Self and Emotional Life

by Adrian Johnston

  4. Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 4, 10, 43, 47, 50–51, 56, 77, 79, 122–123, 325–330.

  5. Ibid., 52.

  6. Ibid., 52–54.

  7. Ibid., 54.

  8. Ibid., 47.

  9. Solms and Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World, 112–133, 277–278.

  10. Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon Books, 1994), 267.

  11. SE 5:600–604.

  12. Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 123.

  13. LeDoux, The Emotional Brain, 17–18, 20, 33–34, 40–41, 64–66, 71, 161, 203.

  14. Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, 34.

  15. Ibid., 28.

  16. LeDoux, The Emotional Brain, 137.

  17. Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 1–2, 5–7, 58–60, 62–65, 67, 72–75, 77–78, 109–111, 144–145, 160–161, 166, 176, 189, 191, 193, 204–205, 220–223, 238, 285–286, 319, 344, 378–380.

  18. Ibid., 226.

  19. Ibid., 372.

  20. LeDoux, The Emotional Brain, 302.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 134, 149–150.

  23. Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010), 294.

  24. Adrian Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 61, 108, 118, 186, 237, 245.

  25. Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, 16–17, 27.

  26. Ibid., 21, 72.

  27. Ibid., 26–27, 31, 33–34, 37.

  28. Ibid., 26.

  29. Ibid., 122.

  30. Ibid., 39, 301, 334, 352; Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During (New York: Routledge, 2005), 8–9; Malabou, Que faire de notre cerveau?, 15–17, 29–30, 40, 65–66, 145–146; Malabou, La plasticité au soir de l’écriture, 21, 25–26, 110–111.

  31. Gérard Pommier, Comment les neurosciences démontrent la psychanalyse (Paris: Flammarion, 2004), 142.

  32. Ibid.

  33. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1.

  34. Michel Foucault, “Society must be defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 240–247, 249–250, 253; Agamben, Homo Sacer, 4–5, 148, 165, 179.

  35. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 83.

  36. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 87–88.

  37. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 35, 37, 105–106, 109.

  38. Ibid., 17–19, 24–25, 37, 83, 105; Agamben, State of Exception, 1, 4–6, 14, 24, 26, 31, 35, 38–39, 50–51, 69–70.

  39. Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, 39, 69.

  40. Ibid., 42–43, 301.

  41. Ibid., 166.

  42. Ibid., 51.

  43. Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 128.

  44. Pommier, Comment les neurosciences démontrent la psychanalyse, 18.

  45. Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, 87–90; Johnston, “Slavoj Žižek’s Hegelian Reformation,” 9; Adrian Johnston, Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 119–124; Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 248; Jacques Lacan, “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power,” in Écrits, 496; Jacques Lacan, “Discours de Rome,” in Autres écrits, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001), 137–138; Jacques Lacan, “Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse,” in Autres écrits, 199; Jacques Lacan, “Petit discours à l’ORTF,” in Autres écrits, 224; Jacques Lacan, “Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever,” in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 187; Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 1, Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 244; Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 2, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 82; Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 3, The Psychoses, 1955–1956, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 32; Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, book 9, L’identification, 1961–1962 (unpublished typescript), session of January 10, 1962; Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, book 14, La logique du fantasme, 1966–1967 (unpublished typescript), session of February 1, 1967; Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, book 16, D’un Autre à l’autre, 1968–1969, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2006), 88–90; Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, book 24, L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue, s’aile à mourre, 1976–1977 (unpublished typescript), session of April 19, 1977.

  46. Pommier, Comment les neurosciences démontrent la psychanalyse, 23–24.

  47. Changeux, The Physiology of Truth, 201–202; Jean-Pierre Changeux, Du vrai, du beau, du bien: Une nouvelle approche neuronale (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2008), 293–294, 296–297.

  48. Jean-Pierre Changeux, Neuronal Man: The Biology of Mind, trans. Laurence Garey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 246–249; Changeux, The Physiology of Truth, 61–62.

  49. Changeux, The Physiology of Truth, 58, 60–62, 64.

  50. Ibid., 113–114, 118.

  51. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 175–176; Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 237; Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, 180–181.

