Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou

Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience

Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou, Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience, Columbia University Press, 2013, 276pp., $32.50 (pbk), ISBN 9780231158312.

Reviewed by John Protevi, Louisiana State University

Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou's important new book greatly helps the materialist turn in continental philosophy by precisely targeting the relations among psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, and affective neuroscience. Continuing the projects they have pursued in their previous work (Johnston 2005, 2008; Malabou 2008, 2010, 2012), the question of Self and Emotional Life could be said to be: what happens to the relation of psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan) and continental philosophy (Derrida, Deleuze, Žižek) when the findings of contemporary affective neuroscience (Damasio, Panksepp, LeDoux) are taken into consideration? That is to say, what would a continental materialist theory of subjectivity look like when it takes the life sciences seriously?

It should be noted at the outset that this is not a co-authored book; rather, it is two independently written essays joined together. The authors do, however, discuss each other's work in the Preface, by Johnston, and in the Postface, by Malabou. There is also a certain difference in emphasis: Malabou focuses on philosophy and neuroscience, though with reference to Freud, to be sure; Johnston, for his part, focuses on psychoanalysis and neuroscience, though always in reference to Hegel and Žižek as philosophers.

In addition, as they both note, the basic orientations of the two authors differ. For her part, Malabou is critical of the way psychoanalysis has neglected the brain, such that the findings of affective neuroscience -- especially with regard to what she calls elsewhere "the new wounded" (Malabou 2012; that is, patients with brain damage severe enough to constitute a destruction of the previous subject) -- serve as a reproach to psychoanalysis, exposing subjects that psychoanalysis can "neither theorize nor treat" (xii). On the other hand, Johnston sees more room for mutual enlightenment, finding that an "immanent critique" that plays off the tensions within the long psychoanalytic tradition might allow for "a genuinely materialist and empirically up-to-date psychoanalysis" (xii).

While I think the authors are correct to claim that this is the first book to join the specific fields of continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and affective neuroscience, there are a number of closely adjacent fields relevant to the materialist turn in continental philosophy, and the full value of the book will be realized in its networking effects, that is, in the mutually supporting and challenging connections it enables with those other fields. The domain to be investigated is the way social experience becomes embodied, or, conversely, the way the somatic is socialized. As Johnston puts it, the proper analysis of this domain can be neither biological reductionism nor social constructivism (188). It also means there never was a (non-social and mechanical) "first"

nature; human nature is such that nurture becomes nature right from the start. (We will come back to the way Johnston treats basic emotions in relation to first and second nature.)

These themes are already being explored by scientific research in neuroplasticity (Wexler 2006) and epigenetics (Jablonka and Lamb 2005; West-Eberhard 2003), which are mentioned though not fully explored. Johnston and Malabou do discuss neuro-psychoanalysis (Solms and Turnbull 2002), but neuro-psychoanalysis doesn't have continental philosophy references (nor does it incorporate Lacan, as Johnston notes [200-201]). Slightly further afield, but I think with great potential, are the connections to be made with neuro-phenomenology and enactivism (Varela 1996; Thompson 2007), though it has to be said that the neuro-phenomenologists and enactivists do not engage with psychoanalysis very much. My own work doesn't deal with psychoanalysis but attempts to connect Deleuze with a politically expanded enactivism in cognitive science and biology (Protevi 2009; 2013). Finally, at the margins, there's social neuroscience (Cacioppo and Bernston 2004), as well as some philosophical work done on the Damasio-Spinoza connection (e.g., Ravven 2003), but these don't engage psychoanalysis or continental philosophy.

Malabou's contribution should be read in conjunction with her previous work -- What Should We Do With Our Brain? (2008;   NDPR review ), Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing (2010; NDPR review), and The New Wounded (2012; NDPR review) -- in order to appreciate the full contours of her powerfully impressive project of constructing a materialist rejoinder to Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida. Here Malabou examines the concepts of affect, affection, auto-affection, heteroaffection, hetero-heteroaffection, and dis-affection in a network of texts: Damasio, Deleuze, and Derrida as readers of Descartes and Spinoza. The leading thread is the analysis of wonder (admiratio) as "the capacity to be amazed" (8).

