“Be My Plasticity for Me”. Gloopiness in Nicole Eisenman’s Phantom Body

Abstract

In the spirit of Catherine Malabou and Judith Butler’s co-authored essay, You Be My Body for Me. Body, Shape, and Plasticity in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, this speculative and experimental text examines Malabou’s concept of plasticity through the work of American artist Nicole Eisenman. Expanding on Malabou and Butler’s notion of the body as a product and agent of transformation, the paper initiates a dialogue between Eisenman’s artworks and Malabou’s writing on plasticity – particularly regarding the phantom limb. Taking up Malabou’s call to invent plasticity, the authors adapt co-authoring and create a collaborative writing style that merges visual and philosophical analysis. Enacting plasticity’s dynamic exchanges of “substitution”, “delegation”, “passing” and “becoming”, they emphasise the slipperiness in Malabou’s plasticity and the gloopiness in Eisenman’s work. Beginning with a glossary of these terms supports visualising the mirroring of plasticity and gloopiness, demonstrated through the visual analysis of Eisenman’s installation Maker’s Muck (2022) as the introduction. The latent ouroboros in this work – of muck making muck – mirrors plasticity’s form forming itself and introduces the structural ouroboros of this paper, which asks: is Malabou’s plasticity gloopy? Is Eisenman’s gloopiness plastic? Is Eisenman’s gloopiness queer? It concludes with a final question: can we call Malabou’s plasticity queer?