The Southern Journal of Philosophy Volume 51, Spindel Supplement 2013

DRIVE BETWEEN BRAIN AND SUBJECT: AN IMMANENT CRITIQUE OF LACANIAN NEUROPSYCHOANALYSIS

Adrian Johnston
ABSTRACT: Despite Jacques Lacans somewhat deserved reputation as an adamant antinaturalist, his teachings, when read carefully to the letter, should not be construed as categorically hostile to any and every possible interfacing of psychoanalysis and biology. In recent years, several authors, including myself, have begun exploring the implications of reinterpreting Lacans corpus on the basis of questions concerning naturalism, materialism, realism, and the position of analysis with respect to the sciences of today. Herein, I focus primarily on the efforts of analyst Franois Ansermet and neuroscientist Pierre Magistretti to forge a specically Lacanian variant of neuropsychoanalysis (as distinct from Anglo-American variants). Taking up Ansermet and Magistrettis interlinked theories of drive (Trieb) and autonomous subjectivity, I develop an immanent critique of their project. Doing so in a manner that is intended to acknowledge and preserve this neuropsychoanalytic duos signicant insights and contributions, I seek to bring into sharper relief the exact set of necessary, as well as sufcient, conditions for what Ansermet, Magistretti, and I all are commonly pursuing: an account of the genesis of denaturalized subjects out of embodied libidinal economies, itself situated within the framework of a nonreductive, quasi-naturalist materialism synthesizing resources drawn from psychoanalysis, neurobiology, and philosophy.

Adrian Johnston is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and an Assistant Teaching Analyst at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta. He is the author of Time Driven (2005), ieks Ontology (2008), and Badiou, iek, and Political Transformations (2009), all published by Northwestern University Press. He has three books scheduled for publication over the course of the next year: Self and Emotional Life (coauthored with Catherine Malabou, Columbia University Press), Adventures in Transcendental Materialism (Edinburgh University Press), and The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy (Northwestern University Press).
The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 51, Spindel Supplement (2013), 4884. ISSN 0038-4283, online ISSN 2041-6962. DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12019

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1. IN THE ORGANIC MORE THAN THE ORGANIC ITSELFTHE SELF-SUBVERTING CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM In his 2002 book Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are surveying the implications of neurobiology for ideas regarding personal identity and subjectivity, Joseph LeDoux remarks that different brain systems . . . can be but are not always in sync.1 Although this might at rst seem like a banal observation, it signals a profound paradigm shift in thinking about the human brain. Admittedly, the brain is, by denition, an organ in an organism. As a set of images and notions automatically accompanying talk of organs and organisms in biological discourses, organicism privileges motifs of harmony, unity, and wholeness (with the etymological tie between the words organism and organization reinforcing this). By contrast, LeDouxs comment suggests that conceiving of the central nervous system, which reaches a peak of multifaceted intricacy and internal differentiation in human beings, along exclusively organicist lines risks leading to serious distortions and oversights. More precisely, highlighting the coordinated synchronization of the brain qua organ in an organism correspondingly heightens the danger of obscuring the multiple ways in which this material seat of the subject is nonorganic qua disorganized and out of synch with itself, permeated by intraneurological conicts, discrepancies, incompatibilities, and the like.2 Panning back for a moment to a very broad and basic perspective, I am convinced that the life sciences, in order to do real justice to the richly and unpredictably weird sorts of subjects humans are, must supplement the framing worldview of their spontaneous organicism with the notion that (phrased in Lacanian fashion) there is something in the organic more than the organic itself. In other words, a nonorganicity is immanent to the most complex forms of the organic. This is by virtue of the reality that, above certain thresholds, complexity of various sorts (be it biological, computational, institutional, social, or whatever) tends, within its given domain(s),

1 Joseph LeDoux, Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 31. 2 Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 105; Adrian Johnston, The Misfeeling of What Happens: Slavoj iek, Antonio Damasio, and a Materialist Account of Affects, in iek and Political Subjectivity, ed. Derek Hook and Calum Neill, special issue, Subjectivity 3 (2010): 8991; Adrian Johnston, Misfelt Feelings: Unconscious Affect Between Psychoanalysis, Neuroscience, and Philosophy, in Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou, Self and Emotional Life: Merging Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neurobiology, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 73210.

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to generate inner antagonisms, bugs, glitches, loopholes, short circuits, and tensions (a fact to which any experienced computer programmer, tax lawyer, or government bureaucrat readily would testify).3 Beyond these thresholds of complexity, more is less (i.e., more complexity equals less functionality).4 Arguably, as suggested by psychoanalysis and some neuroscientic thinkers, the human organism, with its incredibly elaborate central nervous system, is organically hard-wired to misre along lines subverting this beings straightforward status as a mere organism in the sense of a self-integrated totality of parts peacefully cooperating according to the governing master plan of a whole smoothly consistent within itself. However, this complexity-induced category of the nonorganic is not simply equivalent to the inorganic (i.e., the physics and chemistry of the nonliving). Expressed in Hegelian style, the nonorganicity of interest to me, assuming the organic to be an Aufhebung-type negation of the inorganic, is a sublating negation of this negation, namely, the complex organisms autodisruption of the organic part-whole organization of itself as a living system consisting of a plethora of levels and layers. For the sake of clarity, in what follows, I will refer to this nonorganicity distinct from the inorganic as the anorganic. Herein, the anorganic, as different from the inorganic, designates breakdowns of organic structure and dynamics catalyzed in and by non-Whole/not-One living systems themselves. LeDoux is far from alone in stressing the importance of paying attention to the anorganic disorganization of the central nervous system in addition to its organic organization. Cognitive scientist Keith Stanovich, whose 2004 book The Robots Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin advances an immanent critique of crudely reductive versions of evolutionary psychology, similarly emphasizes the lack of thoroughgoing integration among the human brains many individual components and subcomponents. In Stanovichs estimation, any sophisticated living system resulting from evolutionthis movement of historicized nature is a nonteleological process driven along by brute contingencies5 and enforcing nothing more than the quite minimal standard of good enough to survive long enough to reproduceis bound to be riddled with kinks and conicts (in this vein, Stanovich goes so far as to claim that, sometimes a person may have a brain that is, in an important sense, at war
3 Adrian Johnston, ieks Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 17071. 4 Adrian Johnston, Reections of a Rotten Nature: Hegel, Lacan, and Material Negativity, in Science and Thought, ed. Frank Ruda and Jan Voelker, special issue, Filozofski Vestnik (2013): 2352. 5 Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 9698, 11213, 11617, 14546.

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with itself ).6 Given the actual absence of top-down design guidance, the evolutionary criterion of clearing the relatively low bar of passing on genetic material is hardly a recipe for engendering optimally functional complex organisms. Even if hobbled by an array of dysfunctions triggered by less-thancomplete orchestration within and between its organs, with these body parts (and subparts) being outgrowths of disparate periods and inuences of stratied, nonunied evolutionary history, so long as an organism can muddle its way into eventually copulating, that sufces for evolution alone.7 Incidentally, a German saying succinctly conveys this stumbling-into-sex base requirement: Dumm kann cken. Francisco Varela and his collaborators put forward evolutionary-theoretic theses along the same lines as Stanovich and me.8 And, following in the footsteps of Varela, LeDoux, and Stanovich, among others, neuroscientist David Linden and psychologist Gary Marcus, in 2007 and 2008 books respectively, both depict the human brain as a kludge, namely, a suboptimal, hodge-podge device slapped together under pressure out of whatever disparate, unrelated materials happen to be available. They each contend that a number of humanitys distinctive features are the surprising fruits of this kludginess.9 Although the preceding might seem to be utterly foreign to Lacanianism this would be due more to its generally predominant antinaturalist animosity toward all things biological than to the above-mentioned research postdating Lacans deathLacan himself probably would not be so averse to such trajectories of science-inspired speculation.10 Even if one questionably

6 Keith E. Stanovich, The Robots Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 53. 7 Stanovich, The Robots Rebellion, xii, 1213, 1516, 2022, 25, 28, 53, 60, 6667, 8284, 122, 142, 18687, 247; Adrian Johnston, The Weakness of Nature: Hegel, Freud, Lacan, and Negativity Materialized, in Hegel and the Innite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic, ed. Slavoj iek, Clayton Crockett, and Creston Davis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 16869. 8 Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Boston: New Science Library, 1987), 115, 117; Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 19596, 205; Johnston, The Weakness of Nature, 16263. 9 David J. Linden, The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 23, 57, 2124, 26, 23546; Gary Marcus, Kludge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind (New York: Houghton Mifin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2008), 616, 16163; Johnston, The Misfeeling of What Happens, 90; Johnston, Misfelt Feelings, 17576. 10 Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience, in crits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006), 78; Jacques Lacan, Some Reections on the Ego, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, no. 34 (1953), 14; Johnston, The Weakness of Nature, 16370.

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maintains that the sole natural fact appealed to by him is the young childs prematurational helplessness, as already underscored by Freud,11 this single fact contains more aspects than appear to a casual rst glance. To begin with, Lacan links the Hilosigkeit highlighted by Freud specically to the body-inpieces (corps morcel).12 According to a certain standard but erroneous interpretation, the Lacanian corps morcel is carved into slices precisely by the external interventions of the signiers of the big Other; that is to say, the cutting up into bits and segments of the endogenous body is, on this awed textbook reading, an effect produced from the extracorporeal outside by impressions and incisions made by an exogenous sociosymbolic order.13 However, this widely accepted interpretation of Lacans corps morcel ignores his repeated insistence that this fragmentation is a matter of groundzero facticity,14 a contingent-yet-a-priori feature of the bodily Real an sich independent of and/or prior to Imaginary-Symbolic mediation. Again and again, Lacan speaks in the same constant thematic vein of organic disturbance and discord,15 intraorganic . . . discordance,16 an original organic chaos,17 a vital dehiscence constitutive of man,18 the organisms pseudototality,19 the congenital gap presented by mans real being in his

11 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, et al., 24 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 19531974). From here, I will refer to the Standard Edition with the abbreviation SE, followed by the volume number and page. SE 1: 318; SE 20: 15455, 167; SE 21: 1719, 30; Jacques Lacan, Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de lindividu: Essai danalyse dune fonction en psychologie, in Autres crits, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 2001), 3335; Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience, 76, 78; Jacques Lacan, Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis, crits, 92; Jacques Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre 6: Le dsir et son interprtation, 19581959 (unpublished typescript), session of November 12th, 1958; Jacques Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre 8: Le transfert, 19601961, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, 2nd ed. (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 2001), 427. 12 Lacan, Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de lindividu, 4142; Lacan, Some Reections on the Ego, 13, 15; Jacques Lacan, On My Antecedents, crits, 55; Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience, 78; Lacan, Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis, 92; Lacan, On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis, crits, 461; Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre 6, session of January 7th, 1959. 13 Johnston, The Weakness of Nature, 16364. 14 Jacques Lacan, Freuds Papers on Technique: 19531954, book 1, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), 147. 15 Lacan, Some Reections on the Ego, 15. 16 Lacan, Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis, 92. 17 Lacan, Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis, 94. 18 Lacan, Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis, 94. 19 Jacques Lacan, The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis, crits, 346.

