Adaplastics: forming the Zazie dans le metro network

This article posits the productivity, and arguably the necessity, of ‘adapthinking’ Zazie dans le métro as it turns sixty. Bringing into contact Adaptation Studies and Catherine Malabou’s concept of plasticity, it develops an ‘adaplastics’ to explore the vortical movements (a notion inspired by Britta H. Sjogren and Michel Serres) of six French-language Zazic texts: Raymond Queneau’s novel, Louis Malle’s film, Jacques Carelman’s and Clément Oubrerie’s bandes dessinées, Sarah Mesguich’s play, and Evelyne Levasseur’s audio-book. The article focuses on forming processes (in the triple plastic sense of giving, receiving, and exploding form) of Zazie as a con/textual network, exploring the dismantling/re-assembling of a plastic original in the audio-book, the plasticity of forms of Marcel/ine’s gender and le type’s identity, and the collision of comic art and dance. It concludes with the suggestion that plasticity offers a mutable philosophical framework that opens a way towards the future and becoming of the study of adaptation as processes of transformation, (ex)change and metamorphosis.