From a psychoanalytic perspective, perhaps one of the most important facts emphasized by LeDoux is that, as it might be expressed, the brain, although a bodily organ, is not organic in such a way that it is a piece of nature that is a harmonious and synthesized self-integrated system of balanced components in sync with each other.101 In fact, LeDoux points to precisely the sort of phenomena that led Freud to posit the centrality in mental life of intrapsychical conflicts and Lacan to invoke again and again the figure of the split subject as evidence of the brain’s hodgepodge, collage-like construction, a construction whose mismatched elements don’t necessarily work well together.102 Along these lines, in his study The Emotional Brain, he observes: “Although we often talk about the brain as if it has a function, the brain itself actually has no function. It is a collection of systems, sometimes called modules, each with different functions. There is no equation by which the combination of functions of all the different systems mixed together equals an additional function called brain function.”103 He goes on to add, “Evolution tends to act on the individual modules and their functions rather than the brain as a whole.… [B]y and large most evolutionary changes in the brain take place at the level of individual modules.”104 The brain, like the rest of the human body with which it’s inseparably enmeshed, is a product not of Evolution with a capital E (itself yet another nonexistent Lacanian big Other), but of a plethora of different and distinct evolutionary circumstances and challenges spread out over a disparate number of times and places (as Damasio puts it, “Evolution is not the Great Chain of Being”).105 In this vein, Alain Badiou’s denial of Nature as a monolithic cosmic One-All and parallel corresponding affirmation of the existence of a proliferation of natural multiplicities—“Nature has no sayable being. There are only some natural beings.”106—can and should be applied to the natural-scientific notion of evolution. Moreover, these evolutionary pressures, not at all coordinated and unified with each other, act separately on a diverse array of independent systems and subsystems within the central nervous system. (Damasio notes that “the brain is a system of systems”107 and highlights the mismatch between brain stem and cortex in the human nervous system, two [sub]systems of different evolutionary age forced to cooperate with each other.)108 No top-down design plan governed the assembly process producing the peculiar lump of folded, meshwork matter that is the human brain. Its bottom-up genesis consists (inconsistently) of a chaotic vortex of accidents, chances, and contingencies. Consequently, the resulting product of such a process is, not surprisingly, prone to an incalculable number of internal antagonisms, tensions, and short circuits. Or, as the neuroscientist David J. Linden describes it, the human central nervous system is a “kludge”: “The brain is … a kludge, … a design that is inefficient, inelegant, and unfathomable, but that nevertheless works”109 and “at every turn, brain design has been a kludge, a workaround, a jumble, a pastiche.”110 Linden’s book The Accidental Mind, published in 2007, repeatedly insists that the brain is inelegantly designed by a multitude of haphazard evolutionary tinkerings in which the newer is plopped on top of the comparatively older and, hence, is “poorly organized,” “a cobbled-together mess.”111 (Incidentally, Linden devastatingly wields his kludge thesis against antievolution proponents of so-called intelligent design.)112 In the year immediately after the publication of Linden’s book, the psychologist Gary Marcus, in the book Kludge, analyzed a range of mental phenomena in light of the same basic thesis advanced by Linden.113 Both Linden’s and Marcus’s positions are foreshadowed by, among other sources, François Jacob’s Science article “Evolution and Tinkering” from 1977114 (a quotation from which serves as one of the epigraphs to Marcus’s book). One would have to be, as it were, utterly brainless not to see the importance of this neuroscientific picture of the material seat of subjectivity for a psychoanalytic metapsychology emphasizing the central structuring functions of conflicts in mental life.
