The relationship to surprise and otherness initiated by wonder and extended by generosity preserves the union between the body and the soul and is the token for its liveliness. Wonder is surprise at the extraordinary, and it is the ideal way to regard others because it is prior to judgment and thus free of prejudice. Thanks to wonder and generosity, their existence resists assimilation or reduction to sameness or self and we are able to accept dissimilarities in them. At the same time, aren’t wonder and generosity simple projections of our own views or self-understanding onto others, a pure transfer of self-esteem?
2.
A “SELF-TOUCHING YOU”
DERRIDA AND DESCARTES
One may think that the very notion of passions of the soul implies a conception of the self-touching of subjectivity that confirms the very structure of autoaffection. We saw that passions of the soul appear to be disturbances of the soul that make it feel alive or existent. The passionate soul has a proper kind of emotion, raised by the most intimate and sensual dimension of the mind-body union. Is this sensuality reducible to a purely spiritual affectivity in which body and space are evacuated? This is the general orientation of Derrida’s interpretation of Descartes.
Autoaffection and Self-Touching
Derrida’s thought may be regarded, as a whole, as a long and continuous deconstructing gesture of autoaffection in the name of heteroaffection. Derrida never opposes autoaffection to heteroaffection. He shows, on the contrary, that these two structures are intimately linked. In that sense, they appear inseparable. Derrida does not challenge autoaffection as such—there is an unmovable autoaffective dimension of subjectivity—but he criticizes the way in which philosophers always present it as pure (i.e., as purified of any heteroaffection). The incontestable existence of autoaffection cannot occult the fact that there is no such thing as a pure autoaffection. Instead of affirming the existence of an originary autoaffection, Derrida asks, “shouldn’t one rather distinguish between several types of auto-hetero-affection without any pure, properly pure, immediate, intuitive, living, and psychical auto-affection at all?”1
How does Derrida understand autoaffection? In “To Speculate—on ‘Freud,’” he explains that it must be understood as “related to the auto-affective structure of time … such as it is described by Husserl in Lectures on Internal Time Consciousness or in Heidegger’s Kantbuch.… [This structure] concerns the oneself which apostrophizes itself and calls (to) itself as an other in auto affection.”2 Autoaffection coincides with the “inner voice” and the possibility of hearing oneself speak. According to Derrida, autoaffection is a kind of touch: an autoaffected subject is a subject that solicits itself, calls and answers itself, as if there were two persons in one. The traditional concepts of “consciousness” or the “soul,” essential to the definition of subjectivity, are structured as a two-sided instance, one that acts or speaks, the other that receives or listens.
Derrida shows that autoaffection is a transcendental structure that is always presented, in traditional philosophy, as the primordial means, for the subject, to experience its being alive or to feel its own existence. To this extent, autoaffection coincides with life itself: “Auto-affection is a universal structure of experience. All living things are capable of auto-affection. And only a being capable of symbolizing, that is to say of auto-affecting, may let itself be affected by the other in general. Auto-affection is the condition of an experience in general. This possibility—another name for ‘life’—is a general structure articulated by the history of life, and leading to complex and hierarchical operations.”3 Once again, Derrida does not criticize this notion for itself; he states that it is not originary, that the self doesn’t exist before the movement of heteroaffection.
Heteroaffection means the affect of the other, in the double sense that (1) the one who is affected in me is always the other in me, the unknown “me” in me, a dimension of my subjectivity that I don’t know and don’t perceive, and that (2) what affects me is always somebody other that myself, something else than the feeling of my ownness. Even when I have the feeling of self-existence, for example, the I that feels and the existence that is felt are not exactly the same; they differ. There is always a third term, an unknown instance between me and myself. In the end, we have a series of “you”s instead of a double I. Therefore, autoaffection may be regarded as a self-touching, but this self-touching is always, as Jean-Luc Nancy declares, a “self-touching you” (un “se toucher-toi”).
Commenting on this formula, Derrida affirms: “At the very moment when ‘I’ makes its entrance, … it signs the possibility or the need for the said ‘I’ (as soon as it touches itself) to address itself, to speak to itself, to treat of itself (in a soliloquy interrupted in advance) as an other. No sooner does ‘I [touch] itself’ than it is itself—it contracts itself, it contracts with itself, but as with another.… I self-touches spacing itself out, losing contact with itself, precisely in touching itself.”4 The feeling of the difference between the self and itself is then never present to itself, never conscious but always, and right from the start, “disarticulated.”5 The difference that lies at the heart of the “I” is the difference between me and an “intruder,” the other of me in me, “the heart of the other”: “touching, in any case, touches the heart and on the heart, but inasmuch as it is always the heart of the other.”6 For that reason, “no one should ever be able to say ‘my heart,’ my own heart.… There would be nothing and there would no longer be any question without this originary exappropriation and without a certain ‘stolen heart.’”7
The word exappropriation is important here, since it insists upon the interruption of ownness or property. All affects proceed from a disappropriation, not from an intuitive synthesis, of the ego. Heteroaffection, more exactly auto-heteroaffection, is then the real source of all affects.
