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Paper short abstract

Drawing on Catherine Malabou’s theory of Destructive Plasticity, a critical intervention into essential and formalist feminisms, this paper analyzes how an incomplete metamorphosis produces a state of subjective foreclosure, resulting in the suspension rather than the emancipation of the subject.

Paper long abstract

Throughout centuries, women have been subjected to different forms of persecution, considered a lacking being despite being in excess, a reduction of the male body, a site of promulgated relentless oppression and violence. With far enough ink being spilled over this matter, the perennial philosophical and political question of female subjectivity still holds great significance today. However, despite a plethora of work being produced in both essential and formalist feminisms, none suggests a relatively different form of liberation. This leads us to Catherine Malabou’s theory of Destructive Plasticity, which posits subjectivity as forged through the acceptance of the impossibilities of flight, a catastrophic annihilation of prior form rather than through essential continuity or formal integration, and provides a critical intervention into essential and formalist feminist paradigms.

This paper, therefore, uses Destructive Plasticity combined with the anthropological concept of ritual endocannibalism to analyze Yuten Sawanishi’s Filling Up With Sugar. Drawing on the central metaphor of saccharification and its impact on the protagonist Yukiko as her mother is consumed by the disease, this paper argues how the mother’s turning into sugar stages on an arresting foreclosure resulting in an incomplete metamorphosis. It is representative of an event that fissures the essential role assigned to Yukiko, who questions her existence and purpose. As informed by Malabou, this constitutes a catastrophic annihilation of her prior biological and social form and should give way to a new, crystalline, and utterly alien ontology. However, since Yukiko, entrapped in her performative self, not only fears this radical shift and forecloses its possibilities, she ends up in a state of suspension.

Additionally, this paper contends that beyond this impasse, the only way for Yukiko to hold onto any form of female subjectivity is through the logic of endocannibalism in her final act. Finally, in suggesting that resistance emerges not through bodily integrity or autonomy, but through a radical, plastic acceptance of deformation, a negative identification of the mutated self, this paper hopes to critique Yukiko’s reaction to her mother’s gradual saccharification, suggesting her acceptance of the mutation caused by this event would have been far more emancipating.