  52. LeDoux, Synaptic Self, 72–74.

  53. Changeux, The Physiology of Truth, 114.

  54. Ibid., 113, 129, 132, 140–141, 201–202.

  55. Pommier, Comment les neurosciences démontrent la psychanalyse, 24–28, 45–47.

  56. Ibid., 27.

  57. Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, 106–111, 114–115, 172–173, 200, 204–205, 208, 277–278; Johnston, “What Matter(s) in Ontology,” 33–34; Johnston, “Slavoj Žižek’s Hegelian Reformation,” 16; Johnston, “Conflicted Matter,” 177–181; Johnston, “The Weakness of Nature,” 159–179; François Ansermet, “Des neurosciences aux logosciences,” in Qui sont vos psychanalystes?, ed. Nathalie Georges, Jacques-Alain Miller, and Nathalie Marchaison (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002), 377–378, 383; François Ansermet and Pierre Magistretti, Biology of Freedom: Neural Plasticity, Experience, and the Unconscious, trans. Susan Fairfield (New York: Other Press, 2007), xvi, 8, 10, 239; Changeux, The Physiology of Truth, 152–153; Changeux, Du vrai, du beau, du bien, 39–40, 104–105; Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Viking, 2003), 90–91, 93; LeDoux, Synaptic Self, 8–9, 20, 91, 296; Malabou, Que faire de notre cerveau?, 7–8, 14–17, 20–23, 31–32, 84–85; Malabou, La plasticité au soir de l’écriture, 112; Catherine Malabou, “Préface,” in La chambre du milieu: De Hegel aux neurosciences (Paris: Hermann, 2009), 9–10; Solms and Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World, 220; Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 213–214.

  58. Pommier, Comment les neurosciences démontrent la psychanalyse, 27.

  59. Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, 8.

  60. SE 14:187.

  61. SE 21:69–71.

  62. Panks
epp, Affective Neuroscience, 47, 52, 149, 302, 318–319.

  63. Changeux, The Physiology of Truth, 37, 39.

  64. Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 8–9, 73–74, 192–193.

  65. Changeux, The Physiology of Truth, 184–185; Lesley Rogers, Sexing the Brain (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 21–22; Keith E. Stanovich, The Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 82, 201–202.

  66. Changeux, The Physiology of Truth, 62.

  67. LeDoux, Synaptic Self, 203–204.

  68. Pommier, Comment les neurosciences démontrent la psychanalyse, 18.

  69. Ibid., 17.

  70. Karen Kaplan-Solms and Mark Solms, Clinical Studies in Neuro-Psychoanalysis: Introduction to a Depth Neuropsychology (New York: Other Press, 2002), 250–251, 255; Solms and Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World, 54–56, 72, 78.

  71. Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, 275–280.

  72. SE 7:147–148; SE 14:122–123; Adrian Johnston, Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 20–21, 168.

  73. Solms and Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World, 118–119, 122–123.

  74. Kaplan-Solms and Solms, Clinical Studies in Neuro-Psychoanalysis, 18–23, 43, 55; Ansermet and Magistretti, The Biology of Freedom, 216.

  75. Changeux, The Physiology of Truth, 8–9, 23, 25, 28, 32–33, 36, 246, 247; Metzinger, Being No One, 51; Johnston, “What Matter(s) in Ontology,” 35.

  76. Solms and Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World, 120, 133–134, 277–278.

  77. Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 299.

  78. David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), xii–xiii.

  79. André Green, La causalité psychique: Entre nature et culture (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 1995), 43.

  80. Ibid., 45.

  81. Ibid., 118, 252, 290–291.

  82. Ibid., 279.

  83. Ibid., 289–290.

  84. Jacques Lacan, “Presentation on Psychical Causality,” in Écrits, 150.

  85. Ibid. 153.

  86. Jacques Lacan, “Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu: Essai d’analyse d’une fonction en psychologie,” in Autres écrits, 33–34; Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits, 77–78; Jacques Lacan, “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits, 92; Jacques Lacan, “Some Reflections on the Ego,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 34 (1953): 13; Johnston, “The Weakness of Nature,” 159–179.

  87. Lacan, “Presentation on Psychical Causality,” 154.

  88. Green, La causalité psychique, 14, 252, 292, 298.

  89. Ibid., 21.

  90. Ibid., 124–125, 239–240.

  91. Ibid., 124.

  92. Ibid., 126, 292.

  93. Ibid., 87–89, 104, 303.

  94. Ibid., 252.

  95. Ibid., 85.

  96. Ibid., 223.

  97. Ibid.

  98. Ibid., 254.

  99. Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes: L’être et l’événement, 2 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2006), 96, 426–427, 438–439, 442–443, 459, 461, 601, 612, 614.