A Nonspatial Space
Whereas Derrida, until the 1990s, defined logocentrism as the privilege of voice and speech over writing and distance in general, the sense of touch becomes, in later works like On Touching, the most metaphysical of all senses, surpassing vision and hearing in its attachment to presence. In Of Grammatology, autoaffection is clearly defined as “hearing oneself speak.” In On Touching, autoaffection is characterized as the subject’s structural self-touching. Following deconstruction’s development and evolution, we have then moved from logocentrism to “haptocentrism” (from the Greek haptein, “to touch”).
Descartes is, according to Derrida, the paradigmatic thinker of this primordial self-contact that defines subjectivity as such. Is not the passionate soul one of the most convincing examples of such a structure? To undertake such an interpretation, Derrida stresses what appears to him to be a major contradiction in The Passions of the Soul. This contradiction concerns the status of the pineal gland. Thanks to this gland, the soul, “which has no elation to extension,”8 acquires a kind of spatial existence, a kind of “body,” as we previously said.
In paragraph 30 of The Passions of the Soul, Descartes claims that the soul is united to the whole body: “The soul is united to all parts of the body conjointly.” At the same time, Descartes affirms that the union of the soul and the body is circumscribed by one part of the body only, to a single point, the pineal gland: “There is a little gland in the brain where the soul exercises its functions more particularly than in the other parts of the body.”9
Descartes explains: “We need to recognize also that although the soul is joined to the whole body, nevertheless there is a certain part of the body where it exercises its functions more particularly than in all the others.… The part of the body in which the soul directly exercises its functions is … the innermost part of the brain, which is a certain very small gland situated in the middle of the brain’s substance and suspended above the passage through which the spirits in the brain’s anterior cavities communicate with those in its posterior cavities.”10
Derrida asks: If there is a spatiality of the soul, how can it be reduc
ed to a point? Does not the idea of a punctual spatialization of the mind, which corresponds to the site of the union, amount to a pure and simple absence of spatiality (of the mind as well as of the union itself)? Thinking of extension as a point is highly contradictory. The soul’s spatiality, and consequently its bodily existence, appears then to be an ideal—and not a material—one. This problem is also what allows Damasio, as we will see, to consider that, despite the affirmation of the mind-body union, the Cartesian mind is a “disembodied” one.
According to Derrida, the “innermost part of the brain” where the pineal gland is situated appears to be only a metaphorical space, not an effective one. Such a space plays the part of an ideal hand by means of which the soul touches itself and feels itself as united to the body. The pineal gland is the soul’s hand, the nonspatial space of the soul’s self-touching. Instead of opening itself to alterity, the passionate soul is first autoaffected and self-centered, to the extent that it has to touch itself first to be able to touch and be touched by the other.
What does “to touch itself” mean? The treatise’s title, The Passions of the Soul, in fact means The Difference Between the Soul’s Actions and Passions. The ideal space metaphorically incarnated by the pineal gland is the space of the soul’s self-differentiation, this self-differentiation coinciding with two modes of being of the soul: activity and passivity. All the Cartesian developments concerning the actions of the body and the actions of the soul tend toward the final characterization of the space in which the very difference between activity and passivity is felt as such. Touching, writes Derrida, “situates the locus of equilibrium between action and passion.… Touch at the same time fulfills it and covers the entire field of experience, every interval and every degree between passivity and activity.… Touch, as such, occupies a median and ideal region of effort poised between passivity and activity.”11 It is also, for that reason, “the name of all the senses.”12
Every affect is like a finger of the hand that evaluates the ideal difference between the soul’s activity and passivity. The pineal gland can thus be characterized as a transcendental locus for the soul’s self-differenciation, a prefiguration of the Kantian distinction between apperception and the empirical subject.
In this general context, wonder can only mean the way in which the soul is touched or moved by itself, a kind of emotion of the self for itself. Of course, it involves surprise and openness to the unknown or the unfamiliar, but these feelings are caught in a loop that ties the soul to itself. A striking aspect of the book On Touching is that the deconstructive undoing of this loop itself takes place within a tribute paid by Jacques Derrida to his friend Jean-Luc Nancy, a tribute in which Derrida repeats his admiration (wonder) and respect for him. May something like a non-autoaffected wonder exist? May the subject’s self-touching be interrupted? May the metaphysics of touching be breached at some point?