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natural relations,20 the fantasized reality of any sort of totality of the organism,21 and gaps in the organic Gestalt.22 In black and white within the very text of the renowned 1949 crit on the mirror stage, one nds the invocation of a certain dehiscence at the very heart of the organism, a primordial discord.23 Phrased in the manner of the later Lacan, there is a barred corpo-Real in excess of the barred (and barring) big Other. Moreover, this thesis is perfectly compatible with the corresponding emphases on structural-Symbolic (i.e., signier-induced) and phenomenal-Imaginary (i.e., the helpless infants anxious, distressing experience of its motor impotence and nursling dependence24) fragmentation of what would thus be the overdetermined Borromean body, a corps whose piecemeal (denaturalized) nature takes (mis)shape at the intersection of the registers of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. As regards the mediation of the childs body in and through Imaginary-Symbolic realities, infantile helplessness as foregrounded by Freud and Lacan inclines the young subject-to-be in the two entwined directions of reliance on sociolinguistic relationships and identications with others. But, the anorganic corpo-Real of the Lacanian body-in-pieces, specically as independent of and prior to the emergent dual congurations of the ego and subjectivity (i.e., as the baseless base of anatomical and physiological facticity), is a biomaterial condition of possibility for any such phenomenal and/or structural mediations. Were the human organism to enter the world as the product of an evolutionary-genetic preestablished harmony, as a cog in a clockwork, organic order running according to the programs and designs of a pseudosecular naturalistic theodicy, it would be impervious to being affected in its real being by anything alien or foreign qua more-than-natural. In addition, it would, at a minimum, render all such enveloping contexts (i.e., Imaginary-Symbolic realities) epiphenomena of Nature as a material big Other brooking no nonnatural others or Others (as per a reductionist or eliminativist Weltanschauung). Lacan clearly postulates that denying the original existence of a synchronized instinctual monad at one with both itself and its environment, enclosed in the idiotic enjoyment of a blissful
20

Lacan, The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis,

21 Jacques Lacan, Remarks on Daniel Lagaches Presentation: Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure, crits, 545. 22 Lacan, Remarks on Daniel Lagaches Presentation: Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure, 545. 23 Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience, 78. 24 Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience, 76.

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natural balance, is absolutely axiomatic for a properly psychoanalytic metapsychology accounting for ontogenetic subject formation in a plausible and nonreductionist/noneliminativist way.25 Also in the text of The Mirror Stage (as well as elsewhere26) is to be found an almost never noticed detail: an explicit positive appeal to neurobiology.27 Therein, Lacan describes the cerebral cortex of the central nervous system as what psychosurgical operations will lead us to regard as the intraorganic mirror.28 Like Freud before him, he presciently anticipates with a welcoming attitude future empirical corroborations of core components of psychoanalytic theory via studies of the brain. Indeed, recent discoveries concerning mirror neurons and neuroplasticity dovetail with and appear to reinforce Lacanian interpretive glosses on identication, transitivism, and specic sorts of psychopathological symptoms.29 The historical and philosophical reasons for the near total neglect of these features of Lacans teachings are too numerous and messy for me to delve into at present.30 On several of the occasions cited earlier, Lacan addresses the body-inpieces and the brain side-by-side in the same contexts. This alone prompts me to make the move of positing a cerveau morcel as a crucial biological fact with respect to analytic metapsychology.31 Lacans reiterated insistence on the body-in-pieces as being organic, specically in the sense of a biological real(ity) inherent to the human condition from the very beginning of physical and mental development, further encourages me along these lines. As I indicated at the outset, select trajectories of contemporary neuroscientic thinking are coming to suggest such a concept on the basis of intrascientic considerations. Additionally, as neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux explains, the human brain itself, like the rest of the newborns body, is
25 Lacan, Remarks on Daniel Lagaches Presentation: Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure, 545; Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre 8, 410; Adrian Johnston, Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), xxxvixxxviii, 29498; Johnston, ieks Ontology, 21213. 26 Lacan, Some Reections on the Ego, 13; Lacan, Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis, 92. 27 Johnston, The Weakness of Nature, 16465; Johnston, Reections of a Rotten Nature. 28 Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience, 78. 29 Johnston, The Weakness of Nature, 16470; Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions, trans. Frances Anderson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), xixii. 30 Adrian Johnston, Repeating Engels: Renewing the Cause of the Materialist Wager for the Twenty-First Century, in animal.machine.sovereign, special issue, Theory @ Buffalo 15 (2011): 14148. 31 Johnston, The Misfeeling of What Happens, 8990; Johnston, Misfelt Feelings, 17576.

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distinctively premature, with this genetically dictated prematurity leaving the plastic brain to be substantially shaped and reshaped by epigenetic variables.32 In a separate piece of writing, and already with the idea of an anorganic brain-in-pieces in mind, I maintain (paraphrasing Alain Badiou) that, there is, within each human being, no Brain, only some brains.33 This assertion is advanced there in conjunction with citations of two of Antonio Damasios claims: one, Evolution is not the Great Chain of Being34 and, two, the brain is a system of systems.35 As I implied before in connection with LeDoux et al., these two theses are closely related insofar as the aleatory, meandering processes of a multitude of nonteleological, uncoordinated evolutionary dynamics36 almost inevitably must result in a kludge-like brain (i.e., a central nervous system as in pieces [morcel] qua being a system of systems, namely, a detotalized, not-thoroughly-systematic/systematized system). Current neurobiological research programs are starting to reveal that the Brain-with-a-capital-B, as the supposed sum total of cerebral components and operations, is nothing more than a ction of a fully organic material ground of thinking and feeling subjectivity, a fantasy-construct smoothing over the fragmentary anorganicity of this organ of organs37 (this would be the neuroscientistic correlate of the myth of evolution as an uninterrupted march of continuous, steady progress toward ever-greater achievements of synthesized biological complexity). Lacan already warns against attributing the imagined unities of sums/totalities resembling Aristotelian souls (or von Uexkllian worlds as harmonious symbioses between Innenwelten and Umwelten) to what is involved with human beings, their physical bodies included.38
32 Jean-Pierre Changeux, The Physiology of Truth: Neuroscience and Human Knowledge, trans. M.B. DeBevoise, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 189, 20809. 33 Johnston, The Misfeeling of What Happens, 90. 34 Antonio Damasio, Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon, 1994), 185. 35 Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt, 1999), 331. 36 Jean-Pierre Changeux, Du vrai, du beau, du bien: Une nouvelle approche neuronale (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2008), 78. 37 Johnston, Misfelt Feelings, 17578. 38 Jacques Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre 10: Langoisse, 19621963, ed. JacquesAlain Miller (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 2004), 25354; Jacques Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre 12: Problmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse, 19641965 (unpublished typescript), session of March 10th, 1965; Jacques Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre 14: La logique du fantasme, 19661967 (unpublished typescript), session of June 7th, 1967; Jacques Lacan, Encore: 1972 1973, book 20, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 10910; Jacques Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre 21: Les non-dupes errent, 19731974 (unpublished typescript), session of November 20th, 1973; Jacques

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I have a further motive for mentioning Damasio in this setting. In his latest book, 2010s Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, he raises a number of issues both directly related to the preceding discussion, as well as vital for the formulation of a possible Lacanian neuropsychoanalytic theory of drive (something I will propose below). In language audibly resonating with Stanovichs main motif of the robots rebellion, Damasio states:
If nature can be regarded as indifferent, careless, and unconscionable, then human consciousness creates the possibility of questioning natures ways. The emergence of human consciousness is associated with evolutionary developments in brain, behavior, and mind that ultimately lead to the creation of culture, a radical novelty in the sweep of natural history. The appearance of neurons, with its attending diversication of behavior and paving of the way into minds, constitutes a momentous event in the grand trajectory. But the appearance of conscious brains eventually capable of self-reection is the next momentous event. It is the opening of the way into a rebellious, albeit imperfect response to the dictates of a careless nature.39

He proceeds in the immediately following pages to characterize this self, generated out of reexive and recursive mental capacities, as a rebel responsible for the biological revolution called culture.40 Damasio, unlike many enthralled by the life sciences, obviously repudiates reductive or eliminative types of naturalist materialism (in Self Comes to Mind, he argues against any sort of epiphenomenalist dismissal of autonomous selfhood qua selfdetermining reective/reexive subjectivity41). One might even be tempted to detect quasi-Badiouian echoes herein, with Damasios talk of events of radical novelty as revolutions allowed for by the self-subverting natural structures of material beings free of unifying guidance and coordination (i.e., nature . . . as indifferent, careless, and unconscionable).42 Furthermore, Damasio draws attention to a precise volatile fault line deposited within the architecture of the human central nervous system by careless nature (i.e., the unorchestrated contingencies of a plurality of evolutionary forces and factors). He zeroes in on the brain stem and cerebral cortex.43 Looked at from an evolutionary perspective, these two regions of the
Lacan, Television in Television/A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan Copjec, trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1990), 6; Jacques Lacan, Aristotles Dream, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 11 (2006): 8384. 39 Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York: Pantheon, 2010), 287. 40 Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 28889, 29192. 41 Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 27172. 42 Adrian Johnston, The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy: Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume One (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013), forthcoming. 43 Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 25051.

