SELF AND EMOTIONAL LIFE
INSURRECTIONS: CRITICAL STUDIES IN RELIGION, POLITICS, AND CULTURE
INSURRECTIONS: CRITICAL STUDIES IN RELIGION, POLITICS, AND CULTURE
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK, CLAYTON CROCKETT, CRESTON DAVIS, JEFFREY W. ROBBINS, EDITORS
The intersection of religion, politics, and culture is one of the most discussed areas in theory today. It also has the deepest and most wide-ranging impact on the world. Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture will bring the tools of philosophy and critical theory to the political implications of the religious turn. The series will address a range of religious traditions and political viewpoints in the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world. Without advocating any specific religious or theological stance, the series aims nonetheless to be faithful to the radical emancipatory potential of religion.
After the Death of God, John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, edited by Jeffrey W. Robbins
The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures, Ananda Abeysekara
Nietzsche and Levinas: “After the Death of a Certain God,” edited by Jill Stauffer and Bettina Bergo
Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe, Mary-Jane Rubenstein
Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation, Arvind Mandair
Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, Catherine Malabou
Anatheism: Returning to God After God, Richard Kearney
Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation, Peter Sloterdijk
Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism, Clayton Crockett
Radical Democracy and Political Theology, Jeffrey W. Robbins
Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic, edited by Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, and Creston Davis
What Does a Jew Want? On Binationalism and Other Specters, Udi Aloni
A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul, Stanislas Breton, edited by Ward Blanton, translated by Joseph N. Ballan
Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala
Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and Event, Clayton Crockett
SELF
AND EMOTIONAL LIFE
PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOANALYSIS, AND NEUROSCIENCE
ADRIAN JOHNSTON | CATHERINE MALABOU
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2013 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-53518-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Johnston, Adrian, 1974–
Self and emotional life : philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience / Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou.
p. cm. — (Insurrections)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-231-15830-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-15831-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53518-2 (e-book)
1. Emotions. 2. Self. 3. Psychoanalysis. 4. Neurosciences. 5. Psychoanalysis and philosophy. I. Malabou, Catherine. II. Title.
BF531.J64 2013
J28'.2—dc23
2012036488
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].
Cover image: © Illona Wellmann/Trevillion Images
Cover design: Lisa Hamm
References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
CONTENTS
Preface: From Nonfeeling to Misfeeling—Affects Between Trauma and the Unconscious
Acknowledgments
PART I.
GO WONDER: SUBJECTIVITY AND AFFECTS IN NEUROBIOLOGICAL TIMES
CATHERINE MALABOU
INTRODUCTION: FROM THE PASSIONATE SOUL TO THE EMOTIONAL BRAIN
1. WHAT DOES “OF” MEAN IN DESCARTES’S EXPRESSION, “THE PASSIONS OF THE SOUL”?
2. A “SELF-TOUCHING YOU”: DERRIDA AND DESCARTES
3. THE NEURAL SELF: DAMASIO MEETS DESCARTES
4. AFFECTS ARE ALWAYS AFFECTS OF ESSENCE: BOOK 3 OF SPINOZA’S ETHICS
5. THE FACE AND THE CLOSE-UP: DELEUZE’S SPINOZIST APPROACH TO DESCARTES
6. DAMASIO AS A READER OF SPINOZA
7. ON NEURAL PLASTICITY, TRAUMA, AND THE LOSS OF AFFECTS
CONCLUSION
PART II.
