It seems to me that within contemporary academia, there is a good deal of anxiety among philosophers as to just what the vocation of philosophy is. Just as Kant famously observed that “time was when metaphysics was the queen of philosophy”, there seems to be an underlying anxiety, among continental philosophers especially, that “time was when philosophy was the queen of the sciences”. Any honest appraisal of philosophy today cannot fail to acknowledge that philosophy has been dethroned from its privileged position among the various disciplines. Where Kant could still teach geography, anthropology, physics, and philosophy, seeing all of these disciplines as, in effect, a part of philosophy, for us today philosophy has increasingly become pared down and marginalized in such a way that it often appears, to the outsider, as a sort of archaic curiosity. The various sciences, both as forms of serious research and in popular culture, have taken on the mantel of answering the questions of metaphysics, ethics, and politics. Thus, when the layman searches for answers to the question of the fundamental nature of reality, he generally looks not to the tradition of philosophy, but to popular science texts such as the works of Brian Green, Frijtof Capra, Stephen J. Gould, and Richard Dawkins. Where philosophy pursues a game of one upsmanship, presenting ultra-radical, whizbang critique to end all critiques, these figures dogmatically present their various accounts of the nature of reality. When the layman looks for answers to the most fundamental and basic questions of ethics, to the classical questions of Aristotle, Epictetus, Epicurus, Lucretius, and Spinoza, the layman looks not to the ethicist, but to the psychologist and self-help books or to mystogogues selling their latest permissive snake-oil. When the layman looks for answers to questions of politics, they look not to political philosophy, but to popularized works of the social sciences. Everywhere it appears that philosophy has become eclipsed by other disciplines, such that in its own disciplinary practice it becomes addressed only to other professional philosophers addicted to something like Magister Ludi’s glass bead game.
Not surprisingly, this state of affairs has led to rather tiresome and reactionary attitudes among philosophers. It is not uncommon to find a sort of “Luddite” mentality among philosophers, where the world is implicitly described as fallen, where the Enlightenment is seen as the pivot point where this fall took place, and where thought prior to this period was a Golden Age. The vocation of philosophy thus becomes a “recollection” or “retrieval” of this forgotten truth, of this ground of all grounds, that has been lost through the fall into the natural attitude initiated by the Enlightenment. As a result, philosophy in the classroom, journals, and books becomes the history of philosophy and the retrieval of this truth from errancy. It is difficult to escape the suspicion that far from denouncing a decisive errancy of thought, this posture is instead based on a combination of envy at the triumph of one philosophical school over the others (a victory that is very carefully suppressed and denied), self-importance, insecurity, and a phobia towards all things mathematical and scientific.
read on!
In other tiresome postures, the philosophy claims to have the “truth of the truth” or an ultra-critical truth that is foundational (or destructive) to any other particular truth that might emerge from another discipline. In claiming to have the truth about the truth– whether it be the historicist recollection of the origins of our culture, the ultra-critical thought a particular correlationist school of thought, the phenomenology upon which all knowledge is grounded, or the endless wandering and play of the signifier –the philosopher can smugly puff up his chest when listening to his colleagues from other disciplines, believing himself to have provided the foundation of their discipline, and marveling at their unsophisticated and wooden ways of thinking and posing questions, so reflective of the fallenness of our contemporary age. Further, insofar as the philosopher has the truth about the truth, or that truth that precedes and conditions any other truths, the philosopher can rest content in simply ignoring these other truths as they are simply truths iterative of this ultimate Truth that he already possesses. Of course, in psychoanalytic terms all of this, no matter how elaborate its rationalizations and reasonings, looks all too much like a massive defensive formation designed to insure one does not see. Like the discourse of someone who has striven push all sex out of their thought and life which comes to be pervaded, nonetheless, by all sorts of double entendres (I think here of the conservative “Teabagger’s” movement that Schuster recently had so much fun with… listen carefully), everywhere anxiety about these shifts seems present in contemporary continental thought.
