Self and Emotional Life

by Adrian Johnston

  Put differently and more generally, the unconscious of intrapsychical defense mechanisms (i.e., the unconscious that is repressed, with “repression” to be taken here in its broadest possible analytic sense) is not reducible to any set of particular content-nodes in the networks of the psyche insofar as it kinetically slides between these nodes. Repression often bears on associative relations between pieces of psychical content. For example, in an analysis, an analysand might very well be able consciously to recollect every specific fragment of mnemic material involved in a given constellation underpinning a particular symptom. In such a case, what is repressed isn’t one memory among others, but instead the web of associations woven between the memories constituting nodes in the network producing symptoms as its outgrowths. The relations between memories are repressed, rather than the memories themselves. The unconscious comes to light in such analytic circumstances as newly recognized connections between previously recognized contents.

  Whereas Damasio speaks of organic “consonances” between the different layers and levels of his affective spectrum, a psychoanalytic approach, taking up his model, would prefer to emphasize dissonances. More precisely, by virtue of the psyche’s defensive means of achieving a self-regulated homeostatic equilibrium in terms of affects, there inevitably are absences of translations or distorting mistranslations within and between emotions, feelings-had, and feelings-known (or, as Freud might put it, within and between Affekte, Gefühle, and Empfindungen). Additionally, this analytic metapsychological supplement to Damasio’s theory rectifies what appears to be one of its shortcomings: Damasio seems to suggest entertaining the unconvincing hypothesis that a simple, straightforward quantitative factor is responsible for the qualitative shift from nonconscious affective mechanisms to felt affective qualia (“Feelings emerge when the sheer accumulation of mapped details reaches a certain stage”). By contrast, an analytic approach would speculate that much more than “sheer” quantity alone is at work here.

  In several contexts, Damasio somewhat enigmatically refers to what he characterizes as “feelings of feelings.”78 At this point, an examination of Žižek’s Lacanian criticisms of Damasio’s account of affective life is appropriate and promises to be productive. Žižek devotes a certain amount of attention to a topic I did not delve into earlier, namely, the theory of the multiple degrees and strata of consciousness and selfhood in The Feeling of What Happens (in which Damasio sets out such conceptual categories as protoselfhood, core consciousness or selfhood, extended consciousness, autobiographical selfhood, and conscience).79 On this score, Žižek’s complaint is that reducing subjectivity to the two dimensions of embodied being (as protoselfhood and core consciousness or selfhood) and linguistic-representational identity (as extended consciousness, autobiographical selfhood, and conscience) leaves out the third dimension first isolated by Descartes in the figure of the Cogito (i.e., the subject proper as the emptiness of the negativity of $, Lacan’s “barred subject”):80

  Damasio’s solution to the old enigma of the two sides of Self (Self qua the continuously changing stream of consciousness verses Self qua the permanent stable core of our subjectivity) misses the mark: “the seemingly changing self and the seemingly permanent self, although closely related, are not one entity but two”—the first being the Core Self, the second the autobiographical Self. There is no place here, however, for what we as speaking beings experience (or, rather, presuppose) as the empty core of our subjectivity: what am I? I am neither my body (I have a body, I never “am” my body directly, in spite of all the subtle phenomenological descriptions à la Merleau-Ponty that try to convince me to the contrary), nor the stable core of my autobiographical narratives that form my symbolic identity; what “I am” is the pure One of an empty Self which remains the same One throughout the constant change of autobiographical narratives. This One is engendered by language: it is neither the Core Self nor the autobiographical Self, but what the Core Self is transubstantiated (or, rather, desubstantialized) into when it is transposed into language. This is what Kant has in mind when he distinguishes between the “person” (the wealth of autobiographical content that provides substantial content to my Self) and the pure subject of transcendental apperception which is just an empty point of self-relating.81

  The entire philosophical framework informing this critique of Damasio cannot be exhaustively elucidated here insofar as this would require reconstructing the entirety of the Žižekian theory of subjectivity, which is constructed at the intersection of German idealism and Lacanian psychoanalysis (a reconstruction I carry out in my book Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, published in 2008). But, what’s crucial in this context is Žižek’s insistence, following Lacan, that Symbolic mediation (i.e., the passage of the substantial protosubject into the enveloping milieus of language structures) creates a subject (i.e., the Cogito-like subject-as-$ central to Kantian and post-Kantian German idealism) that thereafter escapes reduction to either bodily nature (including Damasio’s “Core Self”) or linguistic culture (including Damasio’s “autobiographical Self”); this could be described as a sort of immanent structural genesis of transstructural subjectivity.82 Damasio agrees with Žižek about the invalidity of reducing consciousness or selfhood to language;83 he even speculates that nonhuman animals have autobiographical selves, thereby clearly indicating that he doesn’t consider this stratum of selfhood to be entirely language-bound.84 But, Damasio and Žižek certainly seem to part company apropos the latter’s Lacanian thesis that the corporeal substance of the Damasian protoselves and core selves doesn’t remain a purely biological foundation over which is then subsequently laid utterly separate and distinct higher-order mental scaffoldings. (Lurking in the broadest encompassing background is what would be a much more far-reaching, fundamental debate about the extent to which sociosymbolic mediators penetrate and alter the realities of the body.)

