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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.
List of contents
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
About the author
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; ¿i¿ek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity; and Badiou, ¿i¿ek, 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.
