The mechanism of mapping seems to be separated from all emotional processes. The attachment of the self to itself, or concern, does not take place any longer. There is no possible healing of such a disaffection: “Elliott seemed beyond redemption, like the repeat offender who professes sincere repentance but commits another offense shortly after.”10
Another case is that of “L”: “The stroke suffered by this patient, which I will call L., produced damage to the internal and upper regions of the frontal lobe in both hemispheres. An area known as the cingulate cortex was damaged, along with nearby regions. She had suddenly become motionless and speechless.… The term neutral helps convey the equanimity of her expression, but once you concentrated on her eyes, the word vacuous gets closer to the mark. She was there but not there.… Again, emotion was missing.”11
A third example is even more serious and concerns cases of anosognosia (from the Greek nosos, “disease,” and gnosis, “knowledge”). Anosognosia denotes the inability to recognize a state of disease in one’s own organism: “No less dramatic than their oblivion that anosognosic patients have regarding their sick limbs is the lack of concern they show for their overall situation, the lack of emotion they exhibit, the lack of feeling they report when questioned about it. The news that there was a major stroke … is usually received with equanimity, sometimes with gallows humor, but never with anguish or sadness, tears or anger, despair or panic.”12
Anosognosia is a lack of perception of damage. It is also known as Anton’s Syndrome. Anton was an Austrian physician living at the end of the nineteenth century. In a talk he gave to the Society of Physicians of Austria, he described these patients as “soul-blind for their own blindness.” Anton’s Syndrome is the inability to make a certain functional loss available for conscious experience. The patients who suffer from this syndrome lose any ability to wonder about anything. The feeling of wonder itself has disappeared from both their body and their mind. This disappearance is a total one, not a partial loss. In what case is the deconstruction of autoaffection the more radical: when wonder proceeds from heteroaffection, or when affects are definitely impaired? Do we have to think of a heteroaffected subject or of a nonaffected subject to complete or accomplish the deconstitution of traditional subjectivity?
Freud and the Event
Freud wouldn’t agree to consider that an emotion or an affect may totally disappear. In the psyche, he says, “nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away.”13 This capacity to preserve the past is precisely called plasticity. Freud compares the psyche to the city of Rome, in which every strata of the past is still present: every memory is still alive in the psyche. He insists upon the impossibility of total oblivion in psychic life. Every memory is thus like a monument.
In the development of the mind, says Freud in “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,”
every earlier stage persists alongside the later stage which has arisen from it; here succession also involves co-existence, although it is to the same materials that the whole series of transformations has applied. The earlier mental stage may not have manifested itself for years, but none the less it is so far present that it may at any time again become the mode of expression of the forces in the mind, and indeed the only one, as though all later developments had been annulled or undone. This extraordinary plasticity of mental developments is not unrestricted as regards directions; it may be described as a special capacity for involution—for regression—since it may well happen that a later and higher state of development, once abandoned, cannot be reached again. But the primitive stages can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable.
What are called mental diseases inevitably produce an impression in the layman that intellectual and mental life have been destroyed. In reality, the destruction only applies to later acquisitions and developments. The essence of mental disease lies in a return to earlier states of affective life and functioning. An excellent example of the plasticity of mental life is afforded by the state of sleep, which is our goal every night. Since we have learnt to interpret even absurd and confused dreams, we know that whenever we go to sleep we throw out our hard-won morality like a garment, and put it on again next morning.14
We clearly see that Freud only stresses the positive meaning of plasticity. Plastic means imperishable, resilient, possessing the ability to cure or to heal. The metaphor of the city of Rome shows that psychic space, thought in reference to architectural extension, is always capable of exhibiting its memory and overcoming wounds and loss. The psyche can be both extended and positively plastic or indestructible.
Neurobiology puts this so-called psychic immortality into question. The formation of a “new” identity after a brain lesion shows that the primitive psyche is not imperishable, as Freud states; it can be damaged without any return to a previous state. The patients are not allowed to regress or to seek shelter in their own history or their own past.
The value of Freud’s “excellent example of the plasticity of mental life” (i.e., dreams) seems to be put into question by some kinds of brain damage that destroy the very process of dreaming. Mark Solms shows that damage caused to sites specializing in mental imagery provokes a disturbance in the ability to dream: “If the patient loses the ability to generate a mental image, the inability to dream seems a logical consequence.”15 Three areas are involved in the process of imagery. When these areas are affected, visual experiences cease. For example, these patients lose the ability to perceive color or movement, or they lose the ability to recognize specific objects or faces. What are the effects of these lesions on dreaming? “Damage to the primary visual cortex, Zone 1, has (perhaps surprisingly) no effect on dreaming at all. Although these patients cannot see in waking life, they see perfectly well in their dreams.… Damage to the middle zone of the system, Zone 2, causes exactly the same deficits in dreams as it does in waking perception: these patients continue to dream in various sense modalities, especially somatosensory and auditory, but their visual dream imagery is deficient in specific respects. For example they no longer dream in color, or they dream in static images (loss of visual movement), or they cannot recognize any of the faces in their dreams. Damage to the higher zone, … Zone 3, on the other hand, produces complete loss of dreaming.”16
What does the Freudian definition of the plasticity of mental life mean to people who have lost their ability to dream, to people who cannot see what they are dreaming of? In what sense is their sleep a return to a previous state? What is there to find? These patients indeed do have a psychic life. We must ask ourselves what this kind of psychic life means when there is no return, no regression, no attachment to the past, and no detachment from the past either.
