Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2020.1857286
Darci Sprengel
ABSTRACT This article offers an alternative approach to the study of atmosphere by examining the relative absence of Egyptian independent music following the military’s return to power in 2014. It argues that periods of quiet, what the Western media has labelled the ‘Arab Winter’, are not reducible to defeat, inactivity, or repression. Instead, they comprise the exploration of third spaces, alternative imaginations, to pre-existing frameworks. Treating the creative work of two Egyptian artists as political theory, it defines a quiet atmosphere as a period composed of nearly-inaudible activity, the relative absence of particular sounds and the illegibility of certain ways of acting, thinking, and speaking in relation to dominant frameworks. The ‘quietness’ of the independent music scene, then, is an indication not that the music has stopped but that it is enacting meaning in ways it had not previously during the revolutionary period (roughly 2011–2014). Treating sonic absence as meaningful and productive, this article broadly suggests an ethnomusicology of the inaudible, which decentres sound in order to be better attuned to the affects of (sonic) absence.
{"title":"Reframing the ‘Arab Winter’: the importance of sleep and a quiet atmosphere after ‘defeated’ revolutions","authors":"Darci Sprengel","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2020.1857286","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2020.1857286","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article offers an alternative approach to the study of atmosphere by examining the relative absence of Egyptian independent music following the military’s return to power in 2014. It argues that periods of quiet, what the Western media has labelled the ‘Arab Winter’, are not reducible to defeat, inactivity, or repression. Instead, they comprise the exploration of third spaces, alternative imaginations, to pre-existing frameworks. Treating the creative work of two Egyptian artists as political theory, it defines a quiet atmosphere as a period composed of nearly-inaudible activity, the relative absence of particular sounds and the illegibility of certain ways of acting, thinking, and speaking in relation to dominant frameworks. The ‘quietness’ of the independent music scene, then, is an indication not that the music has stopped but that it is enacting meaning in ways it had not previously during the revolutionary period (roughly 2011–2014). Treating sonic absence as meaningful and productive, this article broadly suggests an ethnomusicology of the inaudible, which decentres sound in order to be better attuned to the affects of (sonic) absence.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"41 1","pages":"246 - 266"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84662236","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2020.1893486
D. Gill
ABSTRACT This essay attends to select affective politics of theoretical practices in the study of music and affect. Concentrating on EuroAmerican theoretical frames, I address how assumptions generating key theories in affect studies complicate ethnographic analyses of musics emanating from various historical, social and cultural locations. I attend to challenges that object-oriented approaches provide ethnomusicologists in particular, arguing that a focus on practice affords opportunities to avoid the reifications of ‘music’ and ‘affect’ as potentially agentive. In considering strategies of presentation and publication, I call citational practices into question, elucidating inequities in distinct processes of legitimation. This essay stands as an invitation for increased transparency and personal accountability in theorising, with special attention to affective entanglements and attachments.
{"title":"On theory, citational practices and personal accountability in the study of music and affect","authors":"D. Gill","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2020.1893486","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2020.1893486","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay attends to select affective politics of theoretical practices in the study of music and affect. Concentrating on EuroAmerican theoretical frames, I address how assumptions generating key theories in affect studies complicate ethnographic analyses of musics emanating from various historical, social and cultural locations. I attend to challenges that object-oriented approaches provide ethnomusicologists in particular, arguing that a focus on practice affords opportunities to avoid the reifications of ‘music’ and ‘affect’ as potentially agentive. In considering strategies of presentation and publication, I call citational practices into question, elucidating inequities in distinct processes of legitimation. This essay stands as an invitation for increased transparency and personal accountability in theorising, with special attention to affective entanglements and attachments.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"42 1","pages":"338 - 357"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83486844","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2020.1861954
Anaar DESAI-STEPHENS
ABSTRACT This article investigates the practice of teaching and learning to ‘feel’ through film songs within the shifting political economy of contemporary India. Drawing on ethnographic research in a Mumbai popular music institute, I examine how music teachers use Hindi film songs alongside discourses of ‘feel’ to effect simultaneous shifts in students’ performances and embodied subjectivity. Situating the musical transmission of ‘feel’ within a consumption-oriented affective public culture, I argue that ‘feel’ is a newly desirable commodity that is sought out through product consumption and through artistic training. Bridging recent ethnomusicological work on affective pedagogy and scholarship on the role of affect in late capitalism, this article demonstrates that the cultivation of ‘feel’ through popular song in this music pedagogical context functions as a mode of affective labour that is critically linked to the formation of new expressive subjectivities and consumerist publics in contemporary India.
