On October 2-4, PRAXIS (Center of Philosophy, Politics and Culture of the Universty of Évora) will host the international congress Jacques Derrida e a Desconstrução, revisiting some of Derrida's deconstruction most relevant contributions to contemporary thought.
Marco Grosoli will present a paper titled "Beyond Deconstruction: Malabou’s plasticity in Manoel de Oliveira’s Vale Abraão and Espelho Magico".
According to Derrida’s disciple Catherine Malabou (as argued mainly in her Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing), the last word of deconstruction cannot be deconstruction. While unambiguously a supporter of deconstruction, she maintains that writing cannot be regarded any longer as the key motor scheme of our historical times. The indistinguishability between presence and absence informing writing’s trace cannot be regarded as formless any longer: rather, that indistinguishability comes with a form that is always precarious and ready to explode into another form. Thus, deconstruction cannot do without plasticity any longer: it must, in other words, affirm the originlessness of trace without overlooking how the trace always plastically changes the form that it cannot but have.
In his paper, Marco Grosoli will closely analyze two films by Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira which aptly illustrate plasticity qua deconstruction’s flipside. One is Vale Abraão (1993), taken from a novel by Agustina Bessa-Luís which on the one hand deconstructs Flaubert’s Madame Bovary while, by the same token, undermining phallo-logocentrism through a very peculiar use of the spoken and written word, and on the other hand boldly attempts a new idealization of feminine beauty (a move which can safely be taken to be as far as anything could ever be from deconstructionism). The second is Espelho magico (2015), again adapted from Agustina Bessa Luis as a blatant follow-up/update of several themes of Vale Abraão. What is more, Espelho Magico (revolving around a woman deliberately entering a semi-vegetating, living-dead status as a result of her obsessive waiting for an apparition of the Virgin Mary) is an astonishingly literal exemplification of Malabou’s “destructive plasticity”. The latter is a revision of Freud’s death drive attesting to the coincidence between subjectivity/form (two terms which, according to Malabou, are synonyms through and through) and the deconstruction of subjectivity/form (in the sense that what ensues from the deconstruction of subjectivity/form is always another subjectivity/form).
Check the full program here.