To set the stage for her contribution, Malabou guides us through the way in which "affect" in Deleuze's reading of Spinoza enfolds affectio and affectus, being-affected by the encounter with another body so that it affects one's power of being. Affect then is variation in conatus, changes in our power of persisting in being wrought by encounters. We then move to auto-affection as the form of subjectivity as sketched out in Heidegger's Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. The empirical experience of the subject is in time, but that which provides the form of time is atemporal and transcendental, the Transcendental Unity of Apperception.

At this point, the question is the "metaphysics of presence" in the notion of auto-affection as pure self-touching. For Derrida, there is never a pure auto-affection, but always hetero-affection; there is what one could call an economy of exteriority such that there is an other inside our experience: we are always spaced, and there is always an external other. (Malabou notes the way the prime instance for Derrida of that self-present auto-affection changes, from the voice hearing itself speak to self-touching as auto-affection.)

For Derrida and Damasio, Descartes is the exemplar of pure auto-affection, but Deleuze will recognize in him a surpassing of the subject toward a plane of immanence. Malabou shows how, in Deleuze's course lectures on cinema (2 Feb 1982), he produces a reading of Descartes's Passions of the Soul in which "the face becomes the Cartesian plane of immanence par excellence, as if the soul's internal spacing is projected itself on it" (46).

However, in their own accounts, Damasio and Deleuze will look at auto-affection differently. Deleuze connects affect to auto-affection in Spinoza's third form of knowledge in the Ethics, where we find a non-subjective auto-affection. Rather than subjective, it's ontological: the auto-affection of essence, the internal agreement in adequate ideas of our essence, the essence of other things, and God / Nature's essence (44; Malabou here cites both Spinoza and Deleuze's online lectures on Spinoza; the point is also made at Deleuze 1988, 51).

Turning then to Damasio, Malabou shows how the tri-partite distinction in The Feeling of What Happens (1999) of proto-self, core consciousness, and autobiographical self allows one to locate the moment of auto-affection in the unconscious maintenance of homeostasis that makes up the proto-self (31-32; 67). But -- and here is the lynchpin of Malabou's argument -- the material neurological subject is open to the possibility of hetero-heteroaffection, that is, beyond mere heteroaffection of "an other" internal to the subject, the subject is exposed to material damage leading to dis-affection. This is an "effective" (11) or "biological" (58) "deconstruction of the subject," what Malabou calls "destructive plasticity." She then claims psychoanalysis cannot explain or cure the changes to subjectivity wrought by brain damage and studied by neuroscience.

While I believe Malabou has a good case to make with regard to psychoanalysis, her further claim that neurological findings of hetero-heteroaffection are "the most radical way" to thematize heteroaffection (64), that is, more radical than Derrida and Deleuze, is less secure. I will leave Derrida to the side for the purposes of this review, and focus on her claim that Deleuze will "delocalize the natural body" (68). But there is no "natural body" to be delocalized; this is the basic claim of the theory of materialist subjectivity Malabou and Johnston pursue, and it is one that Deleuze and Guattari would support, as the notion of "desiring-production" in Anti-Oedipus makes clear -- the social is not a super-structure to a natural infrastructure.

On a more technical note, the following passage in support of the claim that Deleuze will "delocalize the natural body" moves very quickly over complex territory.

The absence of organs, for Deleuze, means the lack of organization, as if our flesh, our blood, our brain were suspected of being the material expressions of metaphysics, as substance, system, presence, and teleology are such expressions. The "Body Without Organs" remains a body but it only presents itself as a surface to slip over or bounce off of. It is a plane. (68)

Now, it is the case that Deleuze and Guattari look at the organism as the "judgment of God" in A Thousand Plateaus, a move that supports Malabou's claim about metaphysics, but in my opinion the "organism" in question here is political as much as it is biological. What happens in the construction of an "organism" is the material neuro-somatic-social construction (construction of the affective-cognitive patterns, thresholds, and triggers) of a body fit for work in a particular social system; that is, the construction of a peasant, a warrior, a soldier, a factory worker -- with their attendant racialized and gendered aspects. In other words, Deleuze and Guattari insist that constructing the organism -- and reconstructing it in some other way via a construction of a Body without Organs as a way station -- has to be done so as to avoid damaging the biological viability of the body (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 161). That is to say, in A Thousand Plateaus the BwO is

the move toward a new "body politic," a new experimental arrangement of a politically patterned neuro-somatic body; it is not the catatonic body of Anti-Oedipus, a mere surface off of which socialized "flows" slip, but it is a stage in the capture and patterning of those flows in a new body.

