Wednesday, March 27, 2013

New Book by Malabou and Jonston ''Self and Emotional Life''

Self and Emotional Life: 
Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience



Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou defy theoretical humanities’ deeply-entrenched resistance to engagements with the life sciences. Rather than treat biology and its branches as hopelessly reductive and politically suspect, they view recent advances in neurobiology and its adjacent scientific fields as providing crucial catalysts to a radical rethinking of subjectivity.

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.

Malabou believes scientific explorations of the brain seriously problematize established notions of affective subjectivity in Continental philosophy and Freudian-Lacanian analysis. She confronts philosophy and psychoanalysis with something neither field has seriously considered: the concept of wonder and the cold, disturbing visage of those who have been affected by disease or injury, such that they are no longer affected emotionally. At stake in this exchange are some of philosophy’s most important claims concerning the relationship between the subjective mind and the objective body, the structures and dynamics of the unconscious dimensions of mental life, the role emotion plays in making us human, and the functional differences between philosophy and science.


"Self and Emotional Life is 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, Johnston’s and Malabou's Self and Emotional Life enacts the necessary counter-move. 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

"I have often been surprised by how continental philosophy and psychoanalysis managed to ignore biology and at times even reject it. It made no sense to me, and it clearly makes no sense to Catherine Malabou and Adrian Johnston, philosophers and psychoanalysts, who embrace neurobiology and are enriched by it. Their essays make for valuable and often pleasurable reading." — Antonio Damasio, Author of Descartes’ Error and Self Comes to Mind

"This book flows from the obvious conviction that a philosophy of subjectivity simply cannot ignore the body, and therefore simply 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 – but it focuses our attention on just the right questions." — Mark Solms, University of Cape Town


CONTENTS


Preface: From Nonfeeling to Misfeeling—Affects Between Trauma and the Unconscious

Acknowledgments

Part I. Go Wonder: Subjectivity and Affects in Neurobiological Times (Catherine Malabou)

Introduction: From the Passionate Soul to the Emotional Brain

1. What Does “of” Mean in Descartes’s Expression “The Passions of the Soul”?

2. A “Self-Touching You”: Derrida and Descartes

3. The Neural Self: Damasio Meets Descartes

4. Affects Are Always Affects of Essence: Book 3 of Spinoza’s Ethics

5. The Face and the Close-Up: Deleuze’s Spinozist Approach to Descartes

6. Damasio as a Reader of Spinoza

7. On Neural Plasticity, Trauma, and the Loss of Affects: The Two Meanings of Plasticity

Conclusion

Part II. Misfelt Feelings: Unconscious Affect Between Psychoanalysis, Neuroscience, and Philosophy (Adrian Johnston)

8. Guilt and the Feel of Feeling: Toward a New Conception of Affects

9. Feeling Without Feeling: Freud and the Unresolved Problem of Unconscious Guilt

10. Affects, Emotions, and Feelings: Freud's Metapsychologies of Affective Life

11. From Signifiers to Jouis-sens: Lacan’s Senti-ments and Affectuations

12. Emotional Life After Lacan: From Psychoanalysis to the Neurosciences

13. Affects Are Signifiers: The Infinite Judgment of a Lacanian Affective Neuroscience

Postface: The Paradoxes of the Principle of Constancy

Notes

Index

Lecture, March 2013: ''From the Overman to the Posthuman: How Many Ends?'' (Audio)



Event Date: 22 March 2013
Jeffrey Hall
Institute of Education
20 Bedford Way,
London WC1H 0AL
Professor Catherine Malabou (Kingston) - From the Overman to the Posthuman: How Many Ends?
In this presentation, I will read and discuss Derrida’s text The Ends of Man (Margins Of Philosophy), and ask what remains of the notions of The Human, Humanity, and Humanism after deconstruction. To what extent are we still allowed to elaborate a notion of the “proper” of man?
This will also be a reflection on Nietzsche and current biology.
Catherine Malabou studied in Paris at the renowned Sorbonne University. Professor Malabou wrote her dissertation on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) under the direction of the critical French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). She has taught at Nanterre University in Paris, in the United States at the University of California at Berkeley, in Buffalo as well as at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Today Dr. Malabou is a full-time professor at the Centre for Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University in the United Kingdom and is also a Professor at the European Graduate School (EGS) where she teaches an intensive summer seminar. Her work spans continental philosophy and neuroscience/neuro-psychoanalysis. She is a specialist of contemporary French and German philosophy. Her work has focused on the critical thought of Hegel and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), and has developed novel concepts through her critical engagement with contemporary philosophers like Jacques Derrida.
This lecture is the keynote address of the 16th Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities, hosted by the Birkbeck School of Law.
Unfortunately, Catherine Malabou was unable to attend due to unforeseen circumstances. However,  she sent her paper to be read, and you can listen to the plenary session below:
General Introduction by Professor  George Pavlich (University of Alberta):
PLAY
Introduction to Catherine Malabou and her work by Dr. Brenna Bhandar (Queen Mary, University of London):
PLAY
Catherine Malabou’s plenary read by Professor Jon Goldberg-Hiller (University of Hawaii):
PLAY
Vote of Thanks by Professor Timothy Campbell (Cornell):
PLAY
Closing Comments:
PLAY

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Conference, April 2013: ''Apocalyptic Politics: Framing The Present''


The annual philosophy conference at Villanova University has been a tradition since 1996. Sponsored by the Philosophy Graduate Student Union (PGSU), it began as one of the first graduate philosophy conferences in Continental philosophy. Now open for faculty as well as graduate students, the annual conference has drawn participants from all areas of philosophy as well as from around the world.

Villanova University ~ 18th Annual Graduate Philosophy Conference
2013 Conference: Apocalyptic Politics: Framing the Present
Friday, April 12th and Saturday, April 13th, 2013
Villanova room ~ Connelly Center

Keynote Speakers:
Mladen Dolar (University of Ljubljana), Alenka Zupančič (Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts), Slavoj Žižek (Birkbeck, University of London), Catherine Malabou (Kingston University), John D. Caputo (Syracuse University and Villanova University)

Please see website:
http://apocalypticpolitics.wordpress.com/