Malabou, Medicine and Film: Screening Brain Injury, Organ Transplantation and Plasticity in Katell Quillévéré's Heal the Living

Dalton, Benjamin (2024) Malabou, Medicine and Film: Screening Brain Injury, Organ Transplantation and Plasticity in Katell Quillévéré's Heal the Living. Film-Philosophy, 28 (3). pp. 534-560. ISSN 1466-4615

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Abstract

This article brings Catherine Malabou’s explorations of bodily mutation and metamorphosis at the intersections of philosophy and biomedical science into contact with film. In particular, it explores dialogues between Malabou’s work on biomedical understandings of bodily plasticity and filmic representations of medical interventions in the body. This article specifically explores Malabou in relation to Katell Quillévéré’s film Heal The Living (Réparer les vivants, 2016): an adaptation of Maylis de Kerangal’s novel The Heart (Réparer les vivants, 2014). The film tells the story of Simon Limbres, who is taken to a hospital following a road accent and pronounced brain dead. The film then explores how Simon undergoes organ donation, following his organs on their journey to other bodies in need. I argue that Heal The Living allows us to challenge and extend Malabou’s central thinking of (neuro)plasticity, precisely by emphasizing the plasticity of the body beyond and in the wake of the brain. Further, the film’s emphasis on transplantation allows for an exploration of interpersonal plasticity, developing an ethics of transplanted plasticity in testing and extending conceptions of otherness and alterity central to Malabou’s thinking.