  In The Feeling of What Happens, Damasio does concede that a certain amount of dialectical interaction transpires between core consciousness or selfhood and the additional tiers of different configurations of consciousness/selfhood overlaid on top of it.85 And yet, Žižek is quite right that Damasio nonetheless tends to stick persistently to the claim that an atomic center of substantial biomaterial being utterly untouched by nonnatural influences remains a pure, impermeable core ultimately grounding all other dimensions of mental life.86 Against this claim, Žižek asserts that insertion into symbolico-linguistic matrices of mediation (or, in Lacanese, the submission of the protosubject S to “symbolic castration” by the big Other, thus producing the subject-as-$) “transubstantiates” and “desubstantializes” the Damasian hard kernel of bodily existence. However, Žižek’s critique ignores Damasio’s distinction between the protoself and the core self, conflating these two entities under the single heading of the “Core Self.” For Damasio, the core self is a representational map of the protoself.87 Nonetheless, in the spirit of Žižek’s psychoanalytically inspired objection to Damasio, it would be justifiable to maintain that the advent of language use (especially the subjectifying acquisition of proficiency with proper names and personal pronouns) might “transubstantiate” the very means and results of the translation process leading from the protoself to the core self.

  Put in combined Lacanian and Damasian vocabularies, an irreparable rift rendering all representational translation between the protoself as S and the core self as $ somewhat misrepresentative (à la Lacan’s méconnaissance) may open like a gaping wound in organisms subjected to the cutting intervention of linguistic structures. This would be the initial, zero-level introduction into the corporeal reality of human animals of the dissonances and discrepancies that come to be characteristic of split speaking subjects through whose splits circulate unconscious dimensions. But, whereas Žižek sounds as though he flirts at this moment with a vaguely social-constructivist vision according to which the nature-based protoself-as-S is retroactively liquidated and replaced by the
language-induced core-self-as-$ (now in the form of the Cartesian-Kantian-Hegelian-Lacanian void of self-relating negativity), what I am proposing presently is an alternative picture in which, to articulate this in Hegelian fashion, the distinction between S (as the protoself) and $ (as the core self) persists as a distinction internal to $ itself. That is to say, not only do chasms of varying widths crack open between the language-independent protoself as S and its (un)representational (mis)translations in and by the linguistically influenced core self as $, but a split within the core-self-as-$ mirrors this chasm, a split dividing the core self in two, into both a plastic avatar of substantial bodily being as well as a faceless blank of desubstantialized negativity. In other words, maybe there are two core selves dissonant with each other (in addition to the varyingly dissonant intervals between protoselves and core selves): a “full” core self and an “empty” core self (the latter being the Cogito-like void of interest to Žižek, something admittedly neglected by Damasio).

  In The Parallax View, Žižek spells out some key implications of his critical reading of Damasio’s portrait of consciousness or selfhood for this portrait’s accompanying account of affective life. He begins: “Damasio’s fundamental ‘Althusserian’ thesis is that ‘there is no central feeling state before the respective emotion occurs, that expression (emotion) precedes feeling.’ I am tempted to link this emotion which precedes feeling to the empty pure subject ($): emotions are already the subject’s, but before subjectivization, before their transposition into the subjective experience of feeling. $ is thus the subjective correlative to emotions prior to feeling: it is only through feelings that I become the ‘full’ subject of lived self-experience. And it is this ‘pure’ subject which can no longer be contained within the frame of life-homeostasis, that is, whose functioning is no longer constrained by the biological machinery of life-regulation.”88 Žižek soon adds: “The chain of equivalences … imposes itself between the ‘empty’ cogito (the Cartesian subject, Kant’s transcendental subject), the Hegelian topic of self-relating negativity, and the Freudian topic of the death drive. Is this ‘pure’ subject deprived of emotions? It is not as simple as that: its very detachment from immediate immersion in life-experience gives rise to new (not emotions or feelings, but, rather) affects: anxiety and horror. Anxiety as correlative to confronting the Void that forms the core of the subject; horror as the experience of disgusting life at its purest, ‘undead’ life.”89 What Damasio depicts as natural (i.e., the core self as the source of not-felt or not-yet-felt emotions) Žižek treats as radically antinatural, that is “no longer … contained within the frame of life-homeostasis, … no longer constrained by the biological machinery of life-regulation” (i.e., $, which is also the Lacanian subject of the unconscious, as itself a generator of affective phenomena). By arguing that “emotions are already the subject’s,” he signals his hypothesis that Damasio’s protoself or core self (or, more accurately, selves) is thoroughly denaturalized après-coup by the intrusion of the signifiers of the symbolic order.