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brain could not be further apart. They embody a chasm of chronology between the relatively old (brain stem) and new (cerebral cortex), a temporal gap or time-lag literally incarnated in the stuff of the central nervous system. Additionally, the primate cerebral cortex differs from what is to be found in other mammals, whereas the brain stem is a lowest common denominator across a sizable swathe of animal species. As LeDoux,44 Stanovich,45 Linden,46 and Marcus47 also indicate, the present version of the human brain sandwiches together (without seamlessly and exhaustively melding) a motley assortment of components and subcomponents reecting the sculpting powers of different, unsynchronized evolutionary eras and inuences.48 This collage-like, sedimentary juxtaposition of distinct temporal-historical layers and strata, with these levels sometimes entering into conict with one another, cannot but remind those familiar with Freudian psychoanalysis of Freuds famous description of the conicted, temporally elongated psyche as resembling an image of Rome in which, as in a type of virtual, computergenerated hologram, all of this citys separate and successive past phases and states are represented as copresent, simultaneously existing together in the same space.49 Damasio begins by describing the kludgy mismatch between the ancient, reptilian brain stem (responsible for regulating the bodys basic vital functions) and the (relatively) recent, primate cortex (with its sophisticated cognitive and representational capacities) as a big problem posed by evolution.50 He then explains:
notwithstanding the anatomical and functional expansion of the cerebral cortex, the functions of the brain stem were not duplicated in the cortical structures. The consequence of this economic division of roles is a fatal and complete interdependence of brain stem and cortex. They are forced to cooperate with each other.51

Damasios wording (fatal, forced ) emphasizes that the parceling-out of lifes labors between these two neuroanatomical regions is an awkward, fraught arrangement. The brain stem crucially sustains the whole organism (including the cortex) to which it belongs, while outsourcing many tasks essential to life regulation to the cortex. What is more, the cortex comes to
LeDoux, Synaptic Self, 32223. Stanovich, The Robots Rebellion, 60, 122, 18687. 46 Linden, The Accidental Mind, 6, 2122, 26. 47 Marcus, Kludge, 1214, 161. 48 Johnston, The Misfeeling of What Happens, 8992, 97; Johnston, The Weakness of Nature, 16870; Johnston, Misfelt Feelings, 17578. 49 SE 21: 6971. 50 Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 250. 51 Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 250.
45 44

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exert reciprocal modulating mediations back on the brain stem as its grounding base or trunk. In highly distributed primate and human brain functioning, primitive brain stem and advanced cortex are utterly codependent. And yet, they are, in many anatomical and physiological respects, different-in-kind; their architectures and operations dramatically set them apart from each other. Hence, Damasio concludes:
The brain-stem-cortex mismatch is likely to have imposed limitations on the development of cognitive abilities in general and on our consciousness in particular. Intriguingly, as cognition changes under pressures such as the digital revolution, the mismatch may have a lot to say about the way the human mind evolves. In my formulation the brain stem will remain a provider of the fundamental aspects of consciousness, because it is the rst and indispensable provider of primordial feelings. Increased cognitive demands have made the interplay between the cortex and brain stem a bit rough and brutal, or, to put it in kinder words, they have made the access to the wellspring of feeling more difcult. Something may yet have to give.52

Immediately prior to these remarks (as well as in the last sentence of this quotation), Damasio evinces his faith that evolution, like a slow-moving but ultimately benevolent divinity, can and will iron out these kinds of wrinkles in the human central nervous system.53 (Likewise, LeDoux hints that they should be viewed as transitory imperfections.54) Not only does this betray a lingering investment in the pseudosecular visions of a scientistic organicism problematized by the exact types of intraevolutionary and intracerebral disharmonies under discussion here, it is seemingly blind to the possibility, directly implied by the kludge models of Linden and Marcus as well as the central place of conict in psychoanalytic thinking, that an evolutionary overcoming of the anorganic brain-in-pieces would be tantamount to an undermining of the very humanity of human beings. Put differently, if, la Linden and Marcus, the human brains incomplete internal harmonization gives rise to various fundamental features of minded human subjectivity, then evolving past the cerveau (et corps) morcel very well might not be an extension of humanitys evolution; instead, it might amount to an unprecedented sort of dehumanization, an evolutionary liquidation of precisely what makes human beings human. In other words, given the varied dialectics of continuities and discontinuities arguably legible in the evidence of natural history as it has unfolded thus far, there is the potential that certain of humanitys future evolutionary eventualities would not be continuous developments of an

52 53 54

Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 251. Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 25051. LeDoux, Synaptic Self, 32223.

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enduring human nature, but, rather, discontinuous jumps beyond this (disrupted and, perhaps, self-disrupting) natureleaps leaving it behind.55 Having articulated these critical reservations with regard to Damasio still occasionally clinging to an organicist paradigm contested by many of his own observations, an additional detail of his account of intracerebral discord calls for attention. In terms of the neuroscientic triad of cognition, emotion, and motivation, he identies the thalamus as a go-between bridging the divide between, on the one hand, the primarily emotional and motivational (i.e., nonrepresentational) brain stem, and, on the other hand, the mainly cognitive (i.e., representational) cerebral cortex (most external objects exist as images only in the cerebral cortex and cannot be fully imaged in the brain stem56):
This is where the thalamus came to the rescue, as the enabler of an accommodation. The thalamus accomplishes a dissemination of signals from the brain stem to a widespread territory of the cortical mantle. In turn, the hugely expanded cerebral cortex, both directly and with the assistance of subcortical nuclei such as those in amygdalae and basal ganglia, funnels signals to the small-scale brain stem. Maybe in the end the thalamus is best described as the marriage broker of the oddest couple.57

Tempted by the last sentence of this quotation, a Lacanian might recommend comparing the separate regions of the brain stem and the cerebral cortex to the discrepancy between the two positions of sexual difference la Lacan. Thereby, the upshot would be, in connection with Lacans (in)famous il ny a pas de rapport sexuel, that, in certain instances, il ny a pas de rapport intracrbral, an axiomatic formulation of the anorganic barred corpo-Real specically at the level of the human central nervous system. That said, the thalamusthis region is situated near the very middle of the brain, sitting atop the brain stem and projecting nerve bers out to the curving expanses of the cortexindeed appears to be, both structurally and functionally, an intermediary relay station between brain stem and cerebral cortex. As per Damasio, it facilitates the two-way ows of mutual inuences back-and-forth between the oddest couple. Apropos these particular features of neuroanatomy and neurophysiology underlined in Self Comes to Mind, the links to Lacanianism go farther and deeper than playful associations with one of Lacans best-known one-liners. In their 2010 book Les nigmes du plaisir, the Lacanian neuropsychoanalytic couple of analyst Franois Ansermet and neuroscientist Pierre Magistretti zoom in on a brain region closely related to the thalamus: the insular cortex. This books fourth chapter is entitled The
55 Johnston, The Misfeeling of What Happens, 9192; Johnston, Misfelt Feelings, 17778. 56 Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 250. 57 Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 251.

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Island of the Drive (Lle de la pulsion), with the word insula being Latin for island.58 With respect to Freudian-Lacanian drive theory, Ansermet and Magistrettis fundamental thesis is that a mismatch between brain stem and insular cortex (resembling the one between the former and the cerebral cortex of interest to Damasio) lies at the neurobiological basis of what psychoanalysis conceives of as the uniquely human Trieb (drive, pulsion) distinct from animal Instinkt. In the second section of this intervention to follow momentarily, I will lay out a careful reconstruction of Ansermet and Magistrettis efforts to forge a specically Lacanian variant of neuropsychoanalysis, with a focus on their contributions to theorizing the drives (insofar as Trieb is a fundamental concept of psychoanalysis,59 any neuropsychoanalysis must accommodate it within its theoretical architecture). In tandem with this, I will refer to my own earlier work on drive theory (in the 2005 book Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive) as well as the non-Lacanian neuropsychoanalysis championed rst and foremost by Mark Solms. In the third and nal section, I will touch upon the relationship between Trieb and subjectivity in FreudianLacanian psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically informed philosophy. In so doing, I will critically assess both the productivity and limitations of the efforts of Ansermet and Magistretti to articulate a neuropsychoanalytic biology of freedom (the title of the English translation of their 2004 book chacun son cerveau). Through diagnosing a number of far-from-minor philosophical shortcomings aficting Ansermet and Magistrettis reections, I hope to outline what would be required, building on their very helpful contributions, for the completion of a rigorous, systematic theory of the denaturalized, more-thanorganic/physical subject nourished by the combined intellectual resources of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neurobiology. 2. SPLIT BRAIN, SPLIT DRIVETHE NEUROBIOLOGICAL BASES OF THE LIBIDINAL ECONOMY In Time Driven, I recast each and every drive as inherently divided, internally conicted, and self-sabotaging. Armed with many of the insights of Lacanian theory, I return to Freuds metapsychological denition of Trieb. According to Freud, anything qualifying as a drive is a borderline entity both straddling the divide between soma and psyche as well as consisting of four interrelated
58 Franois Ansermet and Pierre Magistretti, Les nigmes du plaisir (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2010), 3957. 59 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: 1964, book 11, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 12, 16162.

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constituents: source (Quelle), pressure (Drang), aim (Ziel ), and object (Objekt). I argue that these four dimensions line up on two antagonistic axes: an axis of iteration (source-pressure) and an axis of alteration (aim-object). Motivated partly by a cautious reluctance to confront the daunting mind-body problemsince then, I have lost this particular hesitant warinessI opt in Time Driven to sidestep this perennial philosophical difculty so as to make progress through concentrating instead on drives specically in light of temporality. Maintaining that the split within the very structure of Trieb is temporal, I depict the axis of iteration as a non/sub-representational movement demanding pure, unadulterated repetitionthe eternal return of the same. This insistence on repetition is routed through the mediating matrices of the axis of alteration, with its shifting concatenations of representations (i.e., images and signiers) in which differences, however minimal, are inevitable and ineliminable. Hence, for intrinsic structural reasons, drives not only are thwarted by inner conict within and between themselvesthey even are self-thwarting, since the very attempt at representational repetition made by the axis of alteration at the behest of its corresponding axis of iteration itself generates repetition-defying difference. As regards the Lacanian distinction between drive and desire, my Hegelian move at the level of the metapsychology of drive is to propose that this distinction is internal to (the Freudian) Trieb itself, with Lacanian pulsion corresponding to the axis of iteration and dsir to the axis of alteration. Each and every drive is torn between the negation and afrmation of time, fueled along indenitely by this temporal tension between the dual somatic and psychical contraption of its four ill-tted components (i.e., the Lacanian montage of the drive60). Related to the preceding, I claim that the notion of the death drive (Todestrieb), in its various scattered expressions throughout Freuds later writings, is really a quasi-concept, an inconsistent jumble of phenomena loosely resembling each other (and occasionally even being incompatible with one another). In other words, I deny that Freud himself presents readers with a clear and consistent metapsychological account of the Todestrieb; that is to say, death drive names a set of unresolved problems instead of a polished, nalized conceptual solution. However, when Freud says that the Todestrieb is not a drive unto itself by contrast with other drives and is, rather, a designation for a lowest common denominator shared by all drives, I take this very seriously. In conjunction with a substantial amount of other textual evidence and supporting argumentation on my part, this Freudian avowal licenses me

60

Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 163, 169.