  100. Adrian Johnston, “‘Naturalism or anti-naturalism? No, thanks—both are worse!’: Science, Materialism, and Slavoj Žižek,” in “On Slavoj Žižek,” special issue, La Revue Internationale de Philosophie (2012); Adrian Johnston, “Second Natures in Dappled Worlds: John McDowell, Nancy Cartwright, and Hegelian-Lacanian Materialism,” in Umbr(a): The Worst, ed. Matthew Rigilano and Kyle Fetter (Buffalo: Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2011), 71–91.

  101. Adrian Johnston, The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy: Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, vol. 1 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013); Adrian Johnston, A Weak Nature Alone: Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, vol. 2 (unpublished manuscript).

  102. Johnston, The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy; Johnston, A Weak Nature Alone.

  103. Johnston, “Conflicted Matter,” 167–168, 174–176, 178–182, 187–188; Johnston, “What Matter(s) in Ontology,” 38–42, 44.

  104. André Green, “The Logic of Lacan’s objet (a) and Freudian Theory: Convergences and Questions,” trans. Kimberly Kleinert and Beryl Schlossman, in Interpreting Lacan, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 180.

  105. André Green, Le discours vivant: Le conception psychanalytique de l’affect (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1973), 139–141, 223, 239, 330.

  106. Green, “The Logic of Lacan’s objet (a) and Freudian Theory,” 181.

  107. Ibid., 180–181.

  108. Ibid., 181.

  109. SE 14:202–203; Johnston, Time Driven, 301–302.

  110. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 120.

  111. LeDoux, The Emotional Brain, 299; Solms and Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World, 34.

  112. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 7, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 181; Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, book 18, D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, 1971, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2006), 15; Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, book 23, Le sinthome, 1975–1976, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005), 121.

  113. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, book 10, L’angoisse, 1962–1963, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004), 91–95; Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, book 23, 164–165.

  114. Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, book 24, session of February 15, 1977.

  115. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, book 21, Les non-dupes errent, 1973–1974 (unpublished typescript), sessions of November 13, 1973, December 11, 1973, January 8, 1974, January 15, 1974; Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, book 22, R.S.I., 1974–1975 (unpublished typescript), sessions of November 19, 1974, December 17, 1974; Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), 206; Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 323; Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute; Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting for? (London: Verso, 2000), 127–128; Slavoj Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence,” in Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 179; Slavoj Žižek, “Author’s Afterword: Where Do We Stand Today?,” in The Universal Exception: Selected Writings, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2006), 2:304–305.

  116. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, book 27, Dissolution, 1979–1980 (unpublished typescript), session of January 15, 1980.

  117. Jacques Lacan, Télévision (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973), 9; Jacques Lacan, “Television,” trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson, in Television/A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 3.

  118. Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, book 16, 208.

  119. Johnston, Time Driven, 300–315.

  120. Lacan, “Television,” 5.

  121. Ibid.

  POSTFACE: THE PARADOXES OF THE PRINCIPLE OF CONSTANCY

  This chapter was translated by Adrian Johnston.

  1. SE 2:193–194.

  2. Ibid., 198.

  3. Ibid., 198–199.

  4. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, La vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), 413; Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Anal
ysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 364.

  5. SE 14:121–123.

  6. Ibid., 126.

  7. Freud’s affirmations hence clarify themselves, according to which “research has given irrefutable proof that mental activity is bound up with the function of the brain as it is with no other organ. We are taken a step further—we do not know how much—by the discovery of the unequal importance of the different parts of the brain and their special relations to particular parts of the body and to particular mental activities. But every attempt to go on from there to discover a localization of mental processes, every endeavour to think of ideas as stored up in nerve-cells and of excitations as travelling along nerve-fibres, has miscarried completely. The same fate would await any theory which attempted to recognize, let us say, the anatomical position of the system Cs.—conscious mental activity—as being in the cortex, and to localize the unconscious processes in the sub-cortical parts of the brain. There is a hiatus here which at present cannot be filled, nor is it one of the tasks of psychology to fill it. Our psychical topography has for the present nothing to do with anatomy; it has reference not to anatomical localities, but to regions in the mental apparatus, wherever they may be situated in the body” (SE 14:174–175).