Within this context, it is thus deeply refreshing to come across a book like Catherine Malabou’s short, yet rich, What Should We Do With Our Brain?. Malabou does not give us yet another tired, reactionary denunciation of the sciences, showing us how we are warranted in dismissing them because they violate phenomenological givenness or because they are disseminated by the play of the signifier. No, Malabou instead embraces neurology. But in her embrace of neurology she does not engage in a dogmatic discourse that reduces all questions of mind, ethics, epistemology, etc., to questions to be answered by neurology, but rather, she asks how neurology summons our thought today, forcing us to pose the question of both what meaning neurology has for who we are, but also exploring how neurology is imbricated with contemporary capitalism (as analyzed by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in the wonderful New Spirit of Capitalism), and what promise of emancipation neurology holds for us. As Malabou vigorously declares in the opening paragraph of her book,
The brain is a work, and we do not know it. We are its subjects– authors and products at once –and we do not know it. “Humans make their own history, but they do not know that they make it,” says Marx, intending thereby to awaken a consciousness of historicity. In a certain way, such words apply precisely to our context and object: “Humans make their own brains, but they do not know that they make it.
Malabou’s book invites us to think how neurology summons us to rethink what we are, what our possibilities are, and what possibilities of emancipation are here for us. In this respect, her book represents the best tradition of philosophy. The great Enlightenment thinkers– Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Voltaire, etc. –did not arise like hydra out of nothing, but were rather endeavoring to determine how thought is summoned by Galileo’s infinite and mathematizable universe, where the distinction between the laws of the heavens and the chaos of the earth had collapsed, where scholastic authority was falling to pieces, and where everywhere there was a dawning recognition of the primacy of immanence. These scientific transformations were not taking something away from philosophy, but were rather an occasion for philosophy, challenging us to ask what we are, what this universe is, how we should live our lives, and what sort of politics and emancipatory possibilities are now available to us conceptually. Rather than reactionary rear-guard actions not unlike a hysterical blindness insuring that one will not see, they embraced these new developments and saw them as the very soil and milieu of their thought. This is how it’s done. As Zizek likes to put it, quoting Wagner, we shall be healed by the very spear that smote us.
Larval Subjects . 
April 15, 2009 at 8:34 pm
No offense Levi, but I think there’s a big difference between Malabou’s claims and the kind you have been making over at Perverse Egalitarianism. The entire point of the book you’ve cited, and which I’ve read, is to put into question the brain=mind identity posited by reductionist materialists. What you left out in your analysis is the fact that Malabou distinguishes between *the neuronal* and *the mental* (and the political from the social), in order to show how they each condition one another without being deterministic. Moreover, the fact that there is room for indeterminacy opens up the space for freedom, both at the level of our brains (neuroscientific) and politically (revolution) through her notion of “plasticity” (as opposed to late capitalist “flexibility”).
Here Malabou is Hegelian, but also in a way Kantian. In other words, I don’t think Kant is quite as “correlationist” as you say he is, whatever that even means by now, nor that critical philosophy is somehow opposed to science–this is totally ridiculous, as if only Spinoza had a claim to science (interestingly, and this I draw from my own personal experience, many neuroscientist “Spinozists” are also Buddhists!).
The Kantian dimension of Malabou’s claim is that, in distinguishing the “mental” from the “neuronal,” we encounter an antinomy: that our world can be explained either at the neuronal level (cognitive scientific), or at the mental level (phenomenologically), but we can never see them both at the same time, like that famous optical illusion of the lamp/face: we either see the lamp, or we see the faces, but never both. In other words, the distinction between “mental” and “neuronal” involves the process of bracketing, just as Kant had to bracket aesthetics and ethics in order to arrive at science, art to arrive at ethics and science, and mutatis mutandis for ethics. The fact that the neuronal and the mental cannot be identified also means that, in between both we approach something like a “thing in itself”–not a transcendental entity, but the fact that neither is totally reducible to the other, coterminous with Kantian transcendental subjectivity. This is why we cannot conflate mental with neuronal, if we do we lose the plasticity of the mind, i.e., human freedom (although, again, from the perspective of the third antinomy, determinism is always a possible standpoint, but only ex post facto–in the sense that, in order to prove that the neuronal determines the mental, we’d have to position ourself from God’s position, the position of “knowing everything at the end of history” [eerily akin to your comments on Mikhael’s blog]).