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to read the death drive in Freud as a name for the split (and this splits myriad consequences) aficting drives in general.61 Jonathan Lears Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life, published after the writing of Time Driven, proposes something similar. Therein, Lear contends that the Todestrieb is not a positive feature or entity of the libidinal economy. Although Freud often hypostatizes it as such, Lears thesis, with which I agree, is that the death drive is better thought of as a dysfunctionality plaguing the pleasure principle, namely, a negativity qua the lack of an unwaveringly optimized and successful libidinal economy.62 Furthermore, Damasios previously-examined oddest couple of brain stem and cerebral cortex, held together by the marriage brokering of the thalamus, looks like a leading candidate for the neurobiological ground of the splitting of the drive along the lines of the two incongruous axes of iteration and alteration. The drives source and pressure (i.e., the axis of iteration), involving a repetitive somatic demand for work, would correspond mainly with the motivational and emotional brain stem. The drives aims and objects (i.e., the axis of alteration), involving shifting successions of differing psychical images and signiers, would correspond with the cognitive cortex. Put in a somewhat oversimplied version of Lacanian locution, the cerebral cortex, via the thalamus, is the conduit for the phenomena and structures of Imaginary-Symbolic reality to affect and mediate the bodily Real, embodied rst and foremost by the brain stem. Resonating with my rendition of drives as perpetual frustration machines,63 Ansermet and Magistretti characterize the brain as a failure machine (machine rater), doing so precisely in the context of discussing drive in the strict psychoanalytic meaning of the term.64 The very title of the book in which they explore in depth the neurobiological foundations of the drivecentered libidinal economy of psychical subjectivity, Les nigmes du plaisir, refers to the mysterious, opaque beyond of the pleasure principle troubling the later Freud and compelling him to run through a series of inconsistent speculations about a death drive (or drives).65 Reasonably assuming that Trieb is rooted in the body of the human (an)organism (or, at least, not without [pas sans] such a rapport with the somatic), they ask, how can it be that what functions for the bodys physiological regulations nds itself being so

Johnston, Time Driven, xxviixxxviii, 33341, 34347. Jonathan Lear, Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 8081, 8485; Johnston, The Weakness of Nature, 15960. 63 Johnston, Time Driven, xxxi. 64 Ansermet and Magistretti, Les nigmes du plaisir, 92. 65 Ansermet and Magistretti, Les nigmes du plaisir, 710.
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dysfunctional in psychical life?66 Of course, as is well known, Freudian drives arise from and take shape around such rudimentary vital activities as eating, defecating, and copulating. Ansermet and Magistretti rightly wonder about how and why these basic functions of organic life, apparently unproblematic for other animals wallowing in their gratications, get derailed and become sources of agitation, displeasure, and suffering in minded subjects. Although Freud never secured a biological explanation for the existence of things beyond the pleasure principle, Ansermet and Magistretti aspire to fulll Freuds hopes that such scientic conrmation for drive theory (and psychoanalysis generally) will arrive eventually.67 Ansermet and Magistretti translate the traditional analytic distinction between drive and instinct into more contemporary life-scientic language. They state that, Instinct is a behavior issuing from the genetic program, whereas drive is precisely the product of the insufciency of genetic determination.68 Ansermet and Magistrettis previous coauthored book, chacun son cerveau, spends a lot of time emphasizing recent biologys intrascientic delegitimization of scientistic determinisms appealing to xed genetic codes and evolutionarily hard-wired neural programs. For them, the steadily increasing importance of neuroplasticity and epigenetics in biological accounts of human beings amounts to the advancement of a paradoxical scientic case for the irreducibility of human nature and subjectivity to standard scientic approaches and explanations.69 Accordingly, they describe humans as genetically determined not to be genetically determined.70 In the third section of this intervention, I will spell out, contra Ansermet and Magistretti, why their neuropsychoanalytic mobilizations of neuroplasticity and epigenetics do not succeed at establishing a full-blown biology of freedom (this has to do primarily with their tendencies to conate autonomy with indeterminism and idiosyncrasy). For now, additional exegetical labor is needed with respect to Lacanian neuropsychoanalysis la Ansermet and Magistretti. The concept-term trace, dened as the neural-somatic inscription of subjective-psychical experience, plays a pivotal role in Ansermet and Magistrettis theorizations.71 Thanks to the brains endogenous epigenetic plasticity, it is exposed to being shaped and reshaped at the synaptic level by
Ansermet and Magistretti, Les nigmes du plaisir, 14. Ansermet and Magistretti, Les nigmes du plaisir, 36. 68 Ansermet and Magistretti, Les nigmes du plaisir, 15. 69 Franois Ansermet and Pierre Magistretti, Biology of Freedom: Neural Plasticity, Experience, and the Unconscious, trans. Susan Faireld (New York: Other Press, 2007), xvi, 70. 70 Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, 8. 71 Pierre Magistretti and Franois Ansermet, Plasticit et homostasie linterface entre neurosciences et psychanalyse, in Neurosciences et psychanalyse: Une rencontre autour de la singularit, ed. Pierre Magistretti and Franois Ansermet (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2010), 17.
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exogenous inuences emanating from the denaturalized and denaturalizing phenomena and structures of experiential elds qua Imaginary-Symbolic realities as conceived of by Lacan (realities organized around intersubjective little-o others and transsubjective big-O Others). Alluding to the Freudian Trieb, Ansermet and Magistretti depict synaptic traces as materializing at the tension-ridden intersection between soma and psyche.72 Additionally, they invoke Catherine Malabous Hegel-inspired dialectical-speculative rendition of plasticity as a convergence of the (ostensible) opposites of, on the one hand, exibility, uidity, malleability, and volatility, and, on the other hand, xity, solidity, rigidity, and stability.73 For Ansermet and Magistretti, traces, formed at the intersection of body and mind, are plastic in the precise Malabouian sense. Furthermore, in their fusion of neurobiology and psychoanalysis, they maintain that this plasticity holds both within and between the somatic and the psychical.74 Thus far, the plasticity of the body, chiey as the neuroplasticity of the central nervous system, seems to be the dominant preoccupation of Ansermet and Magistrettis musings. They devote a great deal of effort to stressing how the human brain of the life sciences is a system of synaptic networks open to more-than-natural/neural inscriptions marking the impacts of subjectively registered images and words on the biophysical substance of the underlying living being. However, these images, words, and the complex, crossresonating networks of memories and representations they combine to constitute and reconstitute repeatedlythis would be the dimension (or, to resort to one of Lacans neologisms, dit-mension) of Freudian Vorstellungen and Lacanian signiers as conceptualized beyond the connes of the linguistic study of natural languages75are plastic too. Throughout their works, Ansermet and Magistretti associate the plasticity of psychical (as distinct from, yet bound up with, somatic) traces with processes of retranscription and reconsolidation, the latter being the neurobiological equivalent of the psychoanalytic former. Retranscription, as per Ansermet and Magistretti, is consistent with Freuds models of mnemic traces according to which these mental marks are retained and reworked through oscillating, back-and-forth dynamics owing between past, present, and future (the key Freudian texts here are Studies on Hysteria [1894], Letter 52 to Wilhelm Fliess [1896], Screen Memories [1899], and Creative

72 73 74 75

Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, 84. Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, xvi. Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, xiiixvi, xvii, 67. Johnston, Time Driven, 30015.

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Writers and Day-Dreaming [1907]76). These coauthors claim, one, that the traces laid down at the crossroads of soma and psyche obey the twisted temporal logics of Freudian Nachtrglichkeit and Lacanian aprs-coup as well as, two, that cutting-edge neurobiology, with its account of reconsolidation, testies to the truth of these psychoanalytic hypotheses regarding the plasticity (as combined xity and uidity) of memory over time. Taking a step further, Ansermet and Magistretti explain that one of the counterintuitive implications of retranscription as per neuropsychoanalysis is that the mnemic mechanisms for retaining the pastthese mechanisms rely on the inscriptions of experiences as dual-aspect (i.e., simultaneously mental and physical) traces in the psychical brainare, at one and the same time, both conditions of possibility and impossibility for such retentions. On the one hand, only through such traces are prior experiences retained. But, on the other hand, the repeated retroactive retranscriptions of these tracesthis is the deferred action through which congurations of associations forming the constellations of Vorstellungen/signiers in the networks of the cerebral psyche periodically are modiedliquidate any past as such in itself, introducing the distances of differences as lost time is recontextualized again and again. The sole temporal-historical continuity available to the subject of memory is one the establishment of which also necessarily creates discontinuities.77 Ansermet and Magistretti take their concept of reconsolidation, closely related to retranscription, from neurobiologist Cristina Alberini.78 However, they propose renaming this empirically veried aspect of the neurobiological functioning of memory deconsolidation. This recommended terminological change is meant to indicate their psychoanalytic emphasis on discontinuity over continuity. The retroactive deferred action of retranscription brings to bear on mnemic systems the effects of psychical subjectivity as itself a locus of the very experiences leaving plastic somatic-psychical traces behind in the brain-psyche. Thus, reconsolidation is equally a deconsolidation in which more-than-biological agencies inject changes into plastic qua less-thanimperviously-solid biological grounds.79

Johnston, Time Driven, 522, 21827. Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, 4546, 8889, 10911, 11518, 175; Ansermet and Magistretti, Les nigmes du plaisir, 179. 78 Cristina M. Alberini, La dynamique des reprsentations mentales: Consolidation de la mmoire, reconsolidation et intgration de nouvelles informations, in Neurosciences et psychanalyse, 3132, 3738. 79 Pierre Magistretti and Franois Ansermet, Introduction, Neurosciences et psychanalyse, 1011; Magistretti and Ansermet, Plasticit et homostasie linterface entre neurosciences et psychanalyse, 1819.
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Returning to the topic of drive theory, Ansermet and Magistretti portray Trieb as a plastic coupling of somatic states with psychical fantasies.80 Put in the Freudian vocabulary of Time Driven, a drive is a pairing of a corporeal axis of iteration (source-pressure) with a representational axis of alteration (aimobject), with the push-and-pull between iteration and alteration being itself the plasticity of drive per se in its (dis)integrated (mal)functioning.81 Furthermore, given that, as I observed earlier, Ansermet and Magistretti distinguish between Trieb and Instinkt with reference to the notion of genetic determinationan instinct is programmed by evolution and genetics while a drive is notdrives have to be educated in and through experience, namely, taught what aims and objects to pursue by surrounding material and social milieus. Following Freud and Lacan, they note that the prolonged period of prematurational helplessness in human beings destines them to the predominance of nurture over nature. Hilosigkeit as a contingent-yet-a-priori biological state of development of human infants lends support to the theme, dear to Ansermet and Magistretti, of humans as preprogrammed to be reprogrammed (as in genetic indeterminism, namely, a coded absence of coding).82 The Vorstellungen/signiers of the drives aims and objects bear witness to the enveloping inuences of intersubjective Imaginary others and transsubjective Symbolic Others. These denaturalizing inuences exploit openings of possible implantation as gaps built into the natural (an)organic body of the living subject-to-be (i.e., the barred corpo-Real).83 With the preceding reconstruction of various of Ansermet and Magistrettis views in place, their neuropsychoanalytic mapping of the structures and dynamics of drives onto the anatomical and physiological rapport between brain stem and insular cortex now can be properly appreciated. Ansermet and Magistretti adamantly draw attention to the fact that the mediating role of the insular cortex is specic to primates alone among the members of the animal kingdom:
in primates, there exists a representation of the physiological state of the body in the insula (posterior and dorsal) that is connected to other regions implicated in motivated behaviors . . . in other species, by contrast, the integration is made essentially at the level of the brain stem, which implies homeostatic motor responses of a reex type.84

Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, 14041, 15152, 156. Adrian Johnston, The Real Unconscious: A Friendly Reply to Catherine Malabou, in Plastique: Dynamics of Catherine Malabou, special issue, Theory @ Buffalo 16 (2012): 133. 82 Johnston, Time Driven, 205, 262; Johnston, ieks Ontology, xxiii, 176, 20309, 213, 279. 83 Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, 168; Magistretti and Ansermet, Plasticit et homostasie linterface entre neurosciences et psychanalyse, 2325. 84 Ansermet and Magistretti, Les nigmes du plaisir, 47.
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They continue:
It is necessary to insist on the unity of the interoceptive path that the insula invests in the human being and, to a lesser degree, in the monkey, but not other species. This path permits constituting a representation of the physiological state of the body. In animals that do not possess the rudiments of this path, the interoceptive afferences form a relay directly with the center of the neurovegetative system in the brain stemmotor centers that govern homeostatic regulations, through an automatic mode, by way of the performance of the neurovegetative system or neuroendocrine loops. In these animals, homeostasis is reestablished in a reex mannerwithout mentalization, one could say. In the human being, by contrast, information coming from the body consists of primary representations in the posterior insula that are associated with others in secondary re-representations, thereby opening a freer mode of regulation that escapes from the automatisms and reexes specic to inferior species. . . .85

Obviously, this underscoring of the primate-specic role of the insular cortex is bound up with the standard analytic move of distinguishing human drives from animal instincts. In terms of the anatomy and physiology of the brain, the addition of insular mediation disrupts what otherwise would be the automatic reexive regulation of lifes vital functions by the brain stem alone (i.e., sans mentalization qua cognitive representation). It does so precisely by routing the tasks for maintaining organic homeostasis through matrices of representations and re-representations, namely, the signier-like Vorstellungen (inscribed in the posterior insula) and Vorstellungsreprsentanzen (inscribed in the anterior insula) of sensory-perceptual phenomena and socio-linguistic structures.86 Moreover, the insular cortexs webs of mentalizations weave together interoceptive and exteroceptive sources of input, with the plasticity of this brain region allowing for both the retention and reworking of its representational contents.87 To be more exact, Ansermet and Magistretti identify the posterior insular cortex as registering representations of the bodys internal milieu (Innenwelt) via interoceptive pathways. These representations (Vorstellungen) are then re-represented (i.e., redoubled as Vorstellungsreprsentanzen) in the anterior insular cortex. The latter, through its receptivity to input coming from the bodys external surroundings (Umwelt) via exteroceptive pathways, transforms the representations of the endogenous it duplicates from the posterior insular cortex by combining them with representations of the exogenous; this activity of synthesis turns internal representations into internal-external
85 86 87

Ansermet and Magistretti, Les nigmes du plaisir, 4748. Ansermet and Magistretti, Les nigmes du plaisir, 4950. Ansermet and Magistretti, Les nigmes du plaisir, 4849.

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re-representations.88 Hence, the anterior insular cortex is the true island of the drive because it is the neurological site at which the denaturalizing forces and factors of experiential, cultural, linguistic, social, etc., environments (i.e., Imaginary-Symbolic realities) enter the distributed and interconnected cognitive, emotional, and motivational systems of the brain. Specically through the anterior insular cortex, these forces and factors entwine themselves with and overwrite the nonrepresentational, unthinking mechanisms of the brain stem. In line with Lacanianism, Ansermet and Magistretti foreground the mediating role of language as itself beyond biology.89 Additionally, they observe that the anterior insular cortex is especially deserving of the title island of the drive since it, along with the anterior cingulate cortex, is unique to human beings, distinguishing them even from their closest primate relatives.90 Meshing with my emphasis on the idea of the anorganic, Ansermet and Magistretti are careful to insist on the discontinuities (rather than organic continuities) between interoceptive representations and hybrid interoceptiveexteroceptive re-representations.91 The latter mark the intrusion of denaturalizing mediators that literally bed down in the esh of the living being they thus colonize. With Ansermet and Magistrettis positing of an insurmountable gap between these mediators and the organism they mediate92this divide is able to take hold in the plastic body due to the anatomical and physiological discrepancies between brain stem and insular cortexAnsermet and Magistretti link the anorganicity of the human central nervous system to the dysfunctionality of the psyches libidinal economy. In other words, they demystify the enigma of the beyond of the pleasure principle by pinpointing the intra-biological bases for conicts between the biological and the morethan-biological. The brain naturally destined for denaturalizationthis anorganic organ is programmed for (partial, never-fully-optimal/successful) reprogramming by being genetically determined not to be (wholly and completely) genetically determinedis fated to be a failure machine for a minded subject prone to painful symptoms and psychopathological sufferings by nature, nurture, and an awkward, unconsummated marriage between the two. Therefore, given Ansermet and Magistrettis thesis that uniquely human drives are products of this anorganicity at the intersection of soma and psyche, their proposals resonate with my theory of the self-subverting split Trieb (a resonance further amplied by their remarking upon the temporal essence of the Hebbian plasticity so markedly affecting the representational
88 89 90 91 92

Ansermet and Magistretti, Les nigmes du plaisir, 51. Ansermet and Magistretti, Les nigmes du plaisir, 16869. Ansermet and Magistretti, Les nigmes du plaisir, 5253. Ansermet and Magistretti, Les nigmes du plaisir, 51. Ansermet and Magistretti, Les nigmes du plaisir, 153.

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scaffoldings of the embodied libidinal economy93). Moreover, like Lear and me, Ansermet and Magistretti manage to account for the malfunctioning of the pleasure principle (i.e., the fact that, by virtue of their inherent dysfunctionality, all drives are, in a manner of speaking, death drives) without hypostatizing this as a dark, mysterious countercurrent maneuvering in the nocturnal depths of the primordial, seething id. They explicitly stipulate that the pleasure principles beyond is its immanent (self-)blockage rather than being a transcendent power.94 However, Ansermet and Magistrettis neuropsychoanalytic treatments of drive and memory trigger in me a nagging worry. With phenomena such as the de/re-consolidations of synaptic traces in plastic neural networks in view, Ansermet and Magistretti stress in both their coauthored books that, we never use the same brain twice.95 While agreeing with this as truthfully accurate in strict neuroscientic terms, I nonetheless want to raise concerns about the emphasis (or, I would claim, overemphasis) they place on the side of a more nominalist ontology primarily tied to neuroanatomy and neurophysiology. Both drive and memory involve repetition. But, if the brain is dissolved in an ever-changing Heraclitian river of ux in which differences rule supreme, how do Ansermet and Magistretti account for the repetitions exhibited by libidinal and mnemic mechanisms? Asked another way, what explains a plethora of facts evident in multiple elds (psychoanalysis, philosophy, cognitive science) indicating that central nervous systems give rise to and support recurrences and reiterations of the same thoughts, feelings, and actionsand this despite the differences both within the brains of single subjects over time as well as across the synchronous and diachronous diversities of multiple individuals brains? Not only do philosophers, cognitive scientists, and even average people on the street (with their everyday common sense) unanimously demand that justice be done to repetitionrelated phenomena by any model of mind, psychoanalysis, both theoretical and clinical, cannot do without references to repetitions for the sake of privileging the differences discernible in connection with neurobiology and an accompanying spontaneous nominalism. Before proceeding to detailed criticisms of Ansermet and Magistrettis more ambitious philosophical speculations, the non-Lacanian neuropsychoanalytic framework of Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbulls The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of Subjective Experience (2002)
Ansermet and Magistretti, Les nigmes du plaisir, 154. Ansermet and Magistretti, Les nigmes du plaisir, 24. 95 Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, 185; Ansermet and Magistretti, Les nigmes du plaisir, 157.
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warrants a few comments. Therein, Solms and Turnbull cover much of the same territory mapped above. To begin with, they maintain that there is a rm neural basis for the fundamental distinction between energies and representations so crucial to Freuds metapsychology.96 This distinction is a particularly prominent feature of Freudian drive theory, with the drives source and pressure (i.e., the axis of iteration) being associated with the energetic and its aims and objects (i.e., the axis of alteration) with the representational. As seen, both Damasio as well as Ansermet and Magistretti furnish precise neurological specications regarding the structures and dynamics of the brain embodying these dening aspects of Trieb. Solms and Turnbull naturally present the emotional-motivational SEEKING systemneuroscientic discourse nowadays identies four basic-emotion command systems in the brain . . . SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, and PANIC97as underlying the neurobiology of libidinal drive.98 The rst connection they establish between Freudian Trieb and neurobiological SEEKING has to do with Freuds insistence on the objectless status of drives (i.e., the claim that a drive, by contrast with an instinct, does not come hard-wired with an innate inclination towards a predetermined type of object as its natural telos):99
What does the SEEKING system do? As the name suggests, it seeks. The more difcult question is: What does it seek? One might think that it seeks the specic object of a current need, as determined by the need detectors. The reality is slightly more complex. The SEEKING system itself does not appear to know what it is seeking. (In psychoanalytic parlance, one might say that it is objectless.) The SEEKING system appears to be switched on in the same way by all triggers, and, when activated, it merely looks for something in a nonspecic way. All that it seems to know is that the something it wants is out there. A nonspecic system like this cannot by itself meet the needs of an animal. It has to interact with other systems. The mode of operation of the SEEKING system is therefore incomprehensible without reference to the memory systems with which it is intimately connected. These systems provide the representations of objects (and past interactions between the self and those objects) that enable the organism to learn from experience. One of the most basic tasks that these combined systems have to perform is to distinguish which objects in the outside world possess the specic properties that the internal milieu lacks when a particular need detector switches on.100

96 Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of Subjective Experience (New York: Other Press, 2002), 34. 97 Solms and Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World, 115; Johnston, Misfelt Feelings, 18694. 98 Solms and Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World, 117. 99 SE 7: 14748; SE 14: 12223, 132. 100 Solms and Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World, 11819.