MISFELT FEELINGS: UNCONSCIOUS AFFECT BETWEEN PSYCHOANALYSIS, NEUROSCIENCE, AND PHILOSOPHY
ADRIAN JOHNSTON
8. GUILT AND THE FEEL OF FEELING: TOWARD A NEW CONCEPTION OF AFFECTS
9. FEELING WITHOUT FEELING: FREUD AND THE UNRESOLVED PROBLEM OF UNCONSCIOUS GUILT
10. AFFECTS, EMOTIONS, AND FEELINGS: FREUD’S METAPSYCHOLOGIES OF AFFECTIVE LIFE
11. FROM SIGNIFIERS TO JOUIS-SENS: LACAN’S SENTI-MENTS AND AFFECTUATIONS
12. EMOTIONAL LIFE AFTER LACAN: FROM PSYCHOANALYSIS TO THE NEUROSCIENCES
13. AFFECTS ARE SIGNIFIERS: THE INFINITE JUDGMENT OF A LACANIAN AFFECTIVE NEUROSCIENCE
POSTFACE: THE PARADOXES OF THE PRINCIPLE OF CONSTANCY
Notes
Index
PREFACE
FROM NONFEELING TO MISFEELING—AFFECTS BETWEEN TRAUMA AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
This book is the product of a fortuitous encounter between two people with significantly overlapping interests as well as fundamental convictions and intuitions held in common. Adding to this good fortune is the fact that they bring major differences of perspective to these shared grounds. This combination of agreement and disagreement provides an absolutely ideal foundation for productive exchange and stimulating debate.
Catherine and I met in April 2007 at the annual Theory Reading Group conference hosted by Cornell University. During that weekend of intense discussions, we quickly recognized each other as well-matched interlocutors. Our backgrounds in Hegelianism, concerns with psychoanalysis, and, especially, beliefs in the importance and urgency of engaging with today’s life sciences on the basis of Continental European theoretical traditions from Kant to the present all converged to convince us that we needed to build a lasting collaborative relationship. Our feeling of kinship has been further reinforced by an impression of being together in a marginal position vis-à-vis the majority of Continentalists, with their antinaturalist proclivities and preferences, by virtue of our fascination with and enthusiasm for things biological. We remain convinced that no genuine materialist philosophy legitimately can neglect the natural sciences generally and that no authentically materialist theory of subjectivity defensibly can sideline the life sciences specifically.
Within weeks following our time together in Ithaca, Catherine and I hatched a plan via e-mail to coauthor a book. After we paused for deliberation, Catherine proposed the topic of affect as a focus for our joint project, expressing a desire to write about wonder in her half of the text. I happily agreed to this. It gave me the opportunity to revisit and more thoroughly digest problems I had been left to grapple with in the wake of my time spent in psychoanalytic training. The question of whether (and, if so, in what sense[s]) affects can be unconscious strictly speaking persistently perturbed Sigmund Freud throughout his career and has remained an unresolved controversy in the worlds of psychoanalysis ever since. This issue is a big bone of content
ion, particularly in French psychoanalytic contexts dominated by Jacques Lacan. It entails far-from-negligible consequences for theoretical metapsychology as well as clinical practice. Compelled by a mixture of personal and intellectual reasons, I wanted to try to tackle the enigmatic (non)rapport between affects and the unconscious. By contrast, Catherine clearly intended to push further the challenges to psychoanalysis as a whole posed by her philosophical reflections on the implications of various neuropathologies. As I see it, the main fault line of divergence separating our approaches here is between my more immanent and her more external critiques of the psychoanalytic modeling and handling of the psyche, with our philosophical critiques of analysis nonetheless both being developed in dialogue with neurobiology.
Before continuing to sketch an overview of the differences distinguishing my and Catherine’s positions, I will offer a sharper outline of our common commitments, the shared preoccupations that brought us together and continue to cement our fundamental solidarity. For the past several decades, much ink has been spilled by scholars in the theoretical humanities about the intersections of Continental philosophy and the psychoanalytic traditions linked to Freud. However, with a few notable exceptions, Continental philosophers and those scholars in the humanities and social sciences influenced by them have been and remain averse to the prospect of any deep theoretical engagement with the life sciences. Biology as a whole, and the neurosciences in particular, have been largely avoided by such thinkers and writers on the basis of now-outdated (mis)conceptions according to which any such engagement inevitably must result in an ideologically dangerous mechanistic materialism demoting human subjects to the degraded status of mere objectified puppets of an evolutionary-genetic nature. This sort of alibi, speciously justifying an avoidance of philosophically and psychoanalytically responding to the revolutionary advances occurring in the life sciences, is no longer plausible or valid (if it ever was to begin with).