Clearly consistent with his stress upon the nonexistence of the Brain with a capital B as “brain function” in the singular—echoing Badiou, there is, within each human being, no Brain, only some brains—is LeDoux’s repeated and emphatic argument against the false impression that affective neuroscience can and does deal with emotional life in general or an ultimately homogenous emotion function in the brain (such as the so-called limbic system, something the objective reality of which is a bone of contention among neuroscientists).115 So, not only is there no coherent brain function overall, but there is no emotion function overall either (and, with reference again to the trinity of cognition, emotion, and motivation, one might wonder, under the influence of psychoanalytic thinking, whether the same might be said for cognitive and motivational functions too). In his substantial survey Affective Neuroscience, Panksepp takes a further step along this same trajectory delineated by LeDoux (even though he and LeDoux disagree about the status of the notion of the limbic system).116 Panksepp maintains that even particular individual emotions lack discrete corresponding “centers” in the physiological anatomy of the brain: “no single psychological concept fully describes the functions of any given brain area or circuit. There are no unambiguous ‘centers’ or loci for discrete emotions in the brain that do not massively interdigitate with other functions, even though certain key circuits are essential for certain emotions to be elaborated. Everything ultimately emerges from the interaction of many systems. For this reason, modern neuroscientists talk about interacting ‘circuits,’ ‘networks,’ and ‘cell assemblies’ rather than ‘centers.’”117
Combining LeDoux’s denial of a basic, general emotion function in the brain with Panksepp’s denial of compartmentalized anatomical brain loci correlated in a one-to-one manner with various feeling states, one can postulate the following: even specific singular emotions are complex (or complexes), that is, nonatomic or nonelementary clusters of interconnections between multiple different systems and subsystems in the brain. What’s more, it seems quite reasonable to suppose that all three dimensions of brain functioning (i.e., cognition, emotion, and motivation) come into play in affective phenomena. Panksepp says as much here. Moreover, elsewhere, he remarks that “it must be kept in mind that the brain is a massively interconnected organ whose every part can find an access pathway to any other part.”118 He subsequently links this fact to emotional phenomena, emphasizing that the brain’s mind-bogglingly intricate internal interconnectedness makes it such that emotions are inextricably intertwined with nonemotional dimensions.119 Additionally, both within and between these interacting functions, it also seems defensible to hypothesize that a plurality of separate strata of temporal layers deposited in the brain (deposits dating from natural-evolutionary times as well as nonnatural historical times) converge and clash throughout the neural interactions generating emotions, feelings, and the like.
The big picture that arises from all of this, if indeed such a picture can be drawn on the basis of the preceding, is one that LeDoux appears to endorse. This endorsement is expressed in a passage that Žižek undoubtedly has in mind when critically “supplementing” LeDoux’s ideas in The Parallax View: “there is an imperfect set of connections between cognitive and emotional systems in the current stage of evolution of the human brain. This state of affairs is part of the price we pay for having newly evolved cognitive capacities that are not yet fully integrated into our brains. Although this is also a problem for other primates, it is particularly acute for humans, since the brain of our species, especially our cortex, was extensively rewired in the process of acquiring natural language functions.”120 Žižek’s earlier-quoted comments on this passage rightly highlight how LeDoux views the discrepancies between cognition and emotion in the human central nervous system to be symptomatic of a negative imperfection, a deficiency or fault perhaps eventually to be remedied in the evolutionary future of humanity. Especially for a Lacanian, this lack (here a lack of coordination, harmonization, synthesis, and so on between different neurological functions) is positive as well
as negative, a plus arising from a minus. And, like Lacan, LeDoux too identifies the cutting intervention of language as largely responsible for the severity of the cracks and fissures of desynchronization introduced into the human brain. Hence, Žižek, in consonance with a number of hypotheses recently put forward by various investigators into the brain,121 speculates that in losing a presupposed prior evolutionarily integrated balance of neurological functions, people gain their very humanness, their denaturalized subjectivity with its peculiar, uniquely human affective potentials.
