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Dalton and Tyrer have recently edited a special issue of the journal Film-Philosophy on the significance of Malabou’s writings for film.

Dalton and Tyrer discuss the work of contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou in relation to films and cinema. They have recently edited a special issue of the journal Film-Philosophy on the significance of Malabou’s writings for film – the fully open access issue is available here: https://www.euppublishing.com/toc/film/28/3

Malabou’s key term is ‘plasticity’. She has has elaborated the concept of plasticity in relation to diverse subjects from Heidegger and the subject of change, to feminism and human and animal life, and contemporary neuroscience and biology. The effect of her project is to show that bodies, worlds, ideas are malleable – even in ways not yet anticipated – while also insisting upon resistance to forms of neoliberal control that would collapse this plastic capacity into the managerial injunction to be ‘flexible’.

Dr Benjamin Dalton is Lecturer in French Studies in the School of Global Affairs. His research looks at how contemporary French philosophy, literature and film engage with questions of health, healthcare and biomedical science. His current project explores how philosophy can help us to think differently about hospital spaces and transform the healthcare environments of the future. He is currently finishing a book on Catherine Malabou and plasticity in relation to contemporary literature and film, which is under contract with Edinburgh University Press.

Dr Ben Tyrer is Lecturer in Film Theory at Middlesex University. He is the author of Psychoanalytic Film Theory: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, forthcoming) and Out of the Past: Lacan and Film Noir (Palgrave, 2016), and co-editor of Catherine Malabou, Plasticity and Film (Film-Philosophy, 2024), Femininity and Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2019) and Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable (Routledge, 2016). He is a member of the editorial board of Film-Philosophy and a regular contributor to the BFI Philosophical Screens series.