Nowadays, it simply isn’t true that one has to sell one’s philosophical or psychoanalytic soul in its entirety in order to dance with the neurobiological devil (although Catherine and I have separate views regarding the nitty-gritty details of this). In fact, over the past half century, scientific matters concerning neuroplasticity, mirror neurons, epigenetics, and newly proposed revisions to Darwinian depictions of evolution, among other topics, have destroyed the caricature of biological approaches to subjectivity upon which the ever-more-hollow excuses of a tired old antinaturalism rely, caricatures depicting such approaches as essentially deterministic and reductive. This antinaturalism leans upon the partially obsolete early-twentieth-century critiques of the natural sciences formulated by, to name just a handful of prominent individuals, Edmund Husserl, Georg Lukács, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The time is long overdue for psychoanalysis and the ensemble of established Continental philosophical orientations to begin appreciating and seriously working-through a number of developments in the life sciences. Especially for any conceptual framework that wishes to identify itself as materialist, turning a blind eye to these developments seems unpardonable. A completely antinaturalist, antiscientific materialism is no materialism at all.
What might European philosophy and Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis look like if sincere and sustained efforts finally are made to digest the many implications for conceptions of the human mind flowing from cutting-edge neuroscientific research? There is very little presently available in print interfacing psychoanalytic metapsychologies with the neurosciences through the mediation of the rich conceptual resources of primarily French and German philosophy from the seventeenth century through today (especially Hegel-indebted variants of historical and dialectical materialism arising in the nineteenth century). Furthermore, what currently goes by the name of “neuro-psychoanalysis,” primarily an Anglo-American clinical endeavor, entirely ignores the ideas of Lacan and the philosophical sophistication of Lacanian analysis, its sophistication being rooted mainly in the legacies of modern philosophy beginning with Descartes.
One of the several fashions in which the two pieces by Catherine and me brought together in this volume complement each other is through their carefully correlated contrasts in terms of philosophically thinking the relations between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences. Simply stated, whereas Catherine’s primary agenda is to delineate the constraining limits of psychoanalysis when it is faced with revelations arising from scientific investigations of the brain, my guiding program is targeted at examining how these two fields promise mutually to enrich one another if synthesized with sufficient care. Catherine maintains that analysis can neither theoretically explain nor practically cure the sorts of afflictions at the heart of scientific studies of many neuropathologies; its attempts to do so have to be abandoned and it must rethink radically, in light of the damaged brains examined by neurology, the philosophical concepts and categories of contingency, continuity, event, selfhood, and subjectivity lying at the metapsychological basis of its clinical practices.
I maintain that a genuinely materialist and empirically up-to-date psychoanalysis can and should be arrived at through Lacanianizing non-Lacanian neuro-psychoanalysis. In tandem with this, both the psychoanalytic and neuroscientific sides of this hybrid interdisciplinary formation must be dialectically reworked in parallel with each other. Such a program promises to flesh out a scientifically well-grounded materialist account of how more-than-material subjective structures (such as those at the center of various strains of Continental philosophy and psychoanalysis) arise that come to escape the explanatory jurisdiction of natural-scientific discourses alone.
Furthermore, unlike Catherine, I think that Freudian-Lacanian analysis is in a good position to accommodate and absorb the findings of recent scientific research into the brain, so long as one bears in mind the distinction between the theorizable and the treatable in analysis (in addition to operating with an appropriate philosophical framework for nonreductively interfacing the analytic and the biological). From my perspective, and to be more precise, four categories have to be acknowledged as permutations of this distinction: (1) what analysis can both theorize and treat; (2) what analysis cannot theorize but can treat; (3) what analysis can theorize but not treat; and (4) what analysis can neither theorize nor treat. Whereas the first of these four categories is the most straightforward—what I’m thinking of are the familiar, garden-variety neuroses providing analysts from Freud onward with the daily bread-and-butter work of their clinics—some readers initially might be perplexed by the second of these four categories. However, many clinical analysts openly wonder about the “therapeutic action” of their practices, honestly admitting uncertainty and puzzlement about what it is that they’re doing (or not doing) that’s responsible for the therapeutic progress of their analysands (i.e., what they’re successfully treating without being able confidently to theorize).