After formulating these observations in response to Damasio and LeDoux, Žižek proceeds to warn that one must mind “the gap that separates the brain sciences’ unconscious from the Freudian Unconscious.”122 He argues that this gap is particularly palpable as regards the topic of emotions.123 Other authors, such as Ansermet and Magistretti as well as Pommier, likewise caution against conflating the psychoanalytic unconscious with the unconscious often spoken of by those situated in the neurosciences, with the latter frequently referring to what analysis would identify as merely preconscious or nonconscious (rather than unconscious proper in the sense of being defensively occluded by such intrapsychical mechanisms as repression, disavowal, negation, rejection or foreclosure, and so on).124 Interestingly, LeDoux himself issues the exact same warning: “Like Freud before them, cognitive scientists reject the view handed down from Descartes that mind and consciousness are the same. However, the cognitive unconscious is not the same as the Freudian or dynamic unconscious. The term cognitive unconscious merely implies that a lot of what the mind does goes on outside of consciousness, whereas the dynamic unconscious is a darker, more malevolent place where emotionally charged memories are shipped to do mental dirty work. To some extent, the dynamic unconscious can be conceived in terms of cognitive processes, but the term cognitive unconscious does not imply these dynamic operations.”125
Damasio too is aware of and acknowledges these crucial differences.126 Žižek and certain other psychoanalytically inclined interpreters of the neurosciences are quite justified in being concerned that many neuroscientists carelessly and indefensibly conflate Freud’s unconscious with that of nonanalytic cognitive science. However, Damasio and LeDoux, the two neuroscientists mentioned by name in the section of The Parallax View under consideration in the present context, are notable exceptions to this tendency in the neuroscientific literature. What’s more, although Žižek charges that Damasio problematically treats emotions (as distinct from feelings) as simply and straightforwardly natural in the sense of biologically hardwired—in his theory of the emotion-based self, Damasio indeed tends to speculate about a kernel of nature as the fixed foundation for additional later layers of higher-order nurture127—there are moments when Damasio appears to entertain the possibility of sociosymbolic mediation penetrating all the way down into the bedrock of even the most rudimentary bodily emotional ground of human being.128
The issue of neuroscientific naturalism (such as Damasio’s, which is critiqued by Žižek) and its validity or invalidity vis-à-vis psychoanalysis will be returned to shortly. For the moment, four lines of thought in Damasio’s defense apropos his alleged failure to account for the properly Freudian unconscious ought to be advanced. First, if the conclusions reached by my prior reexamination of the treatments of affective phenomena in Freud are correct, then the mutually exclusive contrast Žižek appeals to between an emotional unconscious and the Freudian unconscious is questionable, if not incorrect (for the same reasons that render problematic Lacan’s dogmatic insistence that Freud flatly denies the existence of unconscious affects, an insistence upon which Žižek, at least in The Parallax View, evidently relies). Second, despite his general, prevailing emphasis upon the naturalness of the rudimentary emotional building blocks of the embodied human mind, Damasio (as I already have indicated) nonetheless occasionally allows for the possibility of cognitive (and, hence, cultural-linguistic) mediation and modulation even of physiological emotions, not just of psychologically parsed feelings. Third, Damasio’s distinction between emotions and feelings, rather than threatening to reduce the unconscious to a roiling carnal sea of primitive impulses and passions (in a fashion counter to Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis), both dovetails with key features of Lacan’s depiction of the unconscious and opens up new options for envisioning this set of mental dimensions central to psychoanalytic concerns.
