Of course, if someone in Gage’s circumstances were to arrive in an analyst’s consulting room asking about the possibility of starting an analysis, the analyst probably would advise him first to visit a hospital to have the iron rod in his skull removed before thinking about starting analytic work. (Perhaps it is inappropriate to put a somewhat humorous point on this dark example.) Although the early pioneers of analysis in the first decades of the twentieth century tended to overestimate the extent of the curative powers and therapeutic jurisdiction of their young discipline, no reasonable analytic clinicians practicing today believe that analysis is a catch-all treatment suitable and effective for those with cripplingly debilitating brain damage or Alzheimer’s. Analysts indeed debate with each other about “width of scope”: The wider an analyst’s scope, the more sorts of analysands with more severe psychopathologies he/she is willing to put on the analytic couch (and, the psycho- here signals that pathologies having more to do with psyche than soma are what is at stake in these intra-analytic debates). But, even those with the widest of scopes almost certainly would refer the types of individuals of concern to Catherine, if and when such persons presented for analyses, to other specialist practitioners of nonanalytic treatment modalities. Perhaps save for a tiny minority of extreme and eccentric exceptions proving the rule, the days of a psychoanalysis making hubristic claims to unqualified universal hegemony are definitely over, for better and worse.
Likewise, certain forms of psychosis (e.g., the schizophrenias) are widely considered by analysts as well as nonanalysts to be triggered by somatic-organic, rather than psychical-historical, causal factors. Analysis cannot treat such conditions in a way that provides a total cure. But, in line with how I argued with respect to Gage, those schizophrenics exhibiting linguistically and conceptually articulated mental content (e.g., elaborate delusions or hallucinations)—content that testifies to their enduring as proper psychical subjects, however disturbed and disturbing—at least can be better heard and understood thanks to the metapsychological theories and interpretive practices of analysis. Analytic assistance, combined with other appropriate means of medical and nonmedical support, might even help them to varying degrees short of a full-blown elimination of the pathology’s underlying somatic-organic causal triggers; perhaps it could partially address aspects of their multidimensional conditions, especially social and psychical ones. This is to underscore, apropos the four categories I listed earlier, the difference between my favoring the third category (i.e., what analysis can theorize but not treat [in a way that provides a total cure]) and Catherine’s favoring the fourth category (i.e., what analysis can neither theorize nor treat) as regards an overlapping set of pertinent examples.
Catherine explores the future of psychoanalysis as it is interrupted and cut short by the neurosciences. I explore the future of psychoanalysis as it is enriched and carried forward by these same sciences. Despite this division, we agree that neither psychoanalysis nor the neurosciences (nor philosophy, for that matter) can remain unchanged in passing through these ultimately unavoidable disciplinary intersections. Similarly, in response to wary, skeptical questions demanding justification for why philosophers and psychoanalysts should pay attention to the biology of the brain, our answer is simple: ignoring the impressive advances of neurobiology lands the theorist of subjectivity in either metaphysical dogmatism or factual error—intellectual bankruptcy either way. What’s more, clinicians risk blundering about in partial darkness, irresponsibly and perhaps dangerously, if they willfully deprive themselves of potential sources of information further illuminating the minded subjects that are the objects of their practices.
Another manner in which Catherine’s and my pieces dovetail with each other has to do with our choices of which emotions to focus on analyzing, with affect serving as the topic in relation to which we both weave together philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the neurosciences. Catherine zooms in on wonder and I on guilt. The former affect, as per Aristotle, lies at the motivating basis of theoretical philosophy (i.e., epistemology, ontology, metaphysics, logic, and so on); the latter affect plays a key role in practical philosophy (i.e., ethics, morality, and politics). Hence, taken together, our texts revisit the Western philosophical tradition’s vexed, ambivalent relationship with its affective sources—emotions and feelings have been perennially problematic phenomena for philosophy since Socrates—equipped with the combined resources of psychoanalysis and new scientific studies of the brain. Moreover, the place of affect in accounts of embodiment and subjectivity has been a hotly disputed topic particularly in Continental philosophy from the mid-twentieth century up through the present. Between phenomenology, structuralism, poststructuralism, feminism, and deconstruction, to name some of the main trajectories shaping the history of this philosophical tradition, a plethora of debates remain unresolved about what affects are and the extent of their importance in shaping the objects of philosophical investigation. We each reframe these debates in light of the neurosciences.
In “Go Wonder: Subjectivity and Affects in Neurobiological Times,” Catherine pushes off on the basis of a philosophical platform consisting in, from the early modern period, the Continental rationalists René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza and, from the postwar period, the French poststructuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. She anchors her reflections in a consideration of the deconstructive thesis according to which the self-presence of the modern philosophical subject’s “autoaffection” (i.e., its reflexively being in touch with itself, so to speak) actually amounts to a “heteroaffection” (i.e., being touched by another, by the foreignness of an alterity-to-self). Catherine asks about the relative radicalism of the deconstructions of (affective) subjectivity pursued separately under the banners of contemporary philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the neurosciences when compared with one another. Her text builds toward proposing that today’s nonreductive neurobiological investigations into selfhood and emotional life, especially Damasio’s work in these areas (including his neuroscientific reevaluations of Descartes and Spinoza), “think the unthought,” as Heidegger would put it, of both the philosophical and psychoanalytic deconstructions bearing upon heteroaffected subjective identity. The “synaptic self” (to employ Joseph LeDoux’s phrase) of current neurobiology is a subject not only exposed to constant mediation by others (as per heteroaffection), but also vulnerable to traumatic occurrences of disruption that erase it and leave behind an utterly different subject (or even nonsubject) in its vanished place.