A neurological accident is hopeless, unpredictable, and never consumable, an accident that cannot be integrated by the psyche, that cannot make sense for it, that cannot form a moment of a personal history. This is a purely destructive event, which provokes the total disappearance of a psychic formation, or of a brain region, or of affects, particularly wonder.
CONCLUSION
The main issue of this study was the following: Is it possible to develop a philosophical or theoretical approach to affects that does not determine them to be simple consequences of an originary autoaffection? Is the way in which the subject affects itself the definitive foundation of all affects?
We saw that autoaffection, which coincides, according to Derrida, with the inner voice and the possibility of hearing and feeling oneself, is defined as a kind of self-touching. For this autoaffective structure of the subject, Derrida substitutes several types of heteroaffection, or auto-heteroaffection, stating that there is no pure, properly pure, immediate, intuitive, living, and psychical autoaffection at all.
Can we follow such a path and think of affects as belonging to an originary structure of heteroaffection? We characterized heteroaffection as the affection of the other, in the double sense of the genitive: th
e affection coming from the other, from the utterly other, without any expectation or anticipation, and my being affected by the other in me, as if affects affected someone else in me other than me.
Wonder, the “philosophical” affect as such, tends both to erase and to underscore the border between auto- and heteroaffection. To the extent that it is a kind of surprise or astonishment, it appears to be the affection of the other, the unexpected. At the same time, wonder seems to be the privileged way in which spirit feels and enjoys itself. Spinoza himself declares: “When the mind regards its own self and its power of activity, it feels pleasure, and the more so, the more distinctly it imagines itself and its power of activity.”1 Wonder is thus an ambivalent affect.
For Derrida, Deleuze, and Damasio as readers of Descartes and Spinoza, the approach to affects in general and wonder in particular, in its ambivalence, determine three things: first, a concept of alterity; second, a privileged metaphor; and, third, a specific notion of spatiality.
In Derrida, the concept of alterity coincides with a definition of subjectivity as a relationship between an “I” and a “You,” a “self-touching you.” The way in which the intruder or the other affects me is a gift that comes from nowhere; it is given. This is what Derrida calls, contra Descartes, ontological, as opposed to subjective, generosity. Wonder always comes from the other wondering in me. Derrida’s privileged metaphor is the graft. The psyche’s extension provides us with a new concept of spatiality.
In Deleuze, affects are always affects of an essence, not of a subject. His privileged metaphor is the face. Spatiality is understood as the plane of immanence. Wonder coincides with the interruption of the social part of the individual. The face becomes a sign.
According to Damasio, there is a fundamental biological alterity of the self to itself to the extent that autoaffection (homeostasis) remains nonconscious. Damasio’s privileged metaphor is that of cold blood. The spatiality is that of maps or neural patterns. Wonder means interest in the world and desire for acting. But it cannot be thought outside of its opposite, namely, the absence of wonder: coldness, detachment, indifference.
Who brings to light heteroaffection in the most radical way? In order to answer this question, let’s confront three texts. Each of them presents an essential aspect of heteroaffection. The first one (by Derrida) could be entitled “The Two Lovers,” the second (by Deleuze) the “Becoming-Non-Human,” and the third (by Damasio) “I Am in Pain But I Don’t Feel It.”
In On Touching, Derrida imagines a very specific case of separation:
Imagine: lovers separated for life. Wherever they may find themselves and each other. On the phone, through their voices and their inflection, timbre, and accent, through elevations and interruptions in the breathing, across moments of silence, they foster all the differences necessary to arouse a sight, touch, and even smell—so many caresses, to reach the ecstatic climax from which they are forever weaned—but are never deprived. They know that they will find ecstasy again, ever—other than across the cordless cord of their entwined voices. A tragedy. But intertwined, they also know themselves, at times only through the memory they keep of it, through the spectral phantasm of ecstatic pleasure—without the possibility of which, they know this too, pleasure would never be promised. They have faith in the telephonic memory of a touch. Phantasm gratifies them. Almost—each in monadic insularity. Even the shore of a “phantasm,” precisely, seems to have more affinity with the phainesthai, that is, with the semblance or shine of the visible.2
In his lectures on Spinoza, Deleuze affirms:
The affect goes beyond affections.… The affect is not the passage from one lived state to another but man’s nonhuman becoming. Ahab does not imitate Moby Dick.… It is not resemblance, although there is resemblance.… It is a zone of indetermination, of indiscernability, as if things, beasts and persons … endlessly reached that point that immediately precedes their natural differenciation. This is what is called an affect. In Pierre, or The Ambiguities, Pierre reaches the zone in which he can no longer distinguish himself from his half-sister, Isabelle, and he becomes woman.… This is because from the moment that the material passes into sensation as in a Rodin sculpture, art itself lives on this zone of indetermination.3
Damasio establishes a distinction between pain and emotion caused by pain:
In short, pain and emotion are not the same thing. You may wonder how the above distinction can be made, and I can give you a large body of evidence in its support. I will begin with a fact that comes from direct experience, early in my training, of a patient in whom the dissociation between pain as such and emotion caused by pain was vividly patent. The patient was suffering from a severe case of refractory trigeminal neuralgia, also known as tic douloureux. This is a condition involving the nerve that supplies signals for face sensation in which even innocent stimuli, such as a light touch of the skin of the face or a sudden breeze, trigger an excruciating pain. No medication would help this young man who could do little but crouch, immobilized, whenever the excruciating pain stabbed his flesh. As a last resort, the neurosurgeon Alamida Lima, offered to operate on him, because producing small lesions in a specific sector of the frontal lobe had been shown to alleviate pain and was being used in last-resort situations such as this.