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Solms and Turnbull take their taxonomy of affective neural systems from neuroscientist Jaak Panksepps comparative cross-species investigations into the emotional brain.101 One of the problems with this is that Panksepp intends his taxonomy to cover mammalian brains in general.102 By contrast, Damasio, with his focus on the circuit between brain stem, thalamus, and cerebral cortex, zeroes in on the primate brain; and, with their focus on the frictions within and between brain stem and multi-dimensional insular cortex, Ansermet and Magistretti target features specic to human beings (as is suitable when what is of interest are drives presumably peculiar to humans). In this regard, Solms and Turnbulls talk of the animal and organism in the preceding quotation is telling. Their reliance on Panksepp, however helpful and productive, risks renaturalizing Trieb, namely, reducing it to animal Instinkt. This problem noted, there nonetheless is signicant overlap between the Lacanian and non-Lacanian neuropsychoanalytic delineations of drive put forward by Ansermet and Magistretti and Solms and Turnbull respectively. Ansermet and Magistretti likewise uphold the importance of objectlessness in any account of drive. And yet, unlike Solms and Turnbull, they stress displeasure instead of pleasure, arguing that the absence of genetically determined instinctual object-choices (i.e., drives being objectless) dooms the drivecentered libidinal economies of human beings to inevitable dissatisfaction and disappointments.103 That is to say, whereas Solms and Turnbull pursue a neuropsychoanalytic understanding of the organic pleasure principle, Ansermet and Magistretti aim to build a neuropsychoanalytic model of anorganic drive on the foundations of Freuds later metapsychology incorporating that which lies beyond the pleasure principle. In the block quotation above, Solms and Turnbull examine a neuroanatomical and neurophysiological juxtaposition between that which is nonrepresentational (i.e., the emotional-motivational SEEKING system) and that which is representational (i.e., memory systems as cognitive in addition to emotional and motivational, systems containing constellations of signier-like mnemic Vorstellungen). This division lines up in parallel with those proposed by Damasio and Ansermet and Magistretti between brain stem and cortices (whether cerebral or insular). For all ve of these authors under consideration at present, the types of motive forces elucidated by psychoanalysis are highly distributed in the human brain, corresponding to complex circuits wiring
101 Solms and Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World, 11233, 27778; Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 47, 5254. 102 Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, 4, 10, 43, 47, 5051, 56, 77, 79, 12223, 32530. 103 Ansermet and Magistretti, Les nigmes du plaisir, 132.

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together a dappled ensemble of diverse systems and subsystems affected by both endogenous and exogenous inputs. As both I and at least a few of these other researchers would argue, such neural circuits, in their hypercomplexity amplied further by their location at the intersection of numerous biological and more-than-biological lines of inuence, are anorganic qua features of a kludgy, malfunction-plagued corpo-Real (of which Trieb as split between axes of iteration and alteration is a prime example). As Solms and Turnbull indicate, the widely spread out neural architecture of drive makes it such that, in humans especially, even supposedly base-level impulses and urges are modulated and nudged around by higher-order cognitive functions.104 Put in the parlance of Freudian metapsychology, the SEEKING system on its own resembles the source and pressure of drives (minus their aims and objects). Consistent with Freuds linkage of the nature of infantile helplessness with the nurture of the helpful signicant Other (i.e., the adult caretaker als Nebenmensch as per the 1895 Project for a Scientic Psychology105), Solms and Turnbull assign a major role to sociolinguistic direction (typically provided by parents) in teaching the SEEKING system of the developing childs brain what it can and should need and want.106 Lacans two triads of alterity Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary as well as need, demand, and desire provide much more nuanced accounts of the processes operative in these developments. Alluding to the realities of epigenetics and neuroplasticity, Solms and Turnbull refer several times to blanks built into the arrangements and workings of the apparatus of the central nervous system.107 These blanks are their equivalent to what Ansermet and Magistretti repeatedly characterize as genetic indeterminism,108 namely, preprogramming for reprogramming, natural determination not to be naturally determined (or, as another advocate of a Lacanian neuropsychoanalysis, Grard Pommier, words it, innate that it not be innate109). The question of whether such indeterminism, as claimed by Ansermet and Magistretti, is tantamount to a biology of freedomput more precisely, the issue is whether a nonreductive neuropsychoanalytic theory of denaturalized drives furnishes sufcient

Solms and Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World, 120. SE 1: 318, 331. 106 Solms and Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World, 12223. 107 Solms and Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World, 13334, 27778. 108 Franois Ansermet, Des neurosciences aux logosciences, Qui sont vos psychanalystes? ed. Nathalie Georges, Nathalie Marchaison, and Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 2002), 383; Magistretti and Ansermet, Introduction, 11. 109 Grard Pommier, Comment les neurosciences dmontrent la psychanalyse (Paris: Flammarion, 2004), 27.
105

104

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conditions for subjective autonomyis what I now will turn to addressing in the third and nal section of this intervention. 3. FROM THE BARRED BRAIN TO THE BARRED SUBJECTNECESSARY AND SUFFICIENT CONDITIONS FOR A MATERIALIST METAPSYCHOLOGY OF FREEDOM In Les nigmes du plaisir, Ansermet and Magistretti gesture at a connection between their account of drive and a theory of autonomous subjectivity.110 Similarly, in the nal two paragraphs of the conclusion to Time Driven, I contend:
Despite the apparent bleakness and antiutopianism of an assessment of human nature as being perturbed by an irreducible inner antagonism, there is, surprisingly, what might be described as a liberating aspect to this splitting of the drives. Since drives are essentially dysfunctional, subjects are able to act otherwise than as would be dictated by instinctually compelled pursuits of gratication, satisfaction, and pleasure. In fact, subjects are forced to be free, since, for such beings, the mandate of nature is forever missing. Severed from a strictly biological master-program and saddled with a conict-ridden, heterogeneous jumble of contradictory impulses impulses mediated by an inconsistent, unstable web of multiple representations, indicated by Lacans barring of the Symbolic Otherthe parltre has no choice but to bump up against the unnatural void of its autonomy. The confrontation with this void is frequently avoided. The true extent of ones autonomy is, due to its sometimes-frightening implications, just as often relegated to the shadows of the unconscious as those heteronomous factors secretly shaping conscious thought and behavior.111

To this is added:
The contradictions arising from the conicts internal to the libidinal economy mark the precise places where a freedom transcending mundane materiality has a chance briey to ash into effective existence; such points of breakdown in the deterministic nexus of the drives clear the space for the sudden emergence of something other than the smooth continuation of the default physical and sociopsychical run of things. Moreover, if the drives were fully functionaland, hence, would not prompt a mobilization of a series of defensive distancing mechanisms struggling to transcend this threatening corpo-Realhumans would be animalistic automatons, namely, creatures of nature. The pain of a malfunctioning, internally conicted libidinal economy is a discomfort signaling a capacity to be an autonomous subject. This is a pain even more essential to human autonomy than what Kant identies as the guilt-inducing burden of duty and its corresponding pangs of anxious, awe-inspiring
110 111

Ansermet and Magistretti, Les nigmes du plaisir, 5455. Johnston, Time Driven, 340.

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respect. Whereas Kant treats the discomfort associated with duty as a symptom-effect of a transcendental freedom inherent to rational beings, the reverse might (also) be the case: Such freedom is the symptom-effect of a discomfort inherent to libidinal beings. Completely curing individuals of this discomfort, even if it were possible, would be tantamount to divesting them, whether they realize it or not, of an essential feature of their dignity as subjects. As Lacan might phrase it, the split Trieb is the sinthome of subjectivity proper, the source of a suffering that, were it to be entirely eliminated, would entail the utter dissolution of subjectivity itself. Humanity is free precisely insofar as its pleasures are far from perfection, insofar as its enjoyment is never absolute.112

Like Ansermet and Magistretti as well as me, others, such as Pommier113 and Stanovich,114 also seize on intrabodily and/or intramental antagonisms (i.e., conicts within and between soma and psyche) as the very groundless ground of human freedom. Although I still agree with the fundamental thrust of the paragraphs from Time Driven quoted aboveI continue to maintain that an internally conicted libidinal economy encompassing both mind and body is a condition for the ontogenetic emergence of a denaturalized free subjectivity immanently transcending its material basesI have come to think that this way of articulating the link between drive and subject is too quick and easy. Thus, the critique of Ansermet and Magistretti to follow is, in part, also a self-critique. Ansermet, in a 2002 essay (From the Neurosciences to the Logosciences) preceding the publication of his rst book with Magistretti (2004s chacun son cerveau), already reveals his desire to paint a neuropsychoanalytic portrait of subjective freedom. Therein, he touches upon the now-familiar theme of humans as being genetically determined not to be genetically determined,115 with the purported consequence that, the subject hence would nd itself determined by the default of its determination.116 Natural genetic openness to more-than-natural epigenetic modications is expressed most strikingly by the plasticity of the human central nervous system. Ansermets thesis in this particular text is that the psychical subjects autonomy results from its plastic brain being individuated to the point of utter uniqueness by the conuence of forces and variables colliding within this lump of folded, wrinkly matter, itself the incarnate intersection of mind and body, Innenwelt and Umwelt, nature and nurture, and so on. In short, the argument is twofold: one, neuroplasticity allows for and makes inevitable the genesis of a hybrid,
112 113 114 115 116

Johnston, Time Driven, 34041. Pommier, Comment les neurosciences dmontrent la psychanalyse, 378, 401. Stanovich, The Robots Rebellion, 13, 28, 67, 8284. Ansermet, Des neurosciences aux logosciences, 378. Ansermet, Des neurosciences aux logosciences, 383.