In any case, these are technical issues, and that being said, Malabou's contribution to Self and Emotional Life is a very valuable addition to not only her own philosophy, but also to the important turn of continental philosophy toward neuroscience and biology.

In his contribution, Johnston focuses on the relation of affect and the unconscious in the psychoanalytic tradition. With careful scholarship, he nuances two standard stories. The first is that there is a clear break in Freud at the point of the second topography in 1923, such that we find a "before" in which unconscious affect is a contradiction in terms, and an "after" in which it is admitted (at least with regard to unconscious sense of guilt). The second story is that Lacan adamantly claims that there is only a Freudian disavowal of unconscious affect. This feeds into a criticism that Lacan neglects affect, being interested only in cognition, signifiers, structure, and so on. After complicating these received stories, Johnston then looks to contemporary affective neuroscience for support of the notion of unfelt -- or better, misfelt -- feelings. This is then fed back into a reading of Žižek and Lacan with regard to the radical interweaving of cognition and affect, language and feeling, structure and energy, nature and culture, and all their substitutes. Johnston appropriately casts the radical interweaving thesis in Hegelian terms as the critique of immediacy (85-86).

I will leave it to others better versed in the Freudian and Lacanian tradition to evaluate Johnston's interpretive textual work here; suffice it to say that I was highly impressed by the carefulness of his scholarship and the clarity and economy of his exposition. I would like to spend the rest of this review on Johnston's more strictly philosophical and argumentative work bringing contemporary neuroscience into relation with the Hegel-Lacan-Žižek critique of the immediacy of affect. (Of course, having said that, I must add that there is no clear distinction here; there is argument in the textual analyses just as there is textual interpretation in the argumentation.)

Some of Johnston's most insightful and interesting comments concern the interplay of two Lacanian concepts-terms-puns: lalangue and jouis-sens. Lalangue is babbling prior to and still inhabiting mature language (la langue). In Johnston's formula, lalangue is "the nonsense uttered by babbling infants joyfully and idiotically reveling in the bodily pleasures of pure, senseless sounds" (142). Lalangue however "lingers on in the linguistic productions of more mature speaking subjects" (142). The presence of lalangue in adult language (la langue) is paralleled by the presence of meaning in affect, the sens in jouis-sens (a portmanteau phonetically identical with jouissance; it is best translated as "enjoy-meant".) Johnston will then link the profusion of lalangue and the relative sparseness of la langue to the concept of neuronal pruning in infant development, in which neuronal over-production allows for inactive synapses to die off (195-196). This is in turn brought back to psychoanalysis and forward to epigenetics, via the work of Gérard Pommier (2007). In Johnston's reconstruction, Pommier shows that

these eliminations and selections are pruning processes through which the wild thickets of lalangue's jouis-sens-laden babbling (i.e., primary processes) are cut down (albeit, for

psychoanalysis, not purged altogether without remainder) into the narrower confines of recognizably meaningful forms of une langue (i.e., secondary processes) (197).

At first glance, the role of the caretaker here seems negative, interventionist, and solely linguistic, rather than positive, catalytic, and corporeal. That is to say, it seems to support the criticism that Lacan neglects affect, a criticism that Johnston strives to defang. As I will show, Johnston has the resources to complicate this critical first impression, but for now, let me follow up on this line. Johnston frames the above passage thusly: "the eliminations and selections imposed on the child's neural network . . . are imposed thanks to the interactive interventions of significant (and signifying) others actively engaging with the child" (197). Now I certainly agree that child-caretaker interactions are how neuroplasticity operates; Johnston is entirely correct in explicating Pommier as in touch with current notions: "the plastic human brain . . . is genetically destined to be turned over to shaping vicissitudes far from entirely preprogrammed by evolutionary-genetic influence alone . . . in short, [the brain] is hardwired to be rewired" (197).