Such inflicted breaks of total and complete discontinuity in the organism’s life history sometimes result, as numerous tragic case studies illustrate, in what Catherine calls a “hetero-heteroaffection,” through which heteroaffection, as the subject’s capacity to be affected, itself is affected by the event of trauma qua the hetero- of a certain sort of alterity or otherness. The sad result, whose sadness cannot be registered by the victim of an intrusive happening affecting his/her brain thus, is a “dis-affected” subject, a subject deprived of the ability to be affected so as to experience emotions and feelings. According to Catherine, neither Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis nor Derridean deconstruction and allied trends in postwar French philosophy rise to the task of trying to envision and explain such posttraumatic neuro-subjectivity, a subjectivity confronting its witnesses with the unsettling, upsetting spectacle of human beings who biologically survive the ordeal of the deaths of their prior forms of personal identity. Catherine’s contribution seeks to remedy this lacuna.
Whereas Catherine is interested in an affecting (i.e., neurological trauma) that negates the potential of being further affected emotionally, I am fixated upon the seemingly paradoxical notion of unconscious affects (i.e., feelings that aren’t felt as such). As I remarked previously, the relation (or lack thereof) between the unconscious and affective life is an issue that haunts psychoanalysis from its inception with Freud onward. Despite Freud’s tendency to dismiss unconscious affective phenomena as self-contradict
ory impossibilities—it apparently makes no sense to speak of unfelt feelings—certain observations pertaining in particular to individuals’ guilt repeatedly nudge him over the course of his intellectual itinerary to speculate about the existence of affects affecting the psyche without being consciously registered as what they really are in (repressed) actuality an sich (such as repressed guilt being self-consciously [mis]experienced as free-floating anxiety). Operating with metapsychological theory, clinical practice, and German and French textual details simultaneously in view, I reread the history of this persisting problem in the development of psychoanalysis from Freud through Lacan to very recent analytic and philosophical orientations, a problem with both theoretical and clinical ramifications. I argue against Lacan’s insistence that Freud categorically denies the reality of unconscious affects, interpretively uncover a more sophisticated metapsychology of affect in Lacan’s teachings than is usually suspected (even by Lacan himself) to be there, critically intervene in post-Freudian and post-Lacanian controversies over these topics, and bring the results of all this to bear on my effort to forge a Lacan-influenced neuro-psychoanalytic account of affective subjectivity.
Based on a tripartite distinction between affects, emotions, and feelings that I extract from readings of Freud and Lacan, I analyze affective phenomena as complex constellations of multiple tiers and dimensions, rather than as elementary, unitary experiences of a self-evident nature incapable of further analytic decomposition. This analysis is profoundly inspired by a Hegelian philosophical outlook. Insofar as feelings are always feelings of feelings (i.e., mediated experiences of the second order or greater), the phenomena of “misfelt feelings,” generated through the interference of defense mechanisms functioning unconsciously within and between different strata of psychical structure, become thinkable possibilities, possibilities not yet thought through by philosophy and psychoanalysis. Contemporary affective neuroscience (à la Damasio, LeDoux, and Jaak Panksepp, among others) is requisite for doing justice to the lingering difficulty of the topic of unconscious affect via the idea of misfelt feelings, with the latter involving distorted conscious registrations of unconscious affects that aren’t consciously felt for what they truly are, but are felt all the same. In the process, I undertake formulating a novel vision of the relationships between, on the one hand, the sciences of nature, and, on the other hand, both psychoanalysis and Continental philosophy.
Those interested in European philosophy and its history will appreciate this book’s wide-ranging conceptual recasting of affective phenomena with reference to theories of subjectivity. Those interested in psychoanalysis will appreciate this book’s balance between, on one side, delineating the explanatory and therapeutic limitations of analysis vis-à-vis neuropathologies and, on another side, its opening up of fresh paths for productive collaboration between analysts and neuroscientists. Those interested in the neurosciences will appreciate this book’s encouraging invitation to them to bring their knowledge into cooperative connection with the subtleties and complexities of state-of-the-art philosophical and psychoanalytic thought.
Catherine forges the concept of hetero-heteroaffection. I introduce the concept of misfelt feelings. Both of us, through our ways of triangulating philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the neurosciences, seek to push readers to reconsider significantly their senses of each of these three fields as well as to imagine exciting new alliances among them full of promising potentials.
Adrian Johnston
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I warmly thank Adrian Johnston for the trouble he has taken to reread, correct, and sometimes translate the texts that follow.
