Plasticity, elaborated by French philosopher Catherine Malabou, is one of the most interesting and rich concepts in contemporary materialist thought. Malabou developed this concept in outlining how Hegel exports the plastic arts—its movement of activity and passivity, such as we can characterize both the artist and their material itself as plastic—outside of their traditional aesthetic realm to encompass the movement and nature of the self-forming subjectivity, thought, and being itself. This paper traces the conceptual epigenesis of plasticity from its notional kernel in Ralph Cudworth’s concept of plastic nature through Shaftesbury to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers including Herder and Hegel in Germany and Coleridge in Britain to reveal the paradoxical presence of the idealist concept plastic ‘life’ at the heart of contemporary materialist thought.