An interesting supplement to the negative linguistic pruning aspect can be found elsewhere in the new attention by cognitive science researchers to what we could call corporeal intersubjectivity. Among other topics, researchers have paid special attention to the work on "primary intersubjectivity" by Andrew Meltzoff, Daniel Stern, and Colwyn Trevarthen. Shaun Gallagher often cites Meltzoff's work on neonatal facial imitation in developing the notion of an infantile body schema, which makes individuation a process of modulating a relation rather than breaking free of a fusion with the mother (Gallagher and Meltzoff 1996; Gallagher 2004). Daniel Stern's recent Forms of Vitality has some concise descriptions of "affective attunement," in which a caretaker matches the affective dynamics of the infant, but in another modality (e.g., voice rather than gesture), so that there is no mere imitation, but a "signature" indicating the matching of internal states (Stern 2010, 41; 113). But it is Dissanayake's (2000) and Trevarthen's (1999) interest in what comes to be called "communicative musicality" (Malloch and Trevarthen 2010) in the rhythmic multi-modal interaction of caretaker and infant that's the key for me. The infant and caretaker engage in a rhythmic interchange of cooing, babbling, rocking, sucking, grasping, and so on. Yes, undoubtedly negative linguistic pruning occurs, but corporeal interchange has positive accomplishments as well.

That being said, the Lacanian notion of the materiality of the signifier that Johnston incorporates into his approach allows us to nuance this first impression and acknowledge that there is no sharp separation between the linguistic and the corporeal or the negative and positive in infant-caretaker interaction. After all, that interaction is corporeal and linguistic at once: cooing and gurgling and reflected babbling blending into "Motherese" is right there all along with rocking and stroking and petting. Similarly, with regard to the negative-positive polarity, the negative pruning is exactly what produces the positivity of neural wiring.

So with that interweaving in mind, let me offer the above references to corporeality as a supplement rather than a criticism of Johnston; it's a matter of emphasis of presentation, I think, rather then strict separation of approaches. The same holds for my last point. Johnston will say that "nature" -- here in the form of basic emotions such as rage and panic -- will peak through into "culture" in "rare, extreme conditions" (193). This is true, but I would offer a slight nuance. You could say that the basic emotion qua affect program is stereotyped and shows similarities

with other mammalian reactions, but even if the pattern is similar the triggers are cultural: the music and dance that could set off a berserker frenzy in one group would just sound like gibberish to another.

But as with my discussion of Malabou's contribution, these minor criticisms are technical issues that should not distract from the overall praise that Self and Emotional Life deserves as a major contribution to the important materialist turn in continental philosophy.

REFERENCES

Cacioppo, John T. and Berntson, Gary G. 2004. Social Neuroscience: Key Readings. New York: Psychology Press.

Damasio, Antonio. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Spinoza's Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Dissanayake, Ellen. 2000. Antecedents of the temporal arts in early mother-infant interactions. In N. Wallin, B. Merker, and S. Brown, eds. The Origins of Music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 389-407.

Gallagher, Shaun. 2004. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gallagher, Shaun and Meltzoff, Andrew. 1996. The Earliest Sense of Self and Others: Merleau-Ponty and Recent Developmental Studies. Philosophical Psychology 9: 213-236.

Jablonka, Eva and Lamb, Marion J. 2005: Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Johnston, Adrian. 2005. Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Johnston, Adrian. 2008. Žižek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Malabou, Catherine. 2008. What Should We Do with Our Brain? New York: Fordham University Press.

Malabou, Catherine. 2010. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction. New York: Columbia University Press.

Malabou, Catherine. 2012. The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage. New York: Fordham University Press.

Malloch, Stephen and Trevarthen, Colwyn. 2010. Communicative Musicality: Exploring the Basis of Human Companionship. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pommier, Gérard. 2007. Comment les neurosciences démontrent la psychoanalyse. Paris: Flammarion.

Protevi, John. 2009. Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Protevi, John. 2013. Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ravven, Heidi. 2003. Spinoza's anticipation of contemporary affective neuroscience. Consciousness & Emotion 4.2: 257-290.

Solms, Mark and Turnbull, Oliver. 2002. The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of the Subjective Experience. New York: Other Press.

Stern, Daniel N. 2010. Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology and the Arts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Thompson, Evan. 2007. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of the Mind. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Trevarthen, Colin. 1999. Musicality and the intrinsic motive pulse: Evidence from human psychobiology and infant communication. Musicae Scientiae, special issue: 155-215.

