Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience

Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture

by Adrian Johnston, Catherine Malabou

Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou defy theoretical humanities' deeply-entrenched resistance to engagements with the life sciences. Rather than treat biology and its branches as hopelessly reductive and politically suspect, they view recent advances in neurobiology and its adjacent scientific fields as providing crucial catalysts to a radical rethinking of subjectivity.

Merging three distinct disciplines―European philosophy from Descartes to the present, Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, and affective neuroscience―Johnston and Malabou triangulate the emotional life of affective subjects as conceptualized in philosophy and psychoanalysis with neuroscience. Their experiments yield different outcomes. Johnston finds psychoanalysis and neurobiology have the potential to enrich each other, though affective neuroscience demands a reconsideration of whether affects can be unconscious. Investigating this vexed issue has profound implications for theoretical and practical analysis, as well as philosophical understandings of the emotions.

Malabou believes scientific explorations of the brain seriously problematize established notions of affective subjectivity in Continental philosophy and Freudian-Lacanian analysis. She confronts philosophy and psychoanalysis with something neither field has seriously the concept of wonder and the cold, disturbing visage of those who have been affected by disease or injury, such that they are no longer affected emotionally. At stake in this exchange are some of philosophy's most important claims concerning the relationship between the subjective mind and the objective body, the structures and dynamics of the unconscious dimensions of mental life, the role emotion plays in making us human, and the functional differences between philosophy and science.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Nonfiction, Neuroscience

304 pages, Paperback

First published May 14, 2013

About the author

American philosopher. He is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta. Johnston’s books are guided by his “transcendental materialism,” which in sum calls for a materialist ontology that nevertheless does not reduce away the gap or figure that is human subjectivity.

Reviews

[Raymond · Rating 5 out of 5]

An in-depth examination of the intersection of philosophies and nuerobiology, focusing of the idea of self, autoaffectation, wonder, and its opposite, indifference.

[Emma Sea]

NTS: ouch, quite pricey, US$25.80 on kindle.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps most significantly in recent Lacanian scholarship, Tupinambá's The Desire of Psychoanalysis provides a Badiouian-inflected interrogation of the relations between the disciplines, especially as regards psychoanalysis as an epistemological domain. While this text claims to give proper due to the neurosciences, and while I am somewhat sympathetic to reintroducing rigor against the proliferation of "wild psychoanalysis," neuroscience remains an afterthought in both sections of this book, taking a backseat to continental philosophy in the first, and psychoanalytic theory in the second. Malabou reflects on wonder as the philosophical affect par excellence, which she will later basically cipher as heterosexuality in Changing Difference, though I appreciate the gloss on Derrida on hetero- and auto-affectivity. (I really just think I should read The New Wounded if I want a deeper treatment of the clinical side of things for Malabou.) Meanwhile, Johnston seeks to develop a theory of unconscious affects through reading affects as signifiers, though I don't believe developments in neuroscience are necessary to prompt this reflection, which in any case seems much less counter-intuitive from a Lacanian standpoint than he seems to believe.