As regards this third line of defense, Lacan continually combats the crude popular image of the unconscious as a dark, hidden depth, repeatedly maintaining (sometimes with recourse to topology, the mathematical science of surfaces) that the unconscious is, so to speak, profoundly superficial, situated right out in the open of the signifiers and structures within which subjects come to be and circulate.129 Although Damasio, with respect to the topic of the unconscious, indeed often does focus on emotions as deep corporeal states of a naturally shaped body overlooked by conscious mental attention (i.e., as unfelt emotions), his distinction between emotions and feelings nonetheless implies a notion of the unconscious that is anything but complicit with the woefully unsophisticated picture thinking of old versions of depth psychology. The Damasian unconscious consists not so much of unfelt emotions bubbling away in the obscure, opaque depths of the flesh, but instead of the ensemble of intervening mechanisms and processes facilitating and interfering with the connections between emotions and feelings. In other words, Damasio’s unconscious, like that of Lacan, is a thin, in-between function of gaps, the cause of discrepancies and splits between manifest features of the parlêtre. In this vein, it’s important to recall that Damasio portrays emotions as public rather than private phenomena.130 That is to say, emotional states, as corporeal events, are observable, at least in principle, by third parties, whether these third parties be scientists monitoring physiological changes in a human organism or nonscientific others taking stock of visible alterations expressed in and through the observed body of the person under consideration. (This is by contrast with feelings as mental events that, due to their first-person quality and corresponding experiential inaccessibility to other minds, can be “observed” only indirectly through linguistically conveyed reports.) So, an emotion à la Damasio, even if unfelt by the person whose body undergoes (un)said emotion, isn’t associated by him with concealed depths. Quite the contrary: A Damasian emotion tends to be just as “out there” in the light of publicly visible day as the utterances spoken by the speaking subject. Along related lines, the Damasian unconscious subsists in the intervals between two types of manifestations: emotions as bodily conditions and thoughts as mental contents (which are potentially expressible in sociosymbolic terms, if not actually thus expressed). Thanks to these intervals as gaps between manifested emotions and their equally manifested translations, nontranslations, or mistranslations in ideationally inflected mediums—such intervals should be counted as constituting some of the “bars” barring the split subject ($) of Lacanian theory—emotions can be not only unfelt but also misfelt in any number of manners.
The fourth line of defense in favor of Damasio when faced with Žižek’s criticisms requires circumnavigating back to the question of naturalism versus antinaturalism. The position I’m staking out here in response to this question could be succinctly encapsulated in Žižekian style as “Naturalism or anti-naturalism? No, thanks—both are worse!”131 Žižek closes the section of the fourth chapter of The Parallax View dealing with Damasio, a section entitled “Emotions Lie, or, Where Damasio Is Wrong,” by insisting that
we should bear in mind the basic anti-Darwinian lesson of psychoanalysis repeatedly emphasized by Lacan: man’s radical and fundamental dis-adaptation, mal-adaptation, to his environs. At its most radical, “being-human” consists in an “uncoupling” from immersion in one’s environs, in following a certain automatism which ignores the demands of adaptation—this is what the “death drive” ultimately amounts to. Psychoanalysis is not “deterministic” (“What I do is determined by unconscious processes”): t
he “death drive” as a self-sabotaging structure represents the minimum of freedom, of a behavior uncoupled from the utilitarian-survivalist attitude. The “death drive” means that the organism is no longer fully determined by its environs, that it “explodes/implodes” into a cycle of autonomous behavior.132
The invocation of the psychoanalytic notion of the death drive won’t be treated in detail here; I’ve addressed Žižek’s philosophical appropriation of the infamous Freudian Todestrieb at length elsewhere.133 What I will address at present are the ways in which Žižek contrasts Damasio’s naturalism with Lacan’s antinaturalism. Both in the passage just quoted and others from the same portion of The Parallax View, one could read Žižek’s remarks as referring to a partial, rather than a complete, denaturalization characteristic of human beings qua subjects (as indicated by the adverb “fully” in “the organism is no longer fully determined by its environs”). Interpreted in this manner, Žižek succeeds at resisting the temptation of an exaggerated pseudo-Lacanian antinaturalism insofar as he presupposes that the primitive emotions deposited within the base of humans’ mammalian brains by archaic evolutionary conditions persist alongside sociosymbolic configurations and all the various subjectifying mediations they bring with them. Žižek’s move here gestures at the notion of humans being creatures of incomplete, perpetually unfinished transformations, monstrous abortions of the failed sublations of a weak, anything-but-omnipotent dialectic incapable of digesting the animal bodies out of which it emerges without leaving behind remaining residual scraps. To resort to the lexicon of Marxism, this would be a dialectic of interminably “uneven development.”
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