
experience that can not be fully integrated into the overall scope of experience. The
conditionality of the distinction between stress and traumatization is due to the fact that
any new experience and exposure to new information, by definition, cannot be totally
identical to the already existing scope of experience, otherwise it wouldn't be possible to
call it new.

As mentioned previously, posttraumatic stress disorder is indicated by Malabou to be

among the examples of the work of destructive plasticity. Indeed, posttraumatic stress
disorder is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the
authority on mental illness diagnoses) and it is recognized as a mental illness.
Posttraumatic stress disorder is defined as a response to a stressful event when an
individual re-experiences a traumatic event along with a state of heightened
physiological arousal and the avoidance of stimuli associated with the event.

Not all individuals experience posttraumatic stress disorder as a reaction to potentially

stressful events: A much more common response to such events is a condition called
posttraumatic stress. In contrast to posttraumatic stress disorder, posttraumatic stress is
not a mental illness. On the contrary, it is recognized as a common, normal, and
adaptive response to experiencing a potentially traumatic event.

The claim that posttraumatic stress disorder is a mental illness and that posttraumatic
stress is a normal reaction can be misleading as it suggests that they are a completely
different phenomena. In fact, this is not true. The key symptoms of posttraumatic stress

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disorder are similar to posttraumatic stress symptoms,; they just differ in intensity and
duration. According to generally accepted criteria of posttraumatic stress disorder, it is
diagnosed when symptoms last more than one month.

The line between mental disorder and non-disorder is unclear, shifting and extremely
relative. Regarding the given example of the differences between posttraumatic stress
and posttraumatic stress disorder, the uncertainty of this line is especially perceptible
the closer you get to midnight between the thirty-first and thirty-second day of you
experiencing the symptoms of posttraumatic stress, when just one more moment and
you will be a part of the world of the mentally disordered. The uncertainty of the line
between mental disorder and non-disorder also implies the uncertainty of division into
those who suffer from the work of destructive plasticity and those who escaped this fate.

My general claim is that it is appropriate to think about every adult as, to a certain extent
(or even to a large extent), an unhealable traumatized child, that is, as of a result of the
work of destructive plasticity. It is certainly a mistake to see those who are mentally
disordered as radically different from those who are considered normal. I believe that
those should not be perceived as two opposites. Humanity is rather a collection of
diverse abnormalities deviations of the norm that doesnt exist. In some way, we are
all traumatized and unhealable, that is to say, we are all beautiful monsters.