Sometimes, the opposite situation occurs. After certain sorts of brain damage, some patients loose their feelings and emotions, but not their first-person perspective, not their consciousness. Those people, as Damasio says, act in cold blood. Because of their disease, they are led to indifference, coldness, and a lack of concern, to “a marked alteration of the ability to experience feelings.”8
It is time now to return to the initial issue: Who thinks autoaffection in the most radical way? All the questions raised by Derrida—the impossibility of a presentation of the self to itself, the impossibility of regarding the affects as rooted in conscious autoaffection—appear precisely to coincide with the problems that are addressed by the neurobiological redrawing of the self. We also know that Deleuze devotes a whole chapter to the brain at the end of What Is Philosophy?
In fact, this apparent proximity between our three authors hides a genuine discrepancy. It seems that the thought of affects in Deleuze and the thought of heteroaffection in Derrida always require the thought of a heterobody, that is, of a nonorganic body or of body without organs.
To bring to light the originary process of heteroaffection, Derrida and Deleuze need to delocalize the natural body. The absence of organs, for Deleuze, means the lack of organization, as if our flesh, our blood, our brain were suspected of being the material expressions of metaphysics, as substance, system, presence, and teleology are such expressions. The “Body Without Organs” remains a body but it only presents itself as a surface to slip over or bounce off. It is a plane. Derrida also needs to think of a kind of nonnatural surface, a nonbiological bodily extension, which allows for the encounter with the other. What he calls the “subjectile” is such a surface, which “stretches out under the figures that are thrown upon it” and lies “between the subject and the object” without any biological determination.9
This exclusion of the body also appears in On Touching: “No one should ever be able to say ‘my heart,’ my own heart, except when he or she might say it to someone else and call him or her this way.… There would be nothing and there would no longer be any question without this originary exappropriation and without a certain ‘stolen heart.’”10 Why is that? Why shouldn’t we say “my heart”? Why this moral injunction “shouldn’t”? Is it necessary to transcend biology to articulate a concept of affects that is not related to subjectivity or to its self-touching? Or, on the contrary, doesn’t it seem that this is one of the most striking lessons of neurology today: that the organic neural organization is radically deconstructive, that a deconstruction of subjectivity is at work in our neurons?
We may wonder whether the critique of phenomenology, of the phenomenological body, of “flesh” and “fleshism,” does not lead Derrida and Deleuze to dematerialize, in their turn, the process of affects. When I clasp my hands, is it two planes that I join? Is it certain that two lovers can resist the absence of bodily pleasure and be satisfied with fantasm? Why is it necessary to look for the outside outside of the body? Why put the body at a distance, at a distance from its own organs?
This leads us to examine Freud’s puzzling statement about the psyche’s spatiality. On August 22, 1938, he wrote on a single sheet: “The psyche is extended, knows nothing about it [Psyche ist ausgedehnt, weiss nichts davon].”11 If this were the case, space, like time, would be outside the realm of consciousness and knowledge. Amazingly, when discussing psychic time and space, Freud refers to Kant’s definition of the forms of intuition. If our unconscious does not know anything about its own temporality and spatiality, it is because their structure is analogous to that of a transcendental apparatus. We must admit time and space to be pure forms of the psyche, in the same way that Kant speaks of the pure temporal and spatial forms of our intuition. Freud writes: “At this point I shall venture to touch for a moment upon a subject which would merit the most exhaustive treatment. As a result of certain psychoanalytic discoveries, we are today in a position to embark on a discussion of the Kantian theorem that time and space are ‘necessary forms of thought.’”12
By the time that Freud came to write Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he had formulated many spatial metaphors to represent his hypotheses about the psychical apparatus and its components, to represent spatially the structural hypotheses of id, ego, and superego and the topographical concepts of consciousness, preconscious, and unconscious. We can think, for example, of the passage from The Ego and the Id where Freud affirms that “the ego is first and foremost a body-ego. It is not merely a surface entity, but is in itself a projection of a surface.”13
This spatial character of the psyche stays forever unconscious. Commenting on Freud’s statement, Derrida declares: “Psyche the untouchable, Psyche the intact: wholly corporeal, she has a body, she is a body, but an intangible one. Yet she is not only untouchable for others. She doesn’t touch herself, since she is wholly extended partes extra partes.”14 Inaccessible to subjectivity and reflexivity, the spatiality of the psyche incarnates the impossibility of self-touching and appears as the very structure of heteroaffection.
Such a space, such a body, is nonempirical and nonbiological. As we know, when Freud uses the word topic, or when he represents the psychic apparatus as a series of strata or layers, it is always metaphorical. The psyche’s spatiality is imaginary; it does not exist as such. Freud would have, of course, refused to consider an organ like the brain to be the extension and material ground for psychic phenomena. That is also why Freud does not admit the idea of a total destruction of any part of the psychic apparatus. The unconscious is indestructible because it has an abstract, unreal spatiality, something that can be blurred but not physically impaired.
To declare that the unconscious, and the psyche in general, are indestructible amounts to saying that affects and emotions themselves are always present, even when they are negative, even when they belong to what Spinoza calls sorrowful instincts. How would it be possible to envisage an emotionless psyche?