I also don’t think Malabou’s book refutes MIkhael’s point at all, but it does put into question the kind of scientific positivism you’ve been espousing lately (from the idea of our finer and finer instruments approximating the truth of the universe, to the discussion of pharmaceuticals and anti-depressants as a substitute for psychoanalysis–reaffirming some of the basic tenets of today’s ideology).
In the end, I think this debate over science is predicated largely on a misunderstanding, and the ongoing rhetorical conceit of your recent entries (“A realist would say [blank], against the correlationist who says [blank] about the world…”) is, I think, a little bit distasteful–especially for someone who was once a Lacanian analyst.
April 15, 2009 at 9:42 pm
Hi Bryan,
I just don’t think that’s an accurate reading of Malabou at all. As Malabou herself says towards the end of the book in the context of her discussion of the mental, “In saying this, I in no way presume to contest the hypothesis of neuronal and mental continuity or to play the game of antireductionism” (63). Qualifications such as this can be found throughout the entire book. Malabou is contesting a determinist account of neurology, which I myself would very much share. Additionally, I have never suggested that pharmaceuticals can be a replacement to psychoanalysis, but have instead argued that there can be limitations to psychoanalysis and that those of a psychoanalytic bent need to be more aware of and familiar with the materiality of the brain.
April 15, 2009 at 9:49 pm
I would suggest consulting again the introduction (aptly titled “Between Determinism and Freedom”), as well as the second subchapter of part III (“‘Lost in Translation’: From the Neuronal to the Mental”). Unfortunately, I don’t have my copy of the book in front of me, but I don’t think your above citation gets at what I’m arguing.
April 15, 2009 at 9:50 pm
*Correction: first subchapter of Part I, titled “Between Determination and Freedom”
April 15, 2009 at 9:56 pm
Not to mention the fact that Malabou’s entire point of discussing neuroscience is to question some of the formulations made by hard scientists, which is to say, that their notion of the brain as “flexible,” according to her, are contaminated by neoliberal ideology. Since I don’t have the book in front of me, here is a quote from the summary on Fordham University’s website:
>Hence there is a thin line between the organization of the nervous system and the political and social organization that both conditions and is conditioned by human experience. Looking carefully at contemporary neuroscience, it is hard not to notice that the new way of talking about the brain mirrors the management discourse of the neo-liberal capitalist world in which we now live, with its talk of decentralization, networks, and flexibility. Consciously or unconsciously, science cannot but echo the world in which it takes place.
In other words, the status of science is far more precarious than I think you’ve been suggesting as of late.
April 15, 2009 at 10:11 pm
You should read her larger book on these matters, because Que faire de notre cerveau? only give a glimpse of the issues that are dealt with in detail in Les nouveaux blessés where she actually does engage neurological theories of trauma and psychoanalytic theories of trauma and gives both a good thrashing. If I recall correctly, Que faire de notra cerveau? was mostly engaging New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, while Les Nouveaux blessés deals more directly with philosophy-neuroscience dialogue…
April 15, 2009 at 10:25 pm
Bryan,
Did it occur to you when someone writes a post saying “this is how you do it!” in response to such a book they are sympathetic to the line of critique the author is presenting?
The issue is far more complex than you’re presenting it. You are suggesting, if I’m reading you correctly, that Malabou rejects neurology on the grounds that it gets appropriated by contemporary capitalist ideology. But that is not at all what she does. She sees a deep emancipatory potential within neurology that hasn’t been able to speak due to this ideology.
