Ontology After the Accident: Derrida, Malabou, and the Future of the Trace

This paper examines how Jacques Derrida’s concept of the crypt challenges Catherine Malabou’s notion of destructive plasticity. Reading Derrida’s ‘Fors’ (1976), the Life Death seminar (1975–76), and Of Spirit (1987) alongside Malabou’s The Future of Hegel (2005), The Ontology of the Accident (2012), and The Heidegger Change (2011), I argue that Malabou misreads supplementarity’s ‘play in form’ as writing’s capacity to convert trace into form, when plasticity merely supplements supplementarity with the trace of form. Because plasticity does not recognise the structural redundancy of différance/supplementarity that blinds writing to its operations, the trace incorporates plasticity as the supplement that dissimulates itself in form. Reading Derrida’s reading of Abraham’s and Torok’s The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, I demonstrate how the crypt’s three pleonastic functions (‘topos’, ‘death’, and ‘cipher’) correspond to the three senses of origin-heterogeneity: heterogeneous from the origin, with respect to the origin, and at the origin. After the accident, after the trace is supplemented by plasticity, it dissimulates its legibility in the historicity of forms. Because of Malabou’s supplementation, the trace can now be read as plasticity, opening deconstruction’s capacity to move between materiality and conceptuality.