Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture)
Self and Emotional Lifeis 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 Lifeenacts 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 Žižek, author ofLiving 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 ofDescartes' 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 ofThe 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 ProteviNotre Dame Philosophical Review)