Self and Emotional Life

Adrian Johnston is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and an assistant teaching analyst at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta. He is the author of Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive; Zizek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity; and Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change. Catherine Malabou is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Centre For Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, U.K. She is the author of several books translated into English, including The Future Of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality And Dialectic; What Should We Do With Our Brain; Plasticity At The Dusk Of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction; and Changing Difference.

Self and Emotional Life is a timely and wholly original intervention into one of the most debated questions of recent years: the place of the affects in psychoanalytic, neuroscientific, and philosophical accounts of the subject. It is doubly valuable in being authored by two scholars of the stature of Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou, philosophers whose range and depth of erudition in recent and emerging scholarship in the neurosciences (especially work on the 'emotional brain') and in clinical psychoanalysis seem to be without peer among scholars working at this intersection today. -- Tracy McNulty, Cornell University While neuroscientists joyfully proclaim the death of philosophy and psychoanalysis, Self and Emotional Life enacts the necessary countermove. It conclusively demonstrates, from a strict materialist standpoint, how brain sciences cannot account for the unconscious processes discovered by Freud and how they remain entangled in a cobweb of their own philosophical presuppositions. The book's subtitle could have been 'prolegomena to any future relationship between philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neurosciences'-which is why it should be read by everyone in these fields. -- Slavoj Zizek, author of Living in the End I have often been surprised by how Continental philosophy and psychoanalysis has managed to ignore biology and at times even reject it. It made no sense to me, and it clearly makes no sense to Johnston and Malabou, who embrace neurobiology and are enriched by it. Their book makes for valuable and often pleasurable reading. -- Antonio Damasio, author of Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain This book flows from the obvious conviction that a philosophy of subjectivity simply cannot ignore the body and must engage with today's biological sciences. The authors' conviction that the link between the subject and the body is best theorized in relation to affect is perhaps less obvious to some, but surely equally correct. It is no surprise, then, that their book touches on many of the deepest questions confronting the mental sciences of our time. It will provoke much disputation-even outrage-yet it focuses our attention on just the right questions. -- Mark Solms, author of The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of the Subjective Experience a major contribution to the important materialist turn in continental philosophy. -- John Protevi Notre Dame Philosophical Review ... Postulating common ground between [neuroscience, psychoanalysis, and philosophy], and a language for mutual understanding, is the uncommon achievement of Johnston's and Malabou's book. Irish Left Review

• Preface: From Nonfeeling to Misfeeling-Affects Between Trauma and the Unconscious Acknowledgments 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"? 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 5. The Face and the Close-Up: Deleuze's Spinozist Approach to Descartes 6. Damasio as a Reader of Spinoza 7. On Neural Plasticity, Trauma, and the Loss of Affects: The Two Meanings of Plasticity Conclusion 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 9. Feeling Without Feeling: Freud and the Unresolved Problem of Unconscious Guilt 10. Affects, Emotions, and Feelings: Freud's Metapsychologies of Affective Life 11. From Signifiers to Jouis-sens: Lacan's Senti-ments and Affectuations 12. Emotional Life After Lacan: From Psychoanalysis to the Neurosciences 13. Affects Are Signifiers: The Infinite Judgment of a Lacanian Affective Neuroscience Postface: The Paradoxes of the Principle of Constancy Notes Index