The real axes of tension between Catherine and me have to do with the third and fourth categories. I can illustrate what’s at stake here with the famous example, dear to the celebrated neuroscientist Antonio Damasio as well as Catherine, of Phineas Gage, the unfortunate nineteenth-century Vermont railway laborer whose left frontal lobe was severely damaged by a workplace accident in which a tamping iron was blown through his skull by an explosion. Gage, who survived this awful incident, could be characterized as ur-patient zero of the neurosciences to the extent that they have relied heavily on human subjects whose brains have been harmed and impaired in specific fashions by disease or injury. These ill-fated subjects enable the methodical pinpointing of “cerebral localizations” in which features of mental life are correlated to specific parts of the central nervous system. The outcome of Gage losing the inhibitory, self-censoring functions evidently arising from the damaged areas of his brain was that, as the story goes, he underwent a dramatic change of personality, going from being a disciplined, respectful, and considerate person before the accident to being the opposite soon after it.
For Catherine,
Gage and those like him—this would include other victims of various types of traumas to the head as well as those ravaged by such terrible ailments as Alzheimer’s disease—undergo brutally senseless physical ordeals in which they lose their former subjectivities without the possibility of the redemption of meaning. They live on as shadowy husks of their former selves, cruelly transported by the contingent vicissitudes of material reality to unimaginable mental wastelands beyond the reach of psychoanalytic recognition and rescue. In Catherine’s eyes, not only is analytic interpretation unable either to comprehend or to cure such patients, but these “new wounded,” at the levels of both their pasts and futures, pose external checks on the universal explanatory ambitions of the metapsychologies of the temporally extended psyche put forward by Freud, Lacan, and their followers. She is guided by the firm conviction that these sufferers of a range of neuropathologies definitely belong in the last of the four categories I enumerated above (i.e., what analysis can neither theorize nor treat).
With reference to the examples of Gage and his kind, I am guided by the equally firm conviction that more of these instances than Catherine estimates belong in the third category (i.e., what analysis can theorize but not treat). However, I would concede to her, while wondering whether this concession would oblige psychoanalysis sweepingly to transform itself in a self-critical fashion, that analytic theory doesn’t have much to say about extremely advanced Alzheimer’s or the severest, most disabling forms of brain damage—unless, if the damage is caused by an injury resulting from an accident, such accidents sometimes qualify as tragic varieties of parapraxis, namely, the “bungled actions” famously analyzed by Freud in his 1901 book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (not to say that understanding these accidents as parapraxes would be of much therapeutic use to their damaged-beyond-repair victims). Returning to nineteenth-century Vermont, Gage likely did not become disinhibited in a generic manner; his posttraumatic personality, however drastically different from his pretraumatic one, probably exhibited distinctive, idiosyncratic details in terms of the specifics of his (foul) language, (impulsive) behavior, and so on. It seems implausible to me that myriad conscious and unconscious elements of his complex ontogenetic life history predating the trauma, elements distributed across many more still-functioning regions of his brain than just the wounded left frontal lobe, abruptly ceased to play any explicable role whatsoever in his existence in the aftermath of the event. Analytic interpretation, although admittedly therapeutically impotent in this case, would be not without its powers to explore and illuminate the associative chains of continuity shaping the sociosymbolic aspects of the Gage who survived this harsh brush with death as a subject transformed in difficult-to-discern relation, but relation nevertheless, to his prior subjectivity.
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