{"title":"‘You have to feel to sing!’: popular music classes and the transmission of ‘feel’ in contemporary India","authors":"Anaar DESAI-STEPHENS","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2020.1861954","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2020.1861954","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article investigates the practice of teaching and learning to ‘feel’ through film songs within the shifting political economy of contemporary India. Drawing on ethnographic research in a Mumbai popular music institute, I examine how music teachers use Hindi film songs alongside discourses of ‘feel’ to effect simultaneous shifts in students’ performances and embodied subjectivity. Situating the musical transmission of ‘feel’ within a consumption-oriented affective public culture, I argue that ‘feel’ is a newly desirable commodity that is sought out through product consumption and through artistic training. Bridging recent ethnomusicological work on affective pedagogy and scholarship on the role of affect in late capitalism, this article demonstrates that the cultivation of ‘feel’ through popular song in this music pedagogical context functions as a mode of affective labour that is critically linked to the formation of new expressive subjectivities and consumerist publics in contemporary India.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"52 1","pages":"187 - 207"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73877182","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2020.1858127
Ellen E. Hebden
ABSTRACT In Mozambique's northern coastal provinces, growing numbers of women are joining competitive dance groups that perform tufo, a popular song-and-dance genre. Originally performed by men for important Islamic celebrations, today tufo is danced by women, who perform feminine beauty ideals on stage at events, cultivating joy and animating forms of attachment through a shared, affective experience. In the post-socialist context, however, meanings and practices of women’s beauty are changing, which has moral implications for tufo dancers and complicates the socio-spatial mobility they enjoy as dance group participants. While onstage, dancers are icons of ‘traditional’ beauty and figures of morality, when moving offstage, they are increasingly perceived as a social problem that threatens to upend patriarchal gender hierarchies. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic research as a member of a tufo group in the coastal town of Pebane, I situate dancer’s social power in relation to failing norms of masculinity to analyse how negative emotions such as jealousy can impede women’s movements. Affect, I argue, does not just create connections or bind communities but can also complicate relationships and disrupt movement as evidenced in the context of tufo, when the desirable dancer becomes the undesirable wife.
