[Commlist] CFP: Malabou, Plasticity and Film - Film-Philosophy Special Issue

    CFP: Malabou, Plasticity and Film

*CALL FOR PAPERS*

Special Issue on *Malabou, Plasticity and Film *

/Film-Philosophy
/Edited by Benjamin Dalton and Ben Tyrer

Deadline: *1 June 2022*

*
*

We welcome articles of between 7,000 and 10,000 words for a special 
issue of /Film-Philosophy/ entitled "Malabou, Plasticity, and Film". 
Articles will explore how the work of the contemporary French 
philosopher Catherine Malabou, and in particular her central concept of 
/plasticity/, speaks to film and film-philosophy; in return, they will 
also explore how film and film-philosophy can extend, challenge and 
transform Malabou’s philosophy and her concept of plasticity.

Malabou’s richly interdisciplinary work elaborates an understanding of 
"plasticity" as a central concept across philosophy, psychoanalysis, 
neuroscience, epigenetics and more recently cybernetics and robotics 
among other disciplines. This plasticity is, at heart, an exploration of 
the innate mutability and transformability of all organisms, bodies and 
modes of being. Malabou’s plasticity, however, does not just describe 
mutability but also resistance, destruction, and explosion (Malabou 
gives the example of plastic explosives). Cinema has an elusive but 
unmistakable presence in Malabou’s elaboration of plasticity. Her work 
references examples of organic and technological mutability in films by 
Chris Marker, Stanley Kubrick, Alex Garland and Lars Von Trier, and she 
also refers to Deleuzian film-philosophy. In /The Heidegger Change/ 
(2004) and /Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing/ (2005), Malabou also 
explores Élie Faure’s concept of ‘cineplasticity’ as a productive idea 
for her own philosophy. Yet Malabou’s work remains under-explored in 
film-philosophy.

The special issue asks: What transformations occur in the encounter 
between Malabou and film? It seeks to establish a series of 
methodologies whereby Malabou’s philosophy of plasticity can be brought 
into contact with film and film-philosophy and vice versa. It will 
consider how a thinking of film and film-philosophy can be analysed, 
extended and challenged in relation to plasticity, whilst also exploring 
how film and film-philosophy can analyse, extend and challenge Malabou’s 
own work.


*Suggested Topics Include: *

  * Readings of cinematic representations of brains, neural identity and
    brain traumas in relation to Malabou’s own work on the brain at the
    intersections of philosophy, psychoanalysis and neuroscience
  * Filmic representations of bodily mutability and transformability
    which resonate with Malabou; filmic representation of biological
    life and processes as plastic
  * The use of moving image technologies in the (neuro)sciences to image
    bodily plasticity (e.g. CT and MRI machines)
  * Plasticity, queer film, and queer film-philosophy: imaging the
    mutability of gender, sexuality and the body
  * Analyses of Malabou’s own references to cinema in her philosophy
    (e.g. Marker, Kubrick, Garland, Von Trier, as well as Deleuzian
    film-philosophy). To what extent might film-philosophy already be
    present in Malabou’s work?
  * Analyses of other (film-)philosophies of plasticity, mutability,
    transformability in relation to Malabou’s philosophy (e.g. Sergei
    Eisenstein’s work on ‘plasmaticness’ in animation)
  * The plasticity of film-philosophy: how might Malabou’s emphasis on
    accident, encounter and transformation offers ways of understanding
    the relation between film and philosophy itself?
  * The politics of plasticity: neurology and/as neoliberalism;
    ideology, resistance, explosion, exploitation
All suitable articles will be subject to double-blind peer-review and 
submission does not guarantee publication.

Full submissions should be made here: 
http://journals.ed.ac.uk/f-p-submissions/about/submissions 
<http://journals.ed.ac.uk/f-p-submissions/about/submissions>

You will be able to choose the specific CFP section when you submit.

Submissions must be formatted and referenced in the *APA (6th edition)* 
style.

Guidelines for authors including information about abstracts, keywords 
and formatting, can be found here

For any questions relating to the special issue please email both 
Benjamin Dalton and Ben Tyrer 
<mailto:(B.Tyrer /at/ mdx.ac.uk),(b.dalton /at/ bham.ac.uk)>.


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