Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy

Description

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.