{"title":"Compromising beauties: affective movement and gendered (im)mobilities in women's competitive tufo dancing in Northern Mozambique","authors":"Ellen E. Hebden","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2020.1858127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2020.1858127","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In Mozambique's northern coastal provinces, growing numbers of women are joining competitive dance groups that perform tufo, a popular song-and-dance genre. Originally performed by men for important Islamic celebrations, today tufo is danced by women, who perform feminine beauty ideals on stage at events, cultivating joy and animating forms of attachment through a shared, affective experience. In the post-socialist context, however, meanings and practices of women’s beauty are changing, which has moral implications for tufo dancers and complicates the socio-spatial mobility they enjoy as dance group participants. While onstage, dancers are icons of ‘traditional’ beauty and figures of morality, when moving offstage, they are increasingly perceived as a social problem that threatens to upend patriarchal gender hierarchies. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic research as a member of a tufo group in the coastal town of Pebane, I situate dancer’s social power in relation to failing norms of masculinity to analyse how negative emotions such as jealousy can impede women’s movements. Affect, I argue, does not just create connections or bind communities but can also complicate relationships and disrupt movement as evidenced in the context of tufo, when the desirable dancer becomes the undesirable wife.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"18 1","pages":"208 - 228"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84043571","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-22DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2020.1780623
J. Maze
ABSTRACT Judith Butler is often heralded as carrying on the legacy of Foucault, yet Butlerian normalisation is engrained in a sincere (mis)interpretation of Foucault. Foucault’s work on punitive measures defined a historically-limited domain by which one could map out a clustered network of power relations, or what he called a dispositif. By revisiting their differences and rethinking their relationship accordingly, one can piece together a methodological model that is immensely utilisable for actor-network theory (ANT). While Butler’s performativity allots agency to nonhuman entities – viewing it more as a dispersed field of agency – Foucault’s genealogy contextually places various power relations, particularly pertaining to material and immaterial nonhuman entities. More than just laying out a method for ANT though, highlighting their differences can help us rethink how we visualise the subject, the body, materialism and agency in very innovative ways while also gaining a deeper insight into what separates Foucault and Butler. Alongside this, we can see how their combined contribution helps ANT with (a) its lack of attention given to immaterial entities, (b) its reluctance to deal with identarian politics and (c) the divide between its more performative and its more practical branches.
{"title":"Normativity versus normalisation: reassembling actor-network theory through Butler and Foucault","authors":"J. Maze","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2020.1780623","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2020.1780623","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Judith Butler is often heralded as carrying on the legacy of Foucault, yet Butlerian normalisation is engrained in a sincere (mis)interpretation of Foucault. Foucault’s work on punitive measures defined a historically-limited domain by which one could map out a clustered network of power relations, or what he called a dispositif. By revisiting their differences and rethinking their relationship accordingly, one can piece together a methodological model that is immensely utilisable for actor-network theory (ANT). While Butler’s performativity allots agency to nonhuman entities – viewing it more as a dispersed field of agency – Foucault’s genealogy contextually places various power relations, particularly pertaining to material and immaterial nonhuman entities. More than just laying out a method for ANT though, highlighting their differences can help us rethink how we visualise the subject, the body, materialism and agency in very innovative ways while also gaining a deeper insight into what separates Foucault and Butler. Alongside this, we can see how their combined contribution helps ANT with (a) its lack of attention given to immaterial entities, (b) its reluctance to deal with identarian politics and (c) the divide between its more performative and its more practical branches.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"76 1","pages":"389 - 403"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78064827","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2020.1821969
Richard Iveson
ABSTRACT In Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality (2014), Catherine Malabou argues that the current schism between innate a priori and a posteriori manufacture is symptomatic of our failure thus far to think the figure of epigenesis. Based primarily on a close reading of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Malabou maintains that epigenesis configures a possible line of flight beyond both the rigid prior accord of preformation and the magical inorganicism of generatio aequivoca, thereby transforming the principle of reason itself in making available for the first time the generative force proper to thought. In this paper, I aim to further clarify the process of temporal articulation by focusing on the alleged inseparability that Malabou seeks to establish between epigenetic temporality, the biological process to which it refers, and the future of the living being. To this end, I will be guided by three questions: first, why is it that only life possesses the capacity to manufacture within itself the future revelation of prior meaning? Second, on what basis can epigenesis be distinguished from automatism? And third, what exactly is the ‘newly figural’ element of life that for Malabou transforms both the principle of reason and the entire system of critique?
