Philosopher Catherine Malabou argues that plasticity is a motor-scheme of contemporary thinking. It is both a neoliberal ideal of the subject’s infinite flexibility, and a philosophical capability by which ideas and recalcitrant matter co-actualize and co-mind one another. Ultimately, she suggests, because plasticity rests at the axis of ideology and philosophical ideal, we must take hold of plasticity for contemporary thinking. But, what would the taking hold of plasticity entail in relation to plastic’s recalcitrant materiality?

This chapter considers how plastic produces reaction formations—schemas, behaviors, environmental topologies, and ultimately a queer futurity. Plastic’s topological spread is a challenge to Malabou’s call to take hold of philosophical plasticity, for it suggests a materialist dilemma in addition to a metaphysical struggle. Plastic as such predetermines the material conditioning of performative behavior. More than standing as an ideal neoliberal subject, plasticity has produced toxic entanglements. Plastic matters above and beyond a philosophical ethic by which it might come to grips with the temptations of neoliberalism. In materialist terms, plastic replicates the capitalist logic that brought it into being, and this very logic continues to reproduce itself as environmental contamination that retroactively affirms the supremacy of capitalism. In other words, plastic materiality entrenches its ideological motor-scheme as a form of toxic capitalism.

What counts as a plastic resistance to plastic, then? We argue that in retrieving plastic’s antithesis, its material recalcitrance and dysfunctionality, we might arrive at the limit of the plastic paradigm and thereby imagine its unlimitation in the queering of bodies. Drawing from Malabou’s paradigm, as well as the scholarship of Gay Hawkins, Heather Davis, Myra Bird, Nicole Seymour, and Mel Chen, we consider how an ethics of queer coexistence with plastic emerges from a reflection on its aesthesis. We therefore address Davis and Seymour’s suggestion that we might read plastic as a queer material, while nevertheless maintaining an insistence that its toxicity is not a measure of its adaptation to queer subjectivity (as failure, dysmorphia, or dysfunctional normativity). We suggest that plastic’s toxicity is a signal to its queering of ontology altogether.