If we are allowed to consider that Freud and Lacan elaborate a vision of a psyche that, contrary to the classical philosophical subject, is never autoaffected, but seems always affected from outside, without any possibility of appropriating this alterity, it seems that the principle of this heteroaffection cannot be destroyed.
The issue of wonder may be assimilated, in Lacan, to the problematic of the gaze, on the one hand, and to the problematic of the agalma, on the other. Agalma is an ancient Greek term for a pleasing gift presented to the gods as a votive offering. The agalma was intended to woo the gods, to dazzle them with its wondrous features and so gain favor for its bearer. The agalma, therefore, was endowed with magical powers beyond its apparent superficial value. Over time, the term agalma has come to mean an iconic image, something beautiful, an object to be treasured. Lacan introduced the term in his seventh seminar (1960–1961), lecturing on Plato’s Symposium. The agalma is defined by love; it is the inestimable object of desire that ignites our desire. Relating this to the analytic setting, Lacan proposes that the agalma is the treasure that we seek in analysis, the unconscious truth we wish to know.15
Looking for this treasure would be impossible if we didn’t feel gazed at during this search. The psychoanalyst gazes at the subject at the same time that the subject wonders at him as at a desirable treasure. To gaze means: “to stare in wonder and in admiration.” The French translation of this word, in the Lacanian context, is “fascination.” The transference relationship requires both the agalma and the gaze as a double direction of wonder: gazing at and being gazed at. Looking at the agalma, the inestimable object of desire, becomes for the analysand the catalyst agent of the transference relationship. This look (which does not come from any eyes, as Lacan firmly states) is in itself a response to the feeling of being looked at, of feeling oneself “sous le regard” or “sous la fascination” (under the gaze). Because the gaze and the agalma are not the works of any given subjectivity, and because their very structure has much to do with fantasy, the affects they generate (lov
e, fascination, idealization, and the like) do not proceed from an autoaffective process of the psyche. They are heteroaffections to the extent that they come from the other. Still, this being affected by the other cannot itself be affected, that is, altered to the point that it can disappear or be totally destroyed.
The same thing happens in Derrida’s philosophy. Wonder and affects in general may be deconstructed, but their deconstruction does not amount to their possible destruction or disappearance. A subject cannot be cut off from its own affectivity or libidinal disposition. We saw that Deleuze also doesn’t seem to envisage the end of wonder, the possibility for a face to not express anything, to lose its capacity to become a surface of inscription or a plane of immanence.
For neurobiologists, psychic spatiality is not ideal, abstract, or transcendental. It coincides with the brain and is exposed to its possible material destruction. In most cases, a brain injury is a type of wound that cannot be anticipated and that, in opposition to the Freudian definition of the psychic event, cannot be explained by the personal history or destiny of the subject. A brain injury most of the time has no other cause than an accidental or an external cause. In this sense, it is “the utterly other.”
If Solms has a right to claim that there is a coincidence between brain events and the inner life of subjective experience, brain injuries cannot then be considered as mere physiological or organic lesions. Rather, they also appear as psychic lesions. The brain today appears as the space of and for the neuronal unconscious.
The emergence of a new type of unconscious and psychic life that is entirely destructible has important consequences for the general theory of death and destruction drives. A major form of brain and psychic disturbance today is, as we saw, emotional indifference and “flatness.” Studying some particular cases of brain lesions such as agnosia or anosognosia, Damasio notices that the people who suffer those kinds of diseases are “absent without leave.” Oliver Sacks, in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, describes “The Lost Mariner’s Case.” The patient “was strongly built and fit, he had a sort of animal strength and energy, but also a strange inertia, passivity, and (as everyone remarked) ‘unconcern’; he gave all of us an overwhelming sense of ‘something missing,’ although this, if he realised it, was itself accepted with an odd unconcern.”16
Damasio links those cases of the loss of emotion with criminal psychological types such as serial killers and with all kinds of social withdrawal. It appears that a philosophical approach to these neurological analyses of injury, indifference, and criminality is necessary in order to understand what we should call a new state of mind of the psyche, determined by a neural death drive, indifferent to love or wonder, indifferent even to its own power of destruction or its own aggressiveness.
The time has come to elaborate a new materialism, which would determine a new position of Continental philosophy vis-à-vis neurobiology, and build or rebuild, at long last, a bridge connecting the humanities and biological sciences. Instead of proposing a substantial vision of subjectivity, current neurobiology is exploring the absence of the self to itself. There could be no power of acting, no feeling of existence, no temporality without this originary delusion of the first person. Such a position might help in radicalizing the notions of heteroaffection, the nonhuman, or the death drive, which remain, in their actual state, remnants of the metaphysical tradition because of the contempt that both philosophy and psychoanalysis have expressed with regard to the biological in general and the brain and the neurosciences in particular.