Varela, Francisco J. 1996. Neurophenomenology: A methodological remedy for the hard problem. Journal of Consciousness Studies 3: 330-49.

West-Eberhard, Mary Jane. 2003. Developmental Plasticity and Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wexler, Bruce E. 2006. Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology, and Social Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Malabou, Catherine 2012 Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, reviewed by Stacey Smith

Catherine Malabou, Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (trans. Carolyn Shread), Polity Press, Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA, Polity Press, 2012. 112 pages, £9.99, €11.50, paper, ISBN: 9780745652610 (http://politybooks.com/book.asp?ref=9780745652603).

Best known for her 2008 book What Should We Do With Our Brains? Catherine Malabou is a rising star across many disciplines, with her bold statements, unapologetic style and above all, her new propositions to longstanding philosophical concepts. Though a self-titled deconstructionist, Malabou aims to transcend Derrida’s différance through an analysis of cerebral transdifferentiation and to apply Hegelian dialectics to describe the relation between matter and consciousness. In her short but complex 2009 essay Ontology of the Accident (translated from French in 2012) Malabou presents her own conception of the subject as a neuronal being that is essential as much as it is accidental, and material as much as it is historical; a becoming-self through plasticity.

In this book, Malabou urges us to think about the event-ality of a destructive event and uses the example of neurological trauma to capture the ‘unheard’ history of the subject. She presents an ontology of becoming, but a becoming that does not belong to the positive connotations of plasticity. In What Should We Do With Our Brains? Malabou argued that in science, art and education, plasticity is presented as a delightful form of ‘natural sculpting’ that shapes our identity and makes us subjects of history. After all, we are able to learn, respond to the world and develop into new subjects. This, at first glance, can only imply a positive progression of the life course and a reinforcement of the permanence of identity. Plasticity is an ‘explosive creativity’ that  makes us (2008, page 74).

In Ontology of the Accident, however, Malabou offers a frightful warning; plasticity can also act as a ‘plastic bomb’ with the potential to unravel the self in profound ways. If ‘we are our synapses’, as neuroscientist (and frequent reference) Joseph LeDoux (2002) pushes, we are also utterly vulnerable to their mutations and disentanglements. This is what Malabou calls the ‘dark side’ of plasticity, its ability to annihilate form as well as to give it. As a result of trauma—socio-political (e.g. post-traumatic stress or depression) or material (e.g. dementia, a brain tumour)—, or sometimes for no reason at all, Malabou argues, the path splits leaving a ‘deep cut in the biography of the subject, an ontological violence that gives rise to a new being which has nothing in common with its preceding form’ (page 17). The possibility of the destructive accident is within all of us, at every moment of our lives and she urges us to recognise that one day, we might become someone else.

‘Plasticity houses itself beneath an apparently smooth service like a reserve of dynamite hidden under the peachy skin of being for death’ (page 1).

Through the example of trauma, Malabou provides important insights into the wider philosophical questions of brain plasticity—the questions that plasticity poses to us and the demands it might make on us (James 2012). Dark plasticity is presented as a freak event, one that interrupts being in its entirety rather than a gradual transformation we might see in natural ageing, for example (which  is discussed extensively in chapter 4). Malabou says that with a more gradual transformation, the subject can only ever transform into itself. Even though form changes through time—our hair greys, wrinkles become deeper, walking slows—substance will

remain. Our personalities may alter over the years but in normal circumstances, our fundamental self stays the same. We see her Hegelian roots shine through here: the idea of a self (or consciousness in Hegel) evolving by recognising its own difference and sublating that particular part or untruth. However, Malabou argues that the destructive accident attacks the plastic abilities of substance so that the subject can no longer inter-relate with its own difference. Through trauma, an ‘absolute other’ emerges which has no relationship with the former self—a complete metamorphosis of being.