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idiosyncratic brain-psyche; two, such plasticity-facilitated singularization is equivalent to freedom.117 Ansermet underscores this argument when he asserts that, the subject remains the exception to the universal that carries him.118 As he subsequently reiterates this assertion in collaboration with Magistretti, the individual can be considered to be biologically determined to be free, that is, to constitute an exception to the universal that carries him.119 This tendency to conate uniqueness with autonomy is reected in the two different titles of Ansermets rst book with Magistretti: the French original, chacun son cerveau (To each his own brain), and the English translation, Biology of Freedom. The original French title emphasizes the irreducible particularity of individuals brains; the English title substituting for it already hints that Ansermet and Magistretti consider this particularity to be itself an embodied realization of autonomy. And, indeed, the contents of the book amply conrm this suspicion. Therein, the two-part equation of neuroplasticity with individuation and individuation with freedom is afrmed many times.120 More recently, Ansermet and Magistretti, in a 2010 collection of papers they assembled based on a 2008 conference, assign even greater importance to idiosyncrasy. This edited collection, entitled Neurosciences et psychanalyse, is given by them the subtitle Une rencontre autour de la singularit. In the last sentence of the opening paragraph of their editors introduction, they maintain that, neurosciences and psychoanalysis share the impossible-to-ignore question of the emergence of singularity.121 Near the end of this same introduction, they state:
The default of determination, on the basis of determination, implied by plasticity and reconsolidation, cannot do otherwise than to open to the impact of contingency. To render account of contingency and its unpredictable consequences constitutes well and truly one of the most important end-points that the contemporary neurosciences encounter.122

Ansermet and Magistretti continue:

Plasticity, reconsolidation, impact of contingency: all of this participates in the emergence of singularity, the creation of the unique, and the unpredictable becoming of the subject. . . . Neurosciences and psychoanalysis hence meet each other in

117 118 119 120 121 122

Ansermet, Des neurosciences aux logosciences, 37677. Ansermet, Des neurosciences aux logosciences, 383. Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, 10. Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, xvi, 10, 211, 21516, 22930. Magistretti and Ansermet, Introduction, 7. Magistretti and Ansermet, Introduction, 12.

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an unforeseen fashion around the discontinuity that permits the putting in play of the act of the subject, the surging up of its response, in this space of unforeseeability that it offers to the living being.123

By this point, a lengthy chain of equivalences has unfurled itself: epigenetics equals plasticity equals contingency equals singularity equals unpredictability equals autonomy. The bottom line here is that Ansermet and Magistretti seem to believe that undermining vulgar scientistic determinisms (i.e., mechanistic, reductive, and/or eliminative materialisms associated with both the natural sciences generally as well as the life sciences specically) is itself alone already tantamount to establishing a biology of freedom in the form of a neuropsychoanalytic rendition of autonomous subjectivity. What, precisely, is objectionable about Ansermet and Magistrettis claims to have advanced a theory of subjective freedom at the intersection of Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis and current neurobiology? The most fundamental philosophical problem plaguing these claims is that full-edged autonomy strictly speaking is much more than a matter of mere contingency, singularity, and/or unpredictability. On any number of varying accounts furnished over the course of the history of philosophy, the freedom of subjects is not simply synonymous with indeterminism arising from idiosyncrasy and/or randomness. Nevertheless, Ansermet and Magistretti sometimes talk as though this were so.124 That it is not readily grasped by taking note of the unproblematic compatibility between nominalism and determinism (qua the denial of the reality of freedom) as ontological positions; one easily could afrm a world of nothing but contingently individuated unique particulars while, at the same time, consistently denying the existence of anything on the order of autonomous subjectivity proper. Furthermore, even if the failure of predictive power cherished by the modern sciences is ascribed to ontology rather than epistemologythis would be to treat unpredictability not as an insufciency on the side of knowledge, but, instead, as a reection of real randomness on the side of being in and of itselfbare chance or arbitrariness is not sufcient for an ascription of autonomy in any robust, meaningful sense. Admittedly, undermining the deterministic picture of nature supporting mechanistic, reductive, and eliminative materialisms is a necessary condition for a viable quasi-naturalist and materialist theory of the autonomous subject (in this particular context, a Lacanian neuropsychoanalytic biology of freedom). But, it is just this, namely, a necessary but not sufcient condition for such a theory.
Magistretti and Ansermet, Introduction, 12. Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, 18183, 185; Magistretti and Ansermet, Plasticit et homostasie linterface entre neurosciences et psychanalyse, 28.
124 123

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To go into greater critical detail, I want to start by zooming in on the interlinked topics of epigenetics and neuroplasticity. Much of Ansermet and Magistrettis presentation of these related biological facts is accurate and insightful. Epigenetics indeed reveals a genetic indeterminism qua hard-wiring by nature for rewiring by nurture.125 And, the neuroplasticity of the human central nervous systemthis is one of the main conduits through which the endogenous biological body is denaturalized by more-than-biological exogenous inuencesis a profoundly important incarnation of such indeterminism as genetic preprogramming for epigenetic reprogramming. As noted above, the additional biological fact of humans extended early period of prematurational helplessness (a natural reality crucial for Freud and Lacan) has as a consequence that signicant portions of brain development occur outside the womb. That is to say, many of the brains neural networks, instead of congealing into place in utero in ways that thereby could be determined only by innate codes and instructions, are generated and assembled during infancy and childhood through learning experiences molded by multifaceted, nonnatural matrices of external mediation (for example, the Freudian family, the Lacanian Symbolic big Other, and an overlapping plethora of cultural, economic, institutional, intellectual, linguistic, normative, political, social, etc. dimensions). Combined with the physical weakness and uncoordination also entailed by human Hilosigkeit, the genetically dictated prematuration of the human brain, in which much of maturation is left up to epigenetic dictates that follow birth, means that human nature is naturally destined for denaturalization.126 As regards everything in the preceding paragraph, I am in complete agreement with Ansermet and Magistretti. Nonetheless, I will play devils advocate for the moment by showing how one could concede all of these points apropos epigenetics and neuroplasticity without dropping the stance of a hard-nosed determinism ruling out the effective existence of the freedom of truly autonomous subjects. One way to illustrate this is through reference to Lacans teachings and the distinction between ontogeny and phylogeny. Breaking with Freuds intermittent reliance on this distinction, Lacan consistently and categorically forbids recourse to phylogenetic speculations. In Lacans eyes, musings about the evolutionary emergence of humanity from nonhuman animality and the creation of language out of a prehistoric, nonlinguistic muteness are, at a minimum, epistemologically

125 Franois Ansermet and Ariane Giacobino, Autisme: chacun son gnome (Paris: Navarin, 2012), 910, 1314, 1617, 2021, 5860, 71, 82. 126 Johnston, ieks Ontology, 176.

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out-of-bounds.127 In both metapsychological theory and clinical practice, Lacanian psychoanalysis arguably limits itself to considering only select facets of ontogenetic subject formation. Ansermet and Magistretti, tacitly in line with their allegiances to Lacanianism, remain silent about evolution and phylogeny despite their invocations of and reliance upon genetics la the post-Darwinian life sciences. A determined determinist, so to speak, readily could take advantage of this avoidance. For instance, if, as per many partisans of a certain evolutionary worldview, language, culture, and the like really are at root outgrowths of a natural history with its selection mechanisms, then epigenetic modications of the plastic brain are nothing more than expressions of a second-order natural determinism, mere epiphenomena of a never-actually-denaturalized humanity. In order to combat such opponents brandishing a reductive naturalistic determinism with more than just unconvincing foot stamping and st bangingeven less convincingly, Lacan permits himself to describe the advent of the symbolic order as the entrance of the Holy Spirit into the world128Lacanianism has to defy Lacans ban on phylogenetic investigations, especially if it is invested in cross-breeding psychoanalysis and neurobiology.129 Lacanians must bring themselves to recognize the momentous revolution that bears Darwins name and, in so doing, begin seriously reckoning with the implications of evolutionary theory. By failing to do this while simultaneously courting the life sciences, Ansermet and Magistretti leave the door wide open to determinists, such as advocates of crude evolutionary psychologies. To be clear, like Lacan, Ansermet, and Magistretti, I am entirely unsympathetic to the scientistic vulgarities of the pan-naturalisms preached by evolutionary psychologists and their ilk. I too consider the nondialectical materialisms of these ideologues to be intellectually bankrupt. However, different sorts of intellectual bankruptcy loom in the absence of compelling intrascientic refutations of these pseudoscientic opponents specious claims: idealist dogmatisms, subjective idealisms, and/or reactive repudiations of materialism and the sciences. Ansermet and Magistretti as well as Lacan each are avowedly committed to a materialist outlook indebted to modern

127 Adrian Johnston, On Deep History and Lacan, in Journal of European Psychoanalysis, special issue: Lacan and Philosophy: The New Generation, ed. Lorenzo Chiesa, 2012, 91121; Johnston, The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy. 128 Jacques Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre IV: La relation dobjet, 19561957, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1994), 4158; Johnston, The Weakness of Nature, 17076. 129 Johnston, On Deep History and Lacan, 91121.

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science.130 But, I maintain, such commitment is severely compromised or totally betrayed by either sealed lips or a sharp tongue in response to the Darwin-event and its myriad consequences. Informed by, among other background sources, the historical and dialectical materialisms founded by Marx and Engels in Hegels wake, my guiding conviction is that the sole nondogmatic and nonidealist route beyond the vulgar materialist beliefs of scientistic ideologies passes through (rather than bypasses) the life sciences, including the phylogenetic reections of an evolutionary thinking encompassing natural history and human historys situation within it.131 A Lacanian neuropsychoanalysis leading to a biology of freedom must possess empirically and philosophically rigorous arguments countering biologistic determinisms on both the ontogenetic and phylogenetic levels. Not only do Ansermet and Magistrettis exclusively ontogenetic sketches of subjectivity rely on an untenable equating of autonomy with idiosyncrasy, indeterminacy, and unpredictabilitytheir neglect of phylogenetic issues further weakens their case here. In addition to ignoring the challenges posed by naturalist determinisms appealing to evolutionary and/or genetic determinants, Ansermet and Magistretti similarly overlook the possible objections that could be posed by advocates of sociocultural determinisms. They seemingly take it for granted that if the subject of psychoanalytic metapsychology can be shown scientically to arise out of the biological body by virtue of more-than-biological mediators irreducible to the biomateriality falling under the explanatory jurisdiction of the natural sciences, then this subject is proven to be not only real, but really free. In other words, Ansermet and Magistretti appear simply to assume that a subject constituted by nonnatural structures and phenomena is autonomous. This, in turn, indicates an assumed synonymy between determinism and naturalism, as though all determinists are naturalists. Various sorts of sociohistorical constructivists readily would retort that the nonnatural mediators overriding (some Lacanians would say overwriting)
130 Adrian Johnston, Conicted Matter: Jacques Lacan and the Challenge of Secularizing Materialism, Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, no. 19 (2008), 16688; Johnston, The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy; Adrian Johnston, Turning the Sciences Inside Out: Revisiting Lacans Science and Truth, in Concept and Form, Volume Two: Interviews and Essays on the Cahiers pour lAnalyse, ed. Peter Hallward and Knox Peden, (London: Verso, 2012), 10336; Johnston, Reections of a Rotten Nature, 2352. 131 Adrian Johnston, This is orthodox Marxism: The Shared Materialist Weltanschauung of Marx and Engels, in On Sebastiano Timpanaro, special issue, Quaderni materialisti (2012), 10336; Adrian Johnston, From Scientic Socialism to Socialist Science: Naturdialektik Then and Now, Communism, A New Beginning?, ed. Slavoj iek (London: Verso, 2013); Adrian Johnston, A Weak Nature Alone: Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume Two, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014 (under review).