Syncope
Jean-Luc Nancy has written at length about the possibility of bringing to light a nonmetaphysical sense of touch. His most explicit book on that topic is Corpus.13 What are the main characteristics of this deconstructive touching? Derrida answers: “Continuity and indivisibility: two traits that could help us to formalize the whole metaphysics of touch, which is often an expressly spiritualistic metaphysics, sometimes a matter of ‘humanisms.’ Nancy seems to break away from haptocentric metaphysics, or at least to distance himself from it. His discourse about touch is neither intuitionistic nor continuistic, homogenistic, or indivisibilistic. What it first recalls is sharing, parting, partitioning, and discontinuity, interruption, cæsura—in a word, syncope. In accordance with a ‘my body’ that finds itself involved from the outset with a techné irreducible to ‘nature’ as to ‘spirit’ and according to a sense of touch that Nancy describes as ‘local, modal, fractal.’”14
A nonmetaphysical touch is a touching that structurally loses contact with itself. “Discontinuity, interruption, cæsura, syncope” express this loss. The subject’s self-touching is always discontinuous—absent to itself, as it were—as if it were the touching of an other: heteroaffection as such. This interruption marks a moment, a node, a fold, in the continuity: it performs a hinging, both breaking the continuity and letting it appear. In medicine, syncope is the temporary loss of consciousness experienced by a quick drop in blood pressure or a blockage of the blood to the brain. This last definition cannot be irrelevant, given Nancy’s stress on the body and on his own body and heart in the essays “The Intruder” and “Corpus.”15
The “syncope” is not a continuous touch between the body and the soul; it is not a punctual touch either as it is in Descartes with the pineal gland. This is a touch that doesn’t know about itself. An affect touches me but I don’t know what “me” means. This interruption between me and myself appears to be a “spacing,” which is the genuine spatiality of the breached affected subject. “At the very moment when ‘I’ makes its entrance,” Derrida writes, “it signs the possibility or the need for the said ‘I’ (as soon as it touches itself) to address itself, to speak to itself, to treat of itself (in a soliloquy interrupted in advance) as an other. No sooner does ‘I [touch] itself’ than it is itself—it contracts itself, it contracts with itself, but as with another.”16 This kind of originarily interrupted touch, this heteroaffection, is also called “to self-touch you” or the “self-touching-you.”17 Because the primordial affect (the affect of the self for itself) is always interrupted by the intrusion of alterity, all particular affects (love, hatred, joy, sadness, wonder, or generosity) are also constantly syncoped, interrupted, and discontinuous.
“Ontological Generosity”
This non-self-centered origin of affects displaces the very definition of affects themselves. Derrida stresses the possibility of elaborating a new, non-Cartesian meaning of both wonder and generosity, a wonder and generosity that wouldn’t know or be aware of their own openness. A genuine generosity would be a pure gift, unconscious of itself, unable to feel itself give: “Generous?” Derrida asks. “Yes, generous: this word is all the more compelling since a certain ‘generosity of being’ becomes the ultimate justification of his ‘experience of freedom.’ This generosity is no longer simply a virtue of a subject, of what Descartes might have grasped by this word. This generosity allows one to configure, and think together, the gift (or rather the offering), decision, spacing, and freedom.”18
Wonder and generosity are still to be understood as fundamental ethical affects. But, because they don’t proceed from a self-touching of the subject, their source is not “selfish” in the literal sense. They are not my affects; they are given to me. Such gifts can come only from being—hence the expression “generosity of being.” An affect is a gift that comes from the absolute outside of being. This “outside” or exteriority of being is characterized again as a “space” or a “spacing” that has no interiority but marks the irretrievable distance between being and the subject.
The problem with the Cartesian ethics of wonder and generosity is that when a subject consciously gives something (is effectively and consciously generous), it is not really an offer. It is the subject’s decision, and thus always a form of calculation. To give out of generosity because one can give is no longer to give. The opening cannot be my decision but an ontological movement, impersonal and anonymous. It is existence itself that gives me the feeling of existence, not “me.”
Therefore, the affective opening of the self cannot signify autonomy or autoaffection any longer. It is to be thought, each time, as an event: something coming from outside, from the other. Heteroaffection might then be defined as an affect which doesn’t touch me to the extent that it doesn’t touch itself. Such would be the “generosity of nonsubjective freedom.”19
3.
THE NEURAL SELF
DAMASIO MEETS DESCARTES
The questions raised by Derrida concerning the impossibility of a presentation of the self to itself, as well as those regarding affect as an accident modifying a give
n subjective autoaffected structure, seem strikingly to coincide with the problems that are currently addressed by the neurobiological redrawing of the self. If neurobiologists acknowledge the existence of autoaffection, they define it as a nonconscious structure.
Following Damasio’s reading of Descartes, the present chapter will bring to light the deconstructive aspects of the neurobiological (or “neuro-psychoanalytic”) redefinition of the subject. It will also show the irretrievable differences and distances between these approaches. The notion of the “neural self” will be at the center of our analysis.
Brain and Subjectivity
Plasticity Versus Fixity
In Descartes’ Error, Damasio declares: “I am convinced that neurobiology can begin to approach the subject.”1 Neurosciences today allow us to consider subjectivity not as a biologically determined, fixed instance. On the contrary, neural subjectivity is a plastic structure in which the emotional dimension plays a major role.
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