Abstract

The present essay attempts to graft Paul Ricoeur’s position onto Catherine Malabou’s notion of writing, in which a double negativity (dialectical and deconstructive) works. If Malabou does not recognize a plastic nature to writing, according to Ricoeur’s conception of subjectivity, the narrative dimension is the possibility of the reconstitution of selfhood in a continuous exercise of dislocation of the ego from itself. By grafting of Ricoeur’s thesis on narrative selfhood onto Malabou’s paradigm on writing, one opens the possibility of thinking of writing as the realm of plasticity, which is a fundamental ontological trait of subjectivity against a self-referential determination of the ego and in favour of a conception of the human being as a moral subject.