Self and Emotional Life

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.

Preface: From Nonfeeling to Misfeeling--Affects Between Trauma and the UnconsciousAcknowledgmentsPart I. Go Wonder: Subjectivity and Affects in Neurobiological Times (Catherine Malabou)Introduction: From the Passionate Soul to the Emotional Brain1. What Does "of" Mean in Descartes's Expression "The Passions of the Soul"?2. A "Self-Touching You": Derrida and Descartes3. The Neural Self: Damasio Meets Descartes4. Affects Are Always Affects of Essence: Book 3 of Spinoza's Ethics5. The Face and the Close-Up: Deleuze's Spinozist Approach to Descartes6. Damasio as a Reader of Spinoza7. On Neural Plasticity, Trauma, and the Loss of Affects: The Two Meanings of PlasticityConclusionPart II. Misfelt Feelings: Unconscious Affect Between Psychoanalysis, Neuroscience, and Philosophy (Adrian Johnston)8. Guilt and the Feel of Feeling: Toward a New Conception of Affects9. Feeling Without Feeling: Freud and the Unresolved Problem of Unconscious Guilt10. Affects, Emotions, and Feelings: Freud's Metapsychologies of Affective Life11. From Signifiers to Jouis-sens: Lacan's Senti-ments and Affectuations12. Emotional Life After Lacan: From Psychoanalysis to the Neurosciences13. Affects Are Signifiers: The Infinite Judgment of a Lacanian Affective NeurosciencePostface: The Paradoxes of the Principle of ConstancyNotesIndex