I read Catherine Malabou’s Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (translated by Carolyn Shread) because the word accident is overdetermined. A few notes and througts:

1. What is the "form born of the accident"—the unplanned deviation? Someone who can never be "reconciled with themselves again". "The Wholly Other." 

2. "Destruction has its own sculpting tools." Malabou notes that metamorphosis is still part of "the order of things"—the exterior changes that the person remains the same. "Transformation" occurs as a substitute for flight, as Daphne who cannot outpace Phoebus, turns into a tree. But this is to preserve herself. To survive. 

3. The accident leads to "the formation of an identity that flees itself, that flees the impossibility of fleeing itself—Identity that "does not subjectivize its own change."  After the accident people become strangers to themselves because flight is not an option - they are the same form of lost prior. 

4. Freud never wrote about formation of the "survivors identity," or the self formed in alienation from prior self. There is no continuous line between the Alina of the before/after.

5. "..selective reduction in emotion is at least as prejudicial for rationality as excessive emotion."

6. Antonio Damasio on how cold-blooded thinking is not more rational. All traumatic injury provokes dissociation, absence of subjectivity, a voiding. A brain injury or brutal said an event "cannot be reintegrated retrospectively into experience". 

7. "How do you internalize a cerebral lesion?" How to speak about the pain you have been robbed of knowing? In the language of experts who know it clinically. It is the clinicians who determine the techne of the post-accident mind.

If you’re looking for a thorough review or synopsis of this book, Stacey Smith does a great job. Larger questions: is plasticity a market value? How do we valorize anomie and alienation that results from amnesia or head trauma? What is the anodyne event?