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evolutionary-genetic programming, instead of carving out liberated zones for free subjectivity, subject the living body in the sense of subjection as heteronomization (rather than subjectication as autonomization). The human organism is thereby placed under the controlling authority of external regimes of discipline, education, normalization, and so on. Representatives of such nonnaturalist determinisms include not only unsophisticated pseudoMarxists as well as those enamored of Nietzschean and Foucauldian historical narrativesvarious professed adherents to the views of Freud and Lacan often portray ontogenetic subject formation as a process wherein the young subject-to-be is marked and cast by family romances and the signiers of big Others. Furthermore, many of those sympathetic to psychoanalysis tend to believe in a determinism of the unconscious and/or id in which human beings are pictured as the unknowing puppets and playthings of asubjective schemes transpiring behind the curtains of intrapsychical defense mechanisms. Although I consider the construal of Freudian-Lacanian analysis as straightforwardly and foundationally deterministic to be erroneous132I strongly suspect Ansermet and Magistretti silently presuppose this without feeling obliged to argue for itexplicit arguments against these types of nonnaturalist determinisms are mandatory as part of the kind of theoretical apparatus Ansermet and Magistrettis texts seek to establish. Another remaining determinist hitch not removed by Ansermet and Magistretti has to do with the two-way dialectic of to-and-fro inuences between brain and experience via plasticity. This co-constituting loop is central to Ansermet and Magistrettis proposals about neuropsychoanalytic subjectivity. Moreover, as indicated previously, they evince a tendency hastily to equate the real dialectics of neuroplasticity with freedom in the fullest, most robust of senses. But, even if the oscillating, bidirectional movements between brain and experience are perfectly balancedconsidering the complexity of the material and more-than-material structures and dynamics operative here, unevenness seems far more likely in the vast majority of instancesone might ask questions such as: What gets the ball of this dialectic rolling to begin with? Does the central nervous system remain the prime mover of this process? Is it still (as a classical Marxist might phrase it) determinative in the last instance? If experience ultimately is a secondary secretion of the brain, then it is easily imaginable that the loop made possible by neuroplasticity is a closed one of an auto-affection entirely determined by the material base of a human nature, itself laid down by evolution and genetics (at least when all is said and done in the last instance). Put in language common to AngloAmerican analytic philosophy of mind and cognitive science, Ansermet and
132

Johnston, ieks Ontology, 102.

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Magistretti would have to elaborate and defend an ontology of strong emergentism in which more-than-material subjectivity (what they associate with experience) both achieves a self-relating, nonepiphenomenal independence vis--vis its material grounds (in this context, the brain in particular) and also comes to exert a power of downward causation on these grounds. And, as argued above, this philosophical framework required by but lacking in Ansermet and Magistrettis work would have to be eshed out at phylogenetic as well as ontogenetic levels. Stepping back for a moment to survey the larger philosophical landscape in which the preceding issues are situated, another reference to relatively recent analytic philosophy of mind is pertinent here. In his 1997 book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, David Chalmers famously labels the enigma of the relationship between matter and consciousness the hard problem.133 With its concept of the subject as distinct from the ego, Lacanianism leans toward highlighting the importance of structures of (unconscious) sapience irreducible to the phenomena of conscious experience alone. Hence, along with Ansermet and Magistretti, I am interested in more than merely the experiential qualia of conscious sentience. Nonetheless, if one enlarges Chalmers hard problem so as to include the mystery of the genesis of sapience over and above sentienceanother way to word this is to say that there are two (interrelated) hard problemsany ostensible biology of freedom cannot credibly avoid confronting and working through these problems. I would allege that Ansermet and Magistretti have yet to face such challenges head-on so as to tackle them satisfactorily. Unless and until they do so, their claims to have forged a neuropsychoanalytic theory of autonomous subjectivity will remain philosophically suspect. From Plato to the present, an overwhelming majority of philosophers reject the idea that freedom amounts simply to doing what one wants (apart from Aristotelian virtue ethics and Kantian deontological ethics, even a utilitarian like John Stuart Mill repudiates, following Aristotle, an unqualied endorsement of the equivalence between freedom and the hedonistic pursuit of happiness of whatever kind).134 Human autonomy cannot be, for a number of compelling reasons, just behaving at the behest of desires, automatically acting out ones shifting bundle of impulses and urges. However, not only is Ansermet and Magistrettis equation of denaturalized drive with subjective freedom problematic in light of my prior argumentstheir insufciently
133 David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), xii-xiii. 134 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, in Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, The Classical Utilitarians: Bentham and Mill, ed. John Troyer (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2003), 10006.

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nuanced identication of Trieb-beyond-Instinkt with being free sounds as though it makes the mistake of allowing for the conation of autonomy proper with wanton hedonism (with this last adjective, I deliberately am alluding to Harry Frankfurts seminal 1971 article Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person135). They owe readers a ner-grained model of the rapport between drive and subject in which the gesture of this conation is thwarted and replaced with a more philosophically and psychoanalytically satisfactory theory of driven-yet-autonomous subjectivity. Ansermet and Magistretti deserve a great deal of credit for their daring and insightful ongoing explorations of the still little-charted territories at the intersections of neurobiology and Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis. More specically, I readily acknowledge that they have made substantial headway in elucidating several of the necessary conditions for a biologically informed account of free subjects. But, despite the many outstanding merits of Ansermet and Magistrettis contributions along these lines, I consider their efforts toward a full-edged neuropsychoanalysis of autonomy to fall short in two basic respects: rst, there are other necessary conditions for subjective freedom apart from the ones Ansermet and Magistretti touch upon, conditions of a general ontological type underlying the specic properties of human organisms latched onto by this Lacanian neuropsychoanalytic pair; second, necessary conditions are not sufcient conditions, meaning that Ansermet and Magistretti pinpoint certain variables in the absence of which strict determinism perhaps would reign without, for all that, actually delivering a theory of really-existing autonomy per se. In moving toward a conclusion here, I can only wave in passing at the specic ingredients missing from Ansermet and Magistrettis attempts to assemble a materialist yet nonreductive account of denaturalized selfdetermining subjectivity. My ongoing labors to construct a transcendental materialism, starting in my 2008 book ieks Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity136 and more thoroughly pursued in a trilogy-inprogress (Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism), can be depicted as supplying much of what is needed by Ansermet and Magistretti. So, what are the other necessary conditions for subjective autonomy not dealt with by this duo? I suspect Ansermet, Magistretti, and I share the core conviction that an equivalence between physical matter and the ground-zero of being is ontologically axiomatic for a materialism properly allied with the natural sciences. That said, any materialist of this stripe who continues to afrm the existence of
135 Harry G. Frankfurt, Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person, The Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971): 520. 136 Johnston, ieks Ontology, 26987.

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subjects irreducible (and yet still immanent) to the domains covered by physics and biology must offer a two-tiered enumeration of necessary conditions explaining: one, how the physical universe is arranged such that it is possible for life and sentience to arise out of it; and, two, how the kingdom of living organisms functions such that it is possible for sapience and autonomy to emerge and achieve a self-relating independence endowed with powers of downward causation on life and matter. A materialist ontology, in the course of enumerating these necessary conditions for free human being(s), almost certainly will be forced to revisit questions and controversies having to do with the cohesiveness (or lack thereof) of the myriad sciences and relations between different varieties of causality. In an even more abstract, albeit indispensable, philosophical register, the distinctions and dialectics between continuity and discontinuity, unity and multiplicity, parts and wholes, and similar timeless problems will be in play over the course of striving for the formulation of a biology of freedom.137 Furthermore, what are the sufcient conditions absent from Ansermet and Magistrettis reections? For the sake of brevity, I will restrict consideration here to the type of sapient subjectivity of the signier at stake in the Lacanianism common to me and these two authors. For a materialism squared with the natural sciences, a phylogenetic account of the genesis of languages compatible with evolutionary theorythis compatibility can be achieved through an evolutionary-theoretic mapping of the rise of entities and processes coming to escape from the realms of natural evolutionmust be added to Lacanian narratives of ontogenetic language acquisition. (I also believe this account should include signicant elements drawn from the traditions of historical and dialectical materialisms, such as a more elaborate and complete version of the later Lukcs ontology of social being.) Additionally, an examination is requisite of the link between, on the one hand, specic aspects of syntax and semantics and, on the other hand, the reexive and recursive capacities displayed by minded subjects conscious and unconscious. These are but a few of the ingredients that would have to be involved with thoroughly spelling out the sufcient (over and above the necessary) conditions for a robust materialism of autonomy. As is apparent, this calls for a massively interdisciplinary endeavor deploying the resources of numerous branches of continental and analytic philosophy, Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, the multiple domains of the neurosciences, linguistics, and Marxism, among other bodies of knowledge.138

137 138

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

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In both his 2000 speech accepting the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries regarding the biology of memory, as well as elsewhere, Eric Kandel emphatically maintains that one of the key intellectual tasks for the twenty-rst century will be accomplishing a synthesis of psychoanalysis and neurobiology.139 Observing that psychoanalysis enters the twenty-rst century with its inuence in decline, he laments, this decline is regrettable, since psychoanalysis still represents the most coherent and intellectually satisfying view of the mind.140 The sad irony is that the waning of analysis corresponds to the waxing of biological research programs recognized by few scientists or analysts (save for such notable exceptions as Ansermet, Magistretti, Solms, and Kandel) as largely complementing and vindicating Freudian and Lacanian tenets. Most people both inside and outside the world of academia see these advances in the life sciences as threatening Freud and Lacan, for better or worse. The truth is arguably the exact opposite: Freuds and Lacans expectations of future biological buttressing of the analytic edice rapidly are being met.141 I close by proposing that if the twenty-rst century is to fulll the hopes of Kandel and those of like minds, then it will have to be the century of the new paradigm of the anorganic, of the barred corpo-Real of bodies and brains in piecesnamely, what I broadly designate weak nature.142

139 Eric R. Kandel, The Molecular Biology of Memory Storage: A Dialogue Between Genes and Synapses, Nobel Lecture, December 8, 2000, http://www.nobelprize.org/ nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2000/kandel-lecture.pdf; Eric R. Kandel, A New Intellectual Framework for Psychiatry, in Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and the New Biology of Mind (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2005), 38. 140 Eric R. Kandel, Biology and the Future of Psychoanalysis: A New Intellectual Framework for Psychiatry Revisited, Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and the New Biology of Mind, 64. 141 Johnston, The Weakness of Nature, 16470. 142 Johnston, The Weakness of Nature, 163, 17576; 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), 76, 86; Johnston, The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy; Johnston, A Weak Nature Alone.