Malabou’s work is challenging because she presents trauma as a complete deviation of being, which, she argues, is rare in the western imaginary. She illustrates this point with beautiful literary examples; firstly, with various examples from ancient Greek mythology—the tales of Metis, Peleus, Menelaus and Daphne where godly transformation acted as a trick or a strategy, but one that was always temporary. She then analyses Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, describing the novella as ‘the most successful, beautiful and relevant attempt to approach this kind of accident’ (2012, page 14). Gregor waking up as a giant insect without cause or understanding is an example of destructive plasticity; an inexplicable transformation and sense of possible danger. However, Malabou argues that we have learnt from metaphysics that form can always change but the nature of being persists. She argues that in Metamorphosis, though Gregor changes form in a dramatic way, he largely remains the same in substance. His ‘inner monologue does not appear to be transformed in substance’ (page 18), which, Malabou argues, is why he suffers—because he has the memory of himself. With this, Malabou introduces the main provocation of her thesis—‘But imagine a Gregor perfectly indifferent to his transformation, unconcerned by it. Now that’s a completely different story!’ (page18).

The destructive accident breaks the conception of metamorphosis having a circular nature because trauma changes identity completely; it does not allow it to return to prior forms and displaces the meaning of a life. To support this provocation, Malabou gives several examples—the couple who cannot recover from an infidelity, the well-off woman whose son abandons to live in a squat, people with Alzheimer’s disease. She argues that once a metamorphosis takes place, its effects are always unexpected, ‘breaking all etiological links’ with its cause.

‘All of a sudden these people became strangers to themselves because they could not flee. It was not, or not just, that they were broken, wracked with sorrow or misfortune; it was the fact they became new people’ (page 13).

The destructive accident reveals a being that cannot be affected; suffering is caused by the absence of suffering, a pain that is indifferent to its own pain. Malabou maintains that coldness and indifference are key characteristics of destructive plasticity and draws on Antonio Damasio’s work and its affinity with the earlier work of Spinoza. She notes that both writers recognise the essential importance of the nervous system, notably the emotions, to the hunger for life (or conatus in Spinoza). For Spinoza, the preservation of the conatus and its persistence to exist is expressed in the form of affects—joy affirms this, sorrow diminishes it. In addition, Malabou explains, developments in neurobiology have shown that reason and cognition cannot develop normally if they are not supported by affects—‘reasoning without desiring is not reasoning’, because there is no value attached to it (Malabou 2012b, page 22). Things must have a weight to them in order for reasoning to discriminate.

According to Damasio (1999), instinctual reactions (or ‘gut feelings’) operate outside of consciousness (or higher order reasoning) in the ventro-medial sector of the brain (the frontal lobes, the brainstem nuclei and the somatosensory cortices). It is only when we become aware of these neural reactions that they can be reconstituted as feelings, which can then produce emotional biases and influence decision making. Without this process, which Damasio says occurs in some cerebral injuries, reasoning becomes ‘cold-blooded’ (2012, page 22), a point upon which Malabou leaps. She gives the example of Romain Dupuy, a former mental patient who in 2004 viciously killed two nurses simply because they were the  closest persons to him in the residence where he stayed. Several other patients witnessed the crime without saying a word. Malabou justifies her engagement with neuroscience here because, she argues, it is not possible to grasp the coldness of the murderer or the indifference of the spectators ‘without referring to brain injuries that cause the sometimes total and irremediable loss of emotion’ (page 28). After the destructive accident, the event cannot be reintegrated retrospectively; the psyche loses its sense of recall, emotional judgement and, in many senses, the subject becomes a ‘living dead’ (page 34).

When a trauma occurs, the entire affective potential is influenced, sorrow is not even possible anymore; the patient falls, beyond sorrow, into a state of apathy that is no longer joyful or despairing (page 27).

At times, I find Malabou’s empirical examples hard to digest. Her claim that all traumatic injuries provoke this ‘indifferent’ behaviour (page 23) is highly questionable. Her empirical cases are very selective and mostly as the extreme end (the indifference of a murderer, complete amnesia, abused children). She does not consider that while the majority of brain injured patients experience this kind of apathetic, catatonic state immediately after the accident, this is often temporary. Consequently, metamorphosis can still have that circular nature Malabou openly dismisses. The aspect of the book I find most problematic is that  it pays no attention to the stages of trauma, the spectrum of subjectivity we find with different kinds of injury and different severities of the accident. Further, ‘destruction’ is a word that carries a lot of weight and I think it is perhaps used too flippantly in Malabou’s analysis. Though there is destruction going on to identity itself—the lesion disrupts affectual capacity which can profoundly ‘unmake’ our sense of self (Romanillos 2012)—, when a trauma occurs it can ‘bring to life’ autoaffectual capacities to heal, or even care, which may not have surfaced in normal circumstances.

