145 The works of Peter Kropotkin, undoubtedly one of the most famous and pow- erful theorists of mutual aid, are today in the grip of a double (mis)reading: one critical and one conservative. The first exposes him as an essentialist and rejects him on that basis, the second presents him as a thinker whose ideas can be used without radical reworking. Both readings take Kropotkin for granted, overlooking the tension of his ideas. In this chapter, I try to unleash mutual aid by freeing Kropotkin from this grip and (re)reading him, first, from the anarchist position of the utilisation of the history of philosophy through the maximal modification proposed by Gilles Deleuze, and second, by orient- ing Kropotkin’s ideas towards ontological extremes of plasticity, rebellion and animation. Ultimately, I intend to view mutual aid as a panpsychistic armature that unfolds all the way down, traversing the orders of organic and non-organic life. UNRECOGNIZABLE KROPOTKIN As a tribute to an influential researcher who left this world unexpectedly, let’s start with a small quote. In their Introduction to the forthcoming edition of Mutual Aid: An Illuminated Factor of Evolution David Graeber and Andrej Grubačić write that Kropotkin’s book is that rare case when an ‘argument against reigning political common sense presents such a shock to the system that it becomes necessary to create an entire body of theory to refute it’. The depth of the shock caused by Kropotkin’s challenge is due to the fact that Chapter 9 Mutual Aid Armature 1 Plasticity All the Way Down Eugene Kuchinov I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Jesse Cohn for his responsiveness and help in working on the manuscript, and Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University for support.