I will not forget seeing the patient on the day before the operation, afraid to make any movement that might trigger a new round of pain, and then seeing two days after the operation, when we visited him on rounds; he had become an entirely different person, relaxed, happily absorbed in a game of cards with a companion in his hospital room. When Lima asked him about the pain, he looked up and said quite cheerfully that “the pains were the same,” but that he felt fine now. I remember my surprise when Lima probed the man’s state of mind a bit further. The operation had done little or nothing to the sensory patterns corresponding to local tissue dysfunction The mental images of that tissue dysfunction were not altered and that is why the patient could report that the pains were the same. And yet the operation had been a success.… Suffering was gone.… This sort of dissociation between “pain sensation” and “pain affect” has been confirmed in studies of groups of patients who underwent surgical procedures for the management of pain.4
These three texts have something in common. Each of them challenges the possibility for the self to touch itself, or to coincide with itself. They all state the impossibility of what Merleau-Ponty calls the “touching-touched” relationship between me and myself: “When my right hand touches my left,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “I touch myself touching: my body accomplishes a ‘sort of reflection’ and becomes a ‘subject-object.’”5 In each case, we find, in a way, two subjects: (1) the two lovers, which can also be read as two expressions of the self-subject, as a staging of the impossibility of autoaffection, and which are the difference of the subject and his own affects that escape him; (2) the subject feeling pain but not being affected by it. We always find two subjects in one. But, there is an infinite distance between them.
The “telephonic memory of a touch” presupposes the existence of a touch without presence. If two lovers can stay together without ever being able to see each other, beyond joy and sorrow, it is because there is no presence of the self to itself, no mirror, no self-reflection. There is no difference between the feeling of myself and the feeling of the other. In both cases, what I experience is separation, parting, discontinuity, and interruption.6 The opening of the self to itself or to the other does not come back to itself, does not form a loop. Wonder remains without closure.
Deleuze takes three examples of affects, which correspond to the three kinds of ideas in Spinoza: first, the affect caused by the effect of the sun on the body; second, the affect caused by the effect of the sun on a painter’s canvas; third, the affect caused by the essence of the sun on the mind. In each case, there is no reflection; the sun (the affecting or touching power) is not reflected by the surface that it touches. The touching and the touched are driven out of
themselves. They form a block that exceeds the material locus of their contact: the body, the canvas, and the mind. That is why Deleuze says that percepts go beyond perceptions, affects beyond affections, reaching this zone of indetermination that is the nonhuman.
Affects, including autoaffection, separate the human subject, the “I” from itself. I am not affected. In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze writes, referring to Merleau-Ponty’s schema of both touching and touched hands: “The difficult part is not to join hands but to join planes.”7 The different kind of affects and affections in Spinoza, the sun on my body, the sun on a canvas, the solar self, or autoaffection of essence are mediated by a “plane of immanence,” a projective surface that prevents immediate contact. There is always the space of a difference between the touching and the touched, which is clear even in the case of essential autoaffection.
According to Damasio, the most intimate and elementary part of our neural self is, as we saw, the “protoself.” The protoself is made of the interconnected and coherent collection of neural patterns that, moment by moment, represent the internal state of the organism, that is, the neural “map” that the organism forms of itself. This map helps the organism to regulate and maintain its homeostasis, which is continuously disturbed by intruding objects. Homeostasis is not a merely mechanistic or logical process. It produces the first form of attachment of the self to itself.
To the extent that this attachment is nonconscious, the subject is anonymous. If we could have a look at our internal neural processes, Damasio says, it would always be from the third-person perspective. In the case of the suffering patient, what happens is not exactly the loss of emotion, but the loss of conscious emotion. The surgery provokes the dissociation of two strata of the subject that are usually unified: the protoself and the conscious self. The third person, involved in homeostatic processes, and the first person, involved in conscious procedures, are disconnected and can look at each other at a distance.
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