Malabou describes the traumatic subject as ‘less than nothing because nothing is a word that still resembles too much’ (2012, page 70). These kinds of comments compromise her self-given title of materialist. In the traumatised subject, particularly those affected by a medical trauma (e.g. brain tumour, embolism, dementia) matter is far from nothing; it is lively, it keeps the body alive as much as it destroys it. The brain may suffer but it is also at work. It seems Malabou focuses only on what is happening to identity and personality, rather than to a subject that is also material. She says that the psyche cannot stage knowledge of the accident itself because ‘the event is completely blind to the hermeneutic dimension’ (2012b, page15). However, the brain can and does stage this knowledge through the autoaffectual mechanisms outlined in The New Wounded.  Malabou previously argued that the brain and psyche are one but here she reverts back to a dualism in many points of her argument.

In the last chapter of Ontology, which I found the most poignant, Malabou says her task is to think through ‘the void of subjectivity’ (page 24), because after all, ‘the brain damaged identity, which even as an absence from the self, is nonetheless well and truly a psyche’ (page 9). Such void is articulated as a possibility; the accident is a way for life to say ‘no’ to itself and ‘no’ to continuity through affirmative plasticity. Here we see Hegel crop up again when she asks: ‘is there a mode of possibility attached exclusively to absolute negation?’ (page 73). Freedom here becomes tied to this ability to say ‘no’; absolute negation can be thought of as affirmative.

Malabou plays around with dialectics in an exciting way. She remains loyal to Hegel in that they both argue that negativity is needed for transformation and differentiation. However, a Hegelian would argue that negation is needed for ‘self-correction’ and desire to live. For Malabou, however, the traumatic subject has lost this desire in their indifference.  Throughout the book Malabou maintains the idea that construction must always be balanced by a form of destruction. She is committed to the fact that ‘all creation can occur at the price of a destructive counterpart [and this] is a fundamental law of life’ (page 4). In this sense, Ontology could be seen as an unafraid, unabridged picture of reality—people get diseases, lives are re-routed, death happens. It is a part of life itself and we must deal with it.

Stacey Smith, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1SS, United Kingdom.

References

Damasio, A 1999 The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York, Harcourt Inc.)

James, I 2012 The New French Philosophy (Cambridge, Polity Press)

LeDoux, J 2002 Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (London, Penguin)

Malabou, C 2008 What Should We Do With Our Brain? (New York, Fordham University Press)

Malabou, C 2012 Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (Cambridge, Polity Press)

Malabou, C 2012b The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage (New York, Fordham University Press)

Romanillos, J-L 2012 ‘The New Wounded: From neurosis to brain damage: A Review’, http://societyandspace.com/reviews/reviews-archive/malabou-new-wounded/

Malabou, Catherine 2011 Changing Difference, reviewed by Sarah Kizuk

Catherine Malabou, Changing Difference (trans. Carolyn Shread), Polity Press, Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA, Polity Press, 2011. 180 pages, £14.99, €18.00, paper, ISBN: 9780745651088 (http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745651095).

Catherine Malabou works in classic continental philosophy, neuroscience, and neuro-psychoanalysis. In some of her other works Malabou has written on trauma, the plasticity of writing and mourning. With Changing Difference she contributes to serious scholarship on contemporary feminism, most notably on the issue of essentialism. This short book was originally published in 2009 as Changer de différence, and it consists of four essays. The second and third essays, ‘Grammatology and plasticity’ and ‘The phoenix, the spider and the salamander’, investigate the ontology and biology of the feminine, whereas the first and final essays, ‘The meaning of the “feminine’’’ and ‘Woman’s possibility, philosophy’s impossibility’, examine the outcome of the two former essays in terms of sex and gender. It is in the final piece, in particular, that Malabou weighs in with her contribution to the heated feminist debates around essentialism.

Such debates centre around the question of whether there is a set of properties that are held in common by all women in virtue of being women. If there were such a set of properties, such as shared biological features or experiences of gendered oppression, then presumably on the grounds of these commonalities women should be able to act collectively for political change. However, reducing all women to the category of ‘woman’  tends to erase important differences amongst women. One worry about anti-essentialism that Malabou shares is that a lack of commonalities throws the possibility of collective political action based on women acting together, qua woman, into doubt.