As the cognitivist Thomas Metzinger writes: “Nobody ever was or had a self.… No such things as selves exist in the world: Nobody ever was or had a self. All that ever existed were conscious self-models that could not be recognized as models. The phenomenological self is not a being, but a process—and the subjective experience of being someone emerges if a conscious information-processing system operates under a transparent self-model. You are such a system right now, as you read these sentences. Because you cannot recognize your self-model as a model, it is transparent: you look right through it. You don’t see it. But you see with it.… As you read these lines you constantly confuse yourself with the content of the self-model currently activated by your brain.”17 The transparency of the self-model and the anonymity of the emotional brain are the disenchanted wonders of the new psychosomatic and libidinal space.
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
Psychoanalysis is organized around its distinctive conception of the unconscious. Moreover, analysis is, of course, not only a set of philosophical and metapsychological theories regarding this peculiar object of its inquiries; it’s also an arsenal of therapeutic techniques for treating specific forms of mental suffering and anguish. Particularly as regards the phenomena confronting working analysts in their clinical consulting rooms day in and day out, the powerful and moving manifestations of affective life, manifestations spanning the full spectrum from the pleasurable to the painful, seem to be of a degree of significance and weight to analysis comparable to that enjoyed by the unconscious itself.
And yet, starting with the founder of psychoanalysis, the question of how to situate the unconscious and affective life vis-à-vis each other consistently has been a controversial matter provoking an array of disparate, and often clashing, responses within and beyond analytic circles. The crux catalyzing the controversy is the basic, fundamental question of if it makes sense to posit feelings that aren’t consciously felt (at least as the feelings they presumably really are). As I soon will show in detail, Freud himself repeatedly and markedly vacillates apropos the question of whether or not (and, if so, how) affects can be (and sometimes are) unconscious in a meaningful analytic manner. Additionally, and to paint in broad brushstrokes at this early introductory stage of my exposition, those who follow in Freud’s footsteps typically take diverging paths in relation to this issue. At one extreme, certain Anglo-American post-Freudian currents sometimes give the impression that, for them, affects are the alpha-and-omega targets of analytic interpretation—and this in the general absence of a philosophically rigorous metapsychological account of how affects are able to be unconscious, an account resolving the unresolved problems that plagued Freud in thinking about this topic. At another extreme, Lacan is virtually unwavering in his claim that a Freud to whom analysts should remain steadfastly faithful categorically rules out the possibility of unconscious affects as a contradiction in terms—and this on the basis of an exegetically and philosophically sophisticated, albeit quite debatable, reading of Freud’s writings and overall metapsychological framework. In my estimation, neither extreme represents a satisfying solution to the riddle of the rapport between the unconscious and affective life.
For analysis, the ramifications of this riddle are both metapsychological and clinical. On the metapsychological side, conceptions of what the unconscious is and how it functions are up for grabs. Do repression and related intrapsychical defense mechanisms operate solely on ideational representations (i.e., linguistic and conceptual mental contents), leaving affects to be pushed and pulled to and fro on the planes of conscious experience as mere superficial appearances? Do the formations of the unconscious comprise exclusively bundles and webs of structured symbolic materials? Or, alternately, do subterranean surges of emotions and feelings pulse through the associative networks of defended-against dimensions of psychical life? How, if at all, do defense mechanisms interfere with or inflect affective phenomena? On the clinical side, the core concern is what analysts’ ears, attempting to attune themselves to the murmurings and outbursts of the unconscious, should be listening for from patients on their couches. This concern shapes in turn the techniques practicing analysts deploy in their ways of hearing, interpreting, and interveni
ng in relation to their analysands. When, if ever, are expressions of affect to be taken at face value? How honest or dishonest are emotions and feelings to be regarded? Which affects, if any, ought to draw special attention from the analyst? How should analysts respond to various upsurges of passions and sentiments during the analytic hour? Are certain affective responses on the part of analysands indicative of interpretive or therapeutic success (or failure)? The questions I’ve raised in this paragraph highlight just a few of many metapsychological and clinical issues in play around the intersection (or lack thereof) between things unconscious and affective.
Having initiated my intervention by outlining the psychoanalytic origins and stakes animating it, I want to continue easing into the topic of unconscious affects from a more philosophical angle. If, as Aristotle famously declares in the Metaphysics, wonder is the source driving philosophizing,1 then a complementary specification immediately should be added to this: Wonder, a compelling, captivating feeling that is experienced as a light, gentle yearning or exhilaration, is the affective motor behind the speculative endeavors of theoretical philosophy. That is to say, if wonder is a fundamental philosophical affect, it’s fundamental primarily to those parts of philosophy moved principally by a “desire to understand” (i.e., epistemology, ontology, metaphysics, logic, and the like). But, what about the significant other half of philosophy? In other words, what about practical philosophy (i.e., ethics, politics, and the like), which is concerned not so much with “What can I know?” (expressing the wondering of theoretical philosophy), but rather with “What should I (or we) do?” Guilt is one of the main candidates for being to practical philosophy what wonder is to theoretical philosophy, namely, a foundational affect that is a catalyst for the deliberations, decisions, and deeds of concern to philosophy’s prescriptions in addition to its wonder-driven descriptions.
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