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2020.1761414
Tawny Andersen
ABSTRACT Catherine Malabou's opinion of non-essentialist models of gender identity and art is unambiguous: in her words, they are ‘catastrophic’ to women and to artists (Malabou [2014]. ‘Sujet: Femme'. de(s)générations des féminismes 21, 29-38: 135). What, then, are the implications of Malabou's hallmark concept of ‘plasticity’ on theories of performativity? Has plasticity come to supplant performativity, just as Malabou believes that it has come to supplant Derridean writing? Or if, as Malabou suggests, philosophical concepts are inherently plastic, may we maintain that performativity was always already plastic? In the following article, I read Malabou's work on writing alongside her work on the feminine in order to question how plasticity and performativity might be examined together to theorise the ways in which the discursive and the material interact in the production of subjectivities. By highlighting the performativity at play within Malabou's own writing about the end of writing, I propose that her work challenges her claim that literature cannot deconstruct philosophy. In response to Malabou's anti-essentialist plastic theory of the essence of woman, I underline the parallels between performativity and plasticity and suggest that the two concepts overlap in their mutual configuration of identity and form as mutable and transformable.
凯瑟琳·马拉布(Catherine Malabou)对性别认同和艺术的非本质主义模式的看法是明确的:用她的话来说，它们对女性和艺术家来说是“灾难性的”(Malabou[2014])。“我:女人”。De (s) cma (s) cma (s) cma (s) cma (s) cma (s) cma (x)， 21, 29-38: 135)。那么，马拉布标志性的“可塑性”概念对表演理论的含义是什么呢?可塑性是否已经取代了表演性，就像马拉布相信它已经取代了德里德里式的写作一样?或者，如果像马拉布所说的那样，哲学概念本质上是可塑的，我们是否可以坚持认为，表演性本来就是可塑的?在接下来的文章中，我阅读了马拉布关于写作的作品，以及她关于女性的作品，以质疑如何将可塑性和表演性一起研究，从而理论化话语和物质在主体性生产中的相互作用方式。通过强调马拉布自己关于写作终结的作品中发挥作用的表演，我认为她的作品挑战了她关于文学不能解构哲学的主张。作为对马拉布关于女性本质的反本质主义的可塑性理论的回应，我强调了表现性和可塑性之间的相似之处，并提出这两个概念在其身份和形式的相互配置中重叠为可变和可转换的。
{"title":"Ontological violence: Catherine Malabou on plasticity, performativity, and writing the feminine","authors":"Tawny Andersen","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2020.1761414","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2020.1761414","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Catherine Malabou's opinion of non-essentialist models of gender identity and art is unambiguous: in her words, they are ‘catastrophic’ to women and to artists (Malabou [2014]. ‘Sujet: Femme'. de(s)générations des féminismes 21, 29-38: 135). What, then, are the implications of Malabou's hallmark concept of ‘plasticity’ on theories of performativity? Has plasticity come to supplant performativity, just as Malabou believes that it has come to supplant Derridean writing? Or if, as Malabou suggests, philosophical concepts are inherently plastic, may we maintain that performativity was always already plastic? In the following article, I read Malabou's work on writing alongside her work on the feminine in order to question how plasticity and performativity might be examined together to theorise the ways in which the discursive and the material interact in the production of subjectivities. By highlighting the performativity at play within Malabou's own writing about the end of writing, I propose that her work challenges her claim that literature cannot deconstruct philosophy. In response to Malabou's anti-essentialist plastic theory of the essence of woman, I underline the parallels between performativity and plasticity and suggest that the two concepts overlap in their mutual configuration of identity and form as mutable and transformable.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"1 1","pages":"4 - 21"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85469617","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2020.1762101
Rasmus Sandnes Haukedal
ABSTRACT In this article, I examine Catherine Malabou’s concept of trauma, and argue that her replacement of the Freudian unconscious with the cerebral unconscious might fit adequately into a different framework from the one she proposes. Comparing her view of pathology to that of Georges Canguilhem, I propose a dimensional reading of pathology. Building on this – and by reference to metaplasticity – I ask whether one can explain the mechanisation characteristic of the new wounded mechanistically. I then look at her exchange with Slavoj Žižek to get at Malabou’s understanding of psychoanalysis. She seeks to realign Freud and neuroscience to resolve issues with both. As part of this shift, she introduces the term ‘the Material’ – linked to the cerebral unconscious – as an alternative to the Lacanian triad of Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary. She does, however, leave it underdeveloped, and I argue that this points to tensions in her theory. While her concept of plasticity runs against ideas of an isolated transcendental subject exempt from the outside, Malabou seems to literalise (or ‘corporealise’) trauma. If this is correct, then how radical is her concept of trauma, and are there ways of describing trauma that are equally compatible with her concept of plasticity?
