Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience

300 Pages·2013·5.06 MB·English

by  Adrian Johnston

SELF
AND EMOTIONAL LIFE
PHILOSOPHY,
PSYCHOANALYSIS, AND
NEUROSCIENCE
I
ADRIAN JOHNSTON CATHERINE MALABOU
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Publishers Since rS93
New York Chichester. West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2013 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Johnston. Adrian. '974-
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 978-0-23I-I5831-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) -
ISBN 978-0-231-53518-2 (e-book)
I. Emotions. 2. Self. 3. Psychoanalysis. 4. Neurosciences. 5. Psychoanalysis and
philosophy. I. Malabou. Catherine. II. Title.
BF531.J64 2013
J28:2-dc23
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent
and durable acid-free paper.
This book is printed on paper with recycled content.
Printed in the United States ofA merica
ClO987654321
PlO9876S4321
Cover image: © Illona WellmannlTrevillion 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
Prefoce: From Nonfteling to Misfeeling-Afficts Between
Trauma and the Unconscious ix
Acknowledgments xix
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"?
12
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
35
5. THE FACE AND THE CLOSE-UP: DELEUZE'S
SPINOZIST APPROACH TO DESCARTES
43
6. DAMASIO AS A READER OF SPINOZA
50
7. ON NEURAL PLASTICITY, TRAUMA,
AND THE LOSS OF AFFECTS
56
CONCLUSION
63
PART II.
MISFELT FEELINGS: UNCONSCIOUS AFFECT
BETWEEN PSYCHOANALYSIS, NEUROSCIENCE,
AND PHILOSOPHY 73
ADRIAN JOHNSTON
8. GUILT AND THE FEEL OF FEELING:
TOWARD A NEW CONCEPTION OF AFFECTS
75
9. FEELING WITHOUT FEELING: FREUD AND
THE UNRESOLVED PROBLEM OF UNCONSCIOUS GUILT
88
10. AFFECTS, EMOTIONS, AND FEELINGS:
FREUD'S METAPSYCHOLOGIES OF AFFECTIVE LIFE
102
VI • CONTENTS
11. FROM S NIFIERS TO
LACAN'S SENThvfENTS AND AFFECTUATfONS
12. EMOTIONAL LIFE AFTER LACAN: FROM PSYCHOANALYSIS
TO THE NEUROSCIENCES
ISO
13. AFFECTS ARE SIGNIFIERS: THE INFINITE JUDGMENT
OF A LACANIAN AFFECTIVE NEUROSCIENCE
ISS
POSTFACE: THE PARADOXES OF THE PRINCIPLE
OF CONSTANCY
211
Notes 225
Index 251}
CONTENTS • VII

PREFACE
FROM NONFEELING TO MISFEELING
AFFECTS BETWEEN TRAUMA
AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
T
his book is the product of a fortuitous encounter between two people
with significantly overlapping interests as well as fundamental convic
tions 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 abso
lutely 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 dis
cussions, 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 collab
orative relationship. Our feeling of kinship has been further reinforced by an
impression of being together in a marginal position vis-a-vis the majority of
Continentalists, with their antinaturalist proclivities and preferences, by vir
tue 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 sub
jectivity 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, express
ing 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 through
out his career and has remained an unresolved controversy in the worlds of
psychoanalysis ever since. This issue is a big bone of contention, particularly
in French psychoanalytic contexts dominated by Jacques Lacan. It entails far
from-negligible consequences for theoretical metapsychology as well as clini
cal 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 chal
lenges 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 ofo ur common com
mitments, 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 influepced 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 (ifit ever was to begin with).
x • PREFACE
isn't true that one to sell one's
soul in its in order to dance with the
devil (although Catherine and I have separate views regarding the nitty-gritty
details of this). In fact, over the past half century, scientific matters concern
ing 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 antinatural
ism leans upon the partially obsolete early-twentieth-century critiques of the
natural sciences formulated by, to name just a handful of prominent individu
als, Edmund Husser!, Georg Lukacs, 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 antinatu
ralist, 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 inter
facing 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 phi
losophy 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 care
fully correlated contrasts in terms of philosophically thinking the relations
between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences. Simply stated, whereas Cath
erine's primary agenda is to delineate the constraining limits of psychoanal
ysis when it is faced with revelations arising from scientific investigations of
the brain, my guiding program is targeted at examining how these two fields
PREFACE • XI