Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience

Adrian Johnston · Catherine Malabou

jun 2013 · Columbia University Press

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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 considered: 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.

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Adrian Johnston (Author)
Adrian Johnston (PhD, Philosophy, Stony Brook; Diploma, Psychoanalysis, Emory) is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico and Assistant Teaching Analyst at Emory Psychoanalytic Institute, a division of the Emory University School of Medecine. He is the author of Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (Northwestern, 2005), Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Northwestern, 2008), Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change (Northwestern, 2009), Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume One: The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy (Northwestern, 2013), Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers (Edinburgh, 2014), and co-author (with Catherine Malabou) of Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (Columbia, 2013). I chose him as a reader for his interests in contemporary continental philosophy and the history of western philosophy.

Catherine Malabou (Author)
Catherine Malabou (PhD, Philosophy, Ecole normale superieure de Fontenay-St. Cloud) is Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. She is the author of a number of books, including (translated into English) Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality (Polity, 2016), Ontology of the Accident (Polity, 2012), The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage (Fordham, 2012), The Heidegger Change: On the Fantastic in Philosophy (SUNY, 2011), Cganging Difference: The Feminine and the Question of Philosophy (Polity, 2011), Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing (Columbia, 2009), What Should We Do with Our Brain? (Fordham, 2008), The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic (Routledge, 2004), (with Jacques Derrida) Counterpath (Stanford, 2004), and (with Adrian Johnston) Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Neurobiology (Columbia, 2013).