I thank equally the students at the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, who, in the spring of 2008, were the first auditors of the seminar that is at the origin of my contribution to this work.
CM
To begin with, I would like to express what a sheer joy it’s been to get to know and to collaborate with Catherine Malabou. I hope and believe that this project marks the start of an enduring cooperative relationship between us.
Wendy Lochner and the staff at Columbia University Press have been fantastic to work with on this book. I greatly appreciate Wendy’s care and guidance generously provided throughout the publication process. I also am profoundly grateful to the editors of the Insurrections series for their support of this project: Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey W. Robbins, and Slavoj Žižek.
Richard Boothby and Tracy McNulty were amazing as external readers of the manuscript. Their incredibly thoughtful feedback was absolutely invaluable to me as I edited and revised pivotal portions of the manuscript. Moreover, Rick’s and Tracy’s friendship and support is very dear to me. Additionally, I owe Tracy an enormous amount of gratitude for her having organized a reading group at Cornell University centered on this manuscript, in which I participated via a Skype video link. This group selflessly furnished me with ideas and insights that proved to be crucial to the final version of this text. For this, I thank Karen Benezra, Shanna Carlson, Aaron Hodges, Ryan Jackson, Fernanda Negrete, and Brad Zukovic. Bruno Bosteels, also at Cornell, offered me very helpful suggestions apropos the topic(s) of honte and pudeur in particular.
I had several wonderful opportunities to present and discuss aspects of this work in a number of venues. Audiences and interlocutors at the following events were extremely helpful to me: the 2009 Second Annual Spring Conference of the Psychoanalysis Reading Group at Cornell University; the 2009 conference on “Concept and Form: The Cahiers pour l’Analyse and Contemporary French Thought” at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (now at Kingston University); and a one-day seminar on this book hosted by the Department of Comparative Literature at Emory University in 2011.
So much of what I have to say here about psychoanalysis is an outgrowth flowing from what I learned and underwent while a research fellow and clinical training candidate at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute from 2002 to 2006. The people who played key roles in my experience there are too numerous to list. I imagine they know who they are and want them to be aware of just how much I appreciate everything they gave me.
Finally, and as always, I wish to proclaim the profundity of my debts and thankfulness to, and love for, my partner in everything, Kathryn Wichelns. Not only is she the very center of my being, but with her caring brilliance, she’s taught me more than anyone else about emotional life in all its subtle richness and complexity.
I appreciate the editors of the journals in which earlier draft versions of some of the chapters of my text appeared for allowing these to reappear in revised form here: “Affects Are Signifiers: The Infinite Judgment of a Lacanian Affective Neuroscience,” Nessie, ed. Fabien Tarby, no. 1, 2009, nessie-philo.com/Files//adrian_johnston___affects_are_signifiers.pdf; “The Misfeeling of What Happens: Slavoj Žižek, Antonio Damasio, and a Materialist Account of Affects,” in “Žižek and Political Subjectivity,” ed. Derek Hook and Calum Neill, special issue, Subjectivity 3, no. 1 (April 2010): 76–100; “Affective Life Between Signifiers and Jouis-sens: Lacan’s Senti-ments and Affectuations,” Filozofski Vestnik: What Is It to Live?, ed. Jelica Šumič-Riha, 30, no. 2 (2010): 113–141; “Affekt, Gefühl, Empfindung: Rereading Freud on the Question of Unconscious Affects,” Qui Parle? Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 18, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 249–289.
For Dr. Grant
AJ
PART I.
GO WONDER
SUBJECTIVITY AND AFFECTS IN NEUROBIOLOGICAL TIMES
CATHERINE MALABOU
INTRODUCTION
FROM THE PASSIONATE SOUL TO THE EMOTIONAL BRAIN
Current neurobiology is engaged in a deep redefinition of emotional life. The brain, far from being a nonsensuous organ, devoted solely to logical and cognitive processes, now appears, on the contrary, to be the center of a new libidinal economy. Such a vision is not only displacing the relationship between body, mind, and the psyche. It also disturbs disciplinar
y boundaries and induces secret networks between sciences (biology and neurobiology) and the humanities (philosophy and psychoanalysis). A new conception of affects is undoubtedly emerging.
Many neurobiologists today insist upon the role of the “emotional brain.” This leads them to elaborate a new theory of affects that is rooted in the traditional one, but whose conclusions transgress the frame of the philosophical analysis of passions, and even the frame of deconstruction.
The general issue I address here is the following: Does this new conception produce a genuinely different approach to emotions, passions, and feelings? Or, by contrast, does it consist in a mere reformulation of the traditional approaches to these topics? Is current neuroscience just a repetition or is it engaged in an unprecedented material and radical deconstruction of affects, feelings, and emotions—and, hence, in a new deconstruction of subjectivity? The problem is knowing whether emotions and affects are still considered rooted in an originary process of autoaffection of the subject—where the subject has to touch itself in order to be moved or touched by objects—or if the study of the emotional brain precisely challenges the vision of a self-affecting subjectivity in favor of an originary deserted subject, a subject that is definitely not present to itself.
Self and Emotional Life Page 2