Catherine Malabou is one of the foremost, most innovative intelligences working in contemporary French philosophy today. Her work articulates a coherent conceptualisation of ‘plasticity’ by merging recent neurobiology and medicinal sciences with the history of philosophy and political theory. Across the essays gathered in ‘Plasticity: The Promise of Explosion’, Malabou carves a philosophical space between structuralism, deconstruction, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis and speculative realism. By demonstrating the plastic transformability at the heart of these disciplines, a change that always promises future explosion, Malabou, as a female philosopher, also articulates the need to ‘change difference’ within patriarchal concepts of tradition itself.