A newcomer to Catherine Malabou's philosophical writings might find themselves a little daunted by the scope, range and interdisciplinary breadth of her engagements. Given this, they might also find it a challenge to situate her thinking or to categorise it within the well-established traditions of so-called ‘continental’ philosophy or ‘French theory’. On the one hand, she clearly works in the wake of Derridean deconstruction and also offers landmark readings and reformulations of Kantian, Hegelian and Heideggerian philosophy. Her writing can therefore most obviously be situated within the legacy of transcendental, phenomenological and post-phenomenological thought. On the other hand, her work brings together diverse and at times seemingly incompatible contexts. Engagements with neurology, neuroscience and cognitive psychology sit alongside discussions of psychoanalysis, aesthetics and politics. The philosophical negotiation with all of these contexts also unfolds within a sustained critical response to some of the most significant theoretical trends of twentieth-century and contemporary continental thought: structuralism, poststructuralism, biopolitics and speculative realism, to name but a few. At times, Malabou also writes very self-consciously as a female philosopher whose concerns are never far from those of feminism and of a feminist critique of the European philosophical tradition.

Faced with such diversity, newcomers and initiates alike might be tempted to categorise Malabou's thinking according to one or other of its most notable defining aspects. So her work could be pigeonholed, variably, as post-deconstructive, as Hegelian, as a philosophy of biology or of neuroscience, or as a variant of recently prominent trends such as ‘new materialism’. Yet none of these somewhat reductive labels quite does justice to the scope, power and originality of what is, ultimately, a unique contribution to contemporary philosophy, one that both bridges and works between all these distinct and very different traditions.

The selection of essays and unpublished writings gathered together in this volume covers the full range of these diverse contexts and concerns, and they can all be shown, to one degree or another, to explore, elaborate and further interrogate what is indisputably the guiding concept and central concern of Malabou's philosophy: plasticity.