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2020.1749686
Denise Thwaites
ABSTRACT This article explores how breakthrough neuroscientific research regarding the Microbiome-Gut-Brain-Axis (MGBA) resonates with Catherine Malabou’s discussions of a delocalised, decentralised, plastic brain. Inspired by Malabou’s materialist methodology, as well as her confrontation of neuroscientific and psychoanalytic paradigms, the article unpacks the imbrication of symbolic and neuro-microbiological treatments of the gut and its excreta. Interlacing the thought of Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein and Malabou alongside current MGBA research and critical studies of science and technology, I reveal how symbolic and microbial transmissions in early childhood development reflect a multimodal and multitemporal formation that challenges the established imaginary associated with functional gut and subject development. Secondly, I consider how MGBA research bears upon questions of difference, examining its further materialisation of Malabou’s otherness in a world without exteriority. Through this discussion I question the significance of this biological paradigm shift, as it disturbs notions of agency and the subject/environment distinction, opening to pressing ethical questions at this moment in human history. Through these varied interrogations and provocations, I provide a preliminary window into the potential of MGBA research to enable new departures for thinking the fragmentary movement of form and time underpinning Malabou’s motor schema of plasticity.
{"title":"What should we do with our gut?","authors":"Denise Thwaites","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2020.1749686","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2020.1749686","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores how breakthrough neuroscientific research regarding the Microbiome-Gut-Brain-Axis (MGBA) resonates with Catherine Malabou’s discussions of a delocalised, decentralised, plastic brain. Inspired by Malabou’s materialist methodology, as well as her confrontation of neuroscientific and psychoanalytic paradigms, the article unpacks the imbrication of symbolic and neuro-microbiological treatments of the gut and its excreta. Interlacing the thought of Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein and Malabou alongside current MGBA research and critical studies of science and technology, I reveal how symbolic and microbial transmissions in early childhood development reflect a multimodal and multitemporal formation that challenges the established imaginary associated with functional gut and subject development. Secondly, I consider how MGBA research bears upon questions of difference, examining its further materialisation of Malabou’s otherness in a world without exteriority. Through this discussion I question the significance of this biological paradigm shift, as it disturbs notions of agency and the subject/environment distinction, opening to pressing ethical questions at this moment in human history. Through these varied interrogations and provocations, I provide a preliminary window into the potential of MGBA research to enable new departures for thinking the fragmentary movement of form and time underpinning Malabou’s motor schema of plasticity.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"21 1","pages":"79 - 98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82651324","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2020.1749685
Francis Russell
ABSTRACT One of the under-theorised aspects of Catherine Malabou’s What Should We Do With Our Brain? is the overtly political project that underpins her discussion of a renewed conception of subjectivity. Malabou's political project is framed in radical and emancipatory terms, and yet the possibilities and limitations that stem from of a neurobiological account of politics have been left under-explored. Can we really locate in the brain a progressive politics, especially in the context of debates around mental illness, when so many groups and individuals are resistant to understanding themselves as their brains? Or is this affirmation of scientific materialism at risk of obscuring the realities and complexities of the materiality of cultural practice? In order to pursue the political consequences of her work, this paper looks to stage an encounter between Malabou's account of neuroplasticity and Lauren Berlant's notion of cruel optimism. This is done in order to ask: do Malabou’s own critiques of neoliberal flexibility run the risk of embracing a neuro-liberalism, in which an optimism regarding plasticity, individual liberty, and compromise between the humanities and life-sciences obscures the political limitations of neuroscience as a site for political-philosophy?
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