Indagine su plasticità e metamorfosi. Catherine Malabou e Franz Kafka

This text explores the intersection between philosophy and literature through the concepts of plasticity and metamorphosis, within the thought of Catherine Malabou and some of Franz Kafka’s short stories. Malabou’s plasticity is split between its traditional and positive form – which preserves its originary state: a metamorphosis – and its negative, destructive variant – which leads to a radical and irreversible transformation; a transmutation following an accident. Drawing on Salvatore Tedesco and Winfried G. Sebald readings of Franz Kafka, this work aims to examine whether it possible to locate the action of a destructive plasticity in Kafka’s metamorphoses: do they describe a process that not only transforms, but radically annihilates pre-existing identity, thus giving birth to a completely new existence, one entirely different from the original?