The Plasticity of Autobiography: Summertime as the Simultaneity of Self-Destruction and Becoming

This paper re-reads J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime through Catherine Malabou’s concept of plasticity to explore how new forms of subjectivity and autobiography emerge in the text. Drawing on Hegelian philosophy and neuroscience, Malabou defines plasticity as the capacity to receive form, to give form, and to destroy form. Among these, destructive (explosive) plasticity highlights the subject’s ability to negate and dismantle itself, simultaneously creating anew. Through this lens, Summertime disrupts the conventions of traditional autobiography and generates a plastic mode of self and life-writing. Coetzee’s narrative shows how the death of the author, the fragmented memories of multiple others, and editorial interventions coexist, rendering the self a plastic subject—what Hegel calls “the substance-subject”—and transforming past memories into an open future. Consequently, it becomes impossible for autobiography to fully represent “I”, and the “I” that seeks to be represented becomes both “I” and “he”, a being in which subject and other are inextricably intertwined. Thus, this paper demonstrates how Coetzee’s autobiographical writing operates as plastic dialectic of self-destruction and becoming, opening the genre to its future.