Catherine Malabou receives an honorary doctorate from Leiden: 'The plasticity of the unconditional'

The French philosopher Catherine Malabou received the title of doctor honoris causa from Leiden University on 9 February 2026. The next day she gave a public lecture at the university's Institute for Philosophy: "On the Plasticity of the Unconditional".

Where the lecture starts#

Malabou began from Jacques Derrida's text The University Without Condition and then worked against it. Derrida had defined the university as an institution holding the right to question everything without submitting to any external condition: the university was the site of "unconditional resistance".

Malabou's question is this: can the university of today — the university under performance metrics, project funding, rankings and market pressure — still carry such unconditionality? Or must unconditionality itself change shape?

Plasticity#

The concept Malabou has worked on for thirty years is plasticity. The word cuts both ways: what is plastic both receives form and gives it — and, as in plastic explosive, can destroy form as well.

She drew the concept first out of a reading of Hegel (The Future of Hegel, 1996), then brought it together with neuroscience (What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 2004). That the brain is plastic — that it is reshaped by experience — is for her not merely a biological fact but a political question. Flexibility and plasticity are not the same thing: flexibility merely adapts to a form imposed from outside, while plasticity includes the power to give form.

What neoliberal work culture asks of people is flexibility; what Malabou defends is plasticity.

Destructive plasticity#

Her third layer is destructive plasticity: a new identity that emerges after an accident, a trauma or an illness and has no continuity with the old one. Ontology of the Accident (2009) works through that picture — against the psychoanalytic schema in which the repressed returns, an idea of transformation that does not return but breaks off completely.