Drawing from Levinas, Irigaray and Butler, Malabou begins by constructing the ontological being of the feminine as hospitality, the instance of ethical openness, the origin of wonder, and the space of play between genders. This is its ‘ontological meaning which ensures that the feminine is not restricted to woman’ (page 21). And yet Malabou claims that in Levinas, Irigaray and Butler’s works there is always already an ambiguity that ties femininity back to biological women and women’s sexuality (pages 27-29). ‘To speak of the ‘feminine’ would thus lead, in one way or another, to a reinforcement of traditional divisions and a reduction in the breadth of difference’. That said, Malabou argues that the critique of the feminine also leads ‘to a dead end’ (page 32) and this neutralizes and eradicates the subject of feminist struggles. As such, she argues that ‘no theory of the pluralization of difference will be able to shake the rigidity of the dyad’ (page 38).

What Malabou demonstrates, then, is that there is a problem with both essentialist and anti-essentialist positions; both are guilty of reduction and violence. In reality, women are ‘dominated sexually, symbolically, socially, economically, and culturally’ (page 92), whereas in deconstructionist thought, as well as in gender and queer studies, a kind of theoretical violence is done to ‘woman’ which ‘can play into the hands of ordinary violence against women in both the domestic and social realm’ (page 96). Gender and queer studies have radically hollowed out ‘woman’, even while claiming to liberate her. They have, in the end, assimilated woman to ‘being nothing’. Malabou insists, however, that this may be a fruitful point of departure. Instead of thinking ‘woman’ as an empty concept, she calls for her to be seen as possessing a plastic and

resistant essence. This is, for Malabou, totally changing the terms of the essentialist/anti-essentialist debate and ushering in a new, ontologically grounded and open plastic era in feminist struggle. Her claim is a strong one; gender and sexual difference have never been investigated ‘back to [their] ontological source’ (page 2); at the same time, queer theory has never confronted deconstruction. The result of both failures is systematic real and theoretical violence against women.

Malabou tends to these wounds by maintaining that there is, in fact, a ‘minimal essence’ that keeps in mind the ‘specificity of the violence to women’ (page 93). This undoubtedly necessitates accepting a sort of feminine essence which is neither essentialist nor anti-essentialist, here Malabou’s training in the thought of Hegel shows through clearly for it is not one, or the other, but a dialectic movement between the two. Malabou is careful to tell this story through her own narrative, not wishing to speak on behalf of other women, but hoping some will follow the path offered in her book. In the final essay she submits philosophical analysis to the rigour of proof through her own experiences. To be part of the act of philosophizing is to be violated as woman, and to refuse to leave the discipline is to be constantly mitigating against this violence.

In the background is Malabou’s fundamental concept of plasticity (developed fully in her 2004 Que faire de notre cerveau?), derived in part from Hegel, which serves as the key of her concept of minimal feminine essence. For Malabou plasticity is that which is malleable (clay) or is able to give form (sculpture), but it is also something that has the power to explode (plastic explosives). It is universal; all is being changed or is changing. In the case of ‘woman’ her very violation shapes her. That said, the violation that shapes her also creates a new being, which in turn can shape other things. The process of plastic formation produces formative power, and it is in this way that women can ‘transform their impossibility of being into a specific power’ (page 112). Malabou’s notion of the feminine essence, then, is one that remains in flux, still empty in a sense, but powerful and transformative.

Malabou’s essays cover much ground in a more or less suggestive way. It is not so much that her arguments are not rigorous, for they are in many ways. Rather, there are many points which would do well to be further elaborated. Her construction of a minimal essence of femininity locates a sort of resistance to violence, in a practical sense, that is derived from that very violation. One wonders, as Malabou does not make this sufficiently clear, if there is anything other than a negative definition of feminine essence. Has the history of women’s resistance to violation provided no positive account of a minimal essence? Moreover, Malabou heavily criticizes anti-essentialist thought without making great reference to a wealth of feminist literature on the subject. Irigaray, Butler and Beauvoir do not constitute the whole of the feminist canon, after all. I look forward, however, to further contributions by Malabou to these debates.

Sarah Kizuk, Department of Philosophy, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, NL, A1C 5S7, Canada