Moral and Social Ontology

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This article attempts to introduce and examine the valence of Catherine Malabou’s dialectical concept of plasticity for the theory of intersectionality. Of course, dialectics has been rehabilitated within the intersectional studies by Lena Gunnarsson in her groundbreaking “Why we keep separating the ‘inseparable’: Dialecticizing intersectionality” (2015). Instead of remaining within the critical dialectical realist philosophy that Gunnarsson operated with, I draw on Malabou’s Hegelian dialectics and start by sketching the general logic of plasticity. In a second step, I turn to Malabou’s concept of the subject as a collective event and argue that the subject of intersectionality that appears at the crossroads of more than one mode of subjectivity production can also be addressed through this concept. I conclude by visiting four topics, the relation between identity and discourse, the debate between heteronomous social construction and autonomous agency, the role of the concrete social other, and, last but not least, the conceptualization of the body as a plastic entity in order to sketch the concrete contributions that plasticity has to offer to the theory of intersectionality.

Here is the first book to present Karl Marx as one of the great systematic philosophers, a man who went beyond the traditional bounds of the discipline to work out a philosophical system in terms of a concrete social theory and politico-economic critique. Basing her work on the "Grundrisse" (probably Marx's most systematic work and only translated into English for the first time in 1973), Gould argues that Marx was engaged in a single enterprise throughout his works, specifically the construction of a systematic and philosophical theory of society.Gould examines five basic themes of Marx's social ontology: society, labor, causality, freedom, and justice, in five separate chapters, preceded by an introductory chapter explicating thesis and methods. The book shows how Marx's ontology, or theory of social reality, may be reconstructed from concrete details of his account of the historical stages of social development and from his analyses and critiques of capitali...