Plastic Scenes: Images from the Future

In recent decades, plasticity has gained prominence across various disciplines—from neuroscience, biology and psychology to art and philosophy. Typically celebrated as a metaphor for flexibility, adaptation, and resilience, plasticity has been closely associated with life, growth, and recovery. However, as philosopher Catherine Malabou has shown throughout her work, this optimistic reading of plasticity overlooks the capacity for transformation that results not in renewal but in rupture. This paper investigates destructive plasticity, a philosophical concept that questions the limits of form, the stability of identity, and the temporality of becoming. Drawing on the work of Catherine Malabou, G.W.F. Hegel, Sigmund Freud, and Martin Heidegger, I explore how destructive plasticity not only reconfigures our understanding of time and matter but also offers a way to think beyond biocentric frameworks. By tracing the historical, etymological, and conceptual development of plasticity, the paper argues that at its core, plasticity is as much about vacuity (emptiness of form) as it is about form. The question at stake is not just how things change—but how they might be irreversibly altered in ways that defy restoration, memory, and recognition.