  Of course, one might have reservations with respect to what sounds like a hyperbolic positing of a total and complete denaturalization without reserve or remainder. As regards the (human) “nature” underpinning subjectivity, I prefer to conceive of denaturalization as, at least in some circumstances, more of a sedimentary accumulation, a layering of heterogeneous montages of often conflicting dimensions running the gamut from the relatively “natural” (e.g., evolutionary tendencies rooted in archaic environmental contexts) to the relatively “nonnatural” (primarily sociohistorical factors and variables past and present). To misappropriate some of Žižek’s language from In Defense of Lost Causes,90 the whole problem is that “life 2.0” (i.e., the retroactive denaturalizer of life as such in and of itself) never succeeds fully at erasing and replacing what after the fact becomes “life 1.0” (i.e., naked, primitive life an sich once it has been retroactively affected by the genesis of life 2.0). At least in certain cases, the latter continues to operate in parallel with the former, with antagonisms and dysfunctions arising between them.

  Human beings, in terms of where they stand between the natural and the nonnatural, could be described as creatures of temporal torsions. Parts of human beings lag behind in the time warp of evolutionary-genetic influences linked to long-past contexts, whereas other parts, which can and do come into conflict with these same evolutionary-genetic influences, take shape according to faster-moving historical temporalities. (Moreover, the latter are themselves outgrowths of evolution that have escaped control by evolutionary governance alone.)91 Such beings are the products of incomplete, partial denaturalizations failing to eliminate without undigested leftovers the vestiges of things other than the sociosymbolically mediated structures and phenomena of human history both phylogenetic and ontogenetic. Of course, one should wholeheartedly agree with Žižek that “Nature does not exist” if “Nature” designates a balanced, harmonious One-All; this is another nonexistent big Other (as per Lacan’s “Le grand Autre n’existe pas”).92 However, nature indeed does exist both as that which immanently allows for and generates the denaturalizations involved with subjectivity,93 and as a bundle of anachronistic variables, within the substance of human being, out of joint with various and sundry aspects of more current historical-temporal milieus. Nature is a participant in this unbalanced ensemble of conflicting elements. So, to paraphrase Lacan’s “there is no Other of the Other” (rather than his “the big Other does not exist”), I assert that there is no Nature of nature, although there is nature as fragmentary, self-sundering components caught up in the conflicts constitutive of the “human condition.”94

  Regardless of all this, Žižek’s crucial move in the passages quoted three paragraphs earlier is his insightful proposal that the signifier-catalyzed explosion of the emptiness of $ out of the fullness of S, of (as per Hegel) subject proper out of substance, is not without significant repercussions in the spheres of affect. In fact, for Žižek, properly human-subjective affects are neither emotions nor feelings in Damasio’s senses of these latter two terms. Damasio treats emotions as automatic physiological processes regulated by nonconscious bodily mechanisms, although he stipulates that the translation of emotions into consciously registered feelings allows for partial cognitive-intellectual mediation and modulation of embodied emotions.95 By contrast, Žižek, for a number of Freudian-Lacanian reasons, insists that the emoting body, insinuated by Damasio to rest on a natural or instinctual basis, is altered right down to its bare bones and raw flesh by its transformative insertion into the sociosymbolic matrices of the big Other. (First and foremost, the corporeal core self of Damasio is “transubstantiated” and “denaturalized” into the disembodied emptiness of Lacan’s Cogito-like $, a void linked to such linguistic signifier-entities as proper names and personal pronouns.)96 Žižek proceeds to refer to LeDoux, another major researcher in the field of affective neuroscience, best known for his empirical investigations of the role of the amygdala in generating fear, in extending his critique of Damasio:

  It would be interesting to conceive the very specificity of “being-human” as grounded in this gap between cognitive and emotional abilities: a human being in whom emotions were to catch up with cognitive abilities would no longer be human, but a cold monster deprived of human emotions.… Here we should supplement LeDoux with a more structural approach: it is not simply that our emotions lag behind our cognitive abilities, stuck at the primitive animal level; this very gap itself functions as an “emotional” fact, giving rise to new, specifically human, emotions, from anxiety (as opposed to mere fear) to (human) love and melancholy. Is it that LeDoux (and Damasio, on whom LeDoux relies here) misses this feature because of the fundamental weakness (or, rather, ambiguity) of the proto-Althusserian distinction between emotions and feelings? This distinction has a clear Pascalian twist (and it is a mystery that, in his extensive critique of “Descartes’ error,” Damasio does not evoke Pascal, Descartes’s major critic): physical
emotions do not display inner feelings but, on the contrary, generate them. However, there is something missing here: a gap between emotions qua biological-organic bodily gestures and emotions qua learned symbolic gestures following rules (like Pascal’s kneeling and praying). Specifically “human” emotions (like anxiety) arise only when a human animal loses its emotional mooring in biological instincts, and this loss is supplemented by the symbolically regulated emotions qua man’s “second nature.”97

  Indeed, LeDoux, like Damasio, sees neuroscience and psychoanalysis as far from incompatible. Moreover, like the Lacanian Žižek, he emphasizes the far-reaching “revolutionary” (rather than just “evolutionary,” smooth, and gradual) ramifications for the human animal of its immersion in language, an immersion changing and reshaping brains and bodies.98 (Damasio similarly speaks of “the biological revolution called culture.”)99 LeDoux even muses about the possible alterations of affective dynamics in human parlêtres driven by linguistic mediation.100 But, how accurate and justified are Žižek’s critical remarks regarding LeDoux’s ideas about the relation between cognition and emotion in the human brain?