Now return to your previous post and look at how your argument “works”. First you begin with your Zizekian parallax of the lamp and the face, drawing a line between the mental and the brain. Of course, in this parallax you attempt to draw, you create a tidy line that allows you to preserve a humanist dualism by advancing the thesis that we only look at the face (the mental), not the lamp (the brain), effectively banishing the brain. Contrary to the explicit letter of the text, you give a Kantian reading where mental and neuronal are at odds with one another, despite her explicit claims to the contrary. You then throw in a couple of words like “scientific positivism” and pharmaceutical ideology, apparently oblivious to the theological and neo-liberal ideology that underlies your own need to assert this dualism or primacy of the psychoanalytic in the face of the material. It is a clever argument but one nonetheless designed to immunize.
April 15, 2009 at 10:26 pm
Thanks for the suggestion, Mikhail. I don’t necessarily see neurology and psychoanalysis as being at odds with one another (following the Freud of the Project essay), though I do think they often speak past one another.
April 15, 2009 at 11:18 pm
Levi, she challenges their views of trauma and attempts to provide a philosophical response, very much as Bryan argues she does in Que faire de notre cerveau?
You might want to close that last italics in your post, it’s screwing up the comments.
April 15, 2009 at 11:30 pm
I don’t think Bryan was talking about a parallax, I think he was talking about an example of antinomy, looking at the lamp/face and not being able to see both objects is not a parallax, Levi – you should quickly look it up before you embarrass yourself. Kant’s “transcendental illusion” is an example of parallax, Zizek argues, and of course antinomy and transcendental illusion are not the same thing.
April 15, 2009 at 11:32 pm
You can erase both on my last comments, by the way, they were mostly addressed to you.
By the way, great job calling my remarks “idiotic” and “moronic” over at PE and then quietly disappearing without a word of apology or explanation. It’s nice and cozy here on your own blog, isn’t it?
April 15, 2009 at 11:35 pm
Going on the basis of his comments, I think Bryan’s read her in a deeply inaccurate way. Setting that aside, I’m curious as to what you think I’m claiming when I point out the virtues of neurology. Do you think I’ve suddenly abandoned the psychoanalytic trauma theory, the role that signs and social relations play in the constitution of subjects, the importance of the signifier, etc., etc., etc.. I’ve spent years railing against certain forms of treatment, certain assumptions about diagnosis as used in particular types of therapies, etc. None of that has changed. But this doesn’t mean you throw out the baby with the bathwater. A critique of a neurological account of trauma in certain instances does not mean “neurology is wrong” but that it is missing a good deal on a particular issue. Just as those coming from the humanist tradition of psychotherapy (psychoanalysis, existential psychotherapy, etc) often exist in a sort of myopic universe that is unaware of other developments because they only deal with speech, texts written in the tradition of humanistic psychotherapy and so on, similarly those coming from a psychiatric tradition (i.e., those that can prescribe pharmaceuticals) often have a rather myopic understanding of things like trauma, symptoms, etc., tending to reduce them to the congenital. The point isn’t to take one side or another, but to carry out a dual critique of both these positions. When Bryan says “it is distasteful to hear a former Lacanian analyst saying these things”, I get the sense 1) that he is completely ignoring the possibility that in my experience of analysis both as an analysand and as an analyst and as a member of these organizations (which I suspect is more experience than Bryan can claim), perhaps I encountered some serious problems with this mode of treatment, but more importantly, 2) that Bryan has some rather inaccurate assumptions about what neurology is claiming and seems to assume that suddenly I’ve abandoned the importance of the signifier, the analysand’s experience and history, and the semiotic nature of many symptoms. Nothing could be further from the truth.
April 15, 2009 at 11:39 pm
Mikhail, I did provide a citation!
April 15, 2009 at 11:41 pm
And I did explain why your remark about multiple competing realist positions was idiotic and moronic! I really saw no point in continuing discussion after that as you weren’t debating in good faith– as far as I could tell –and I had a huge pile of grading to finish.
April 15, 2009 at 11:48 pm
I mean c’mon guys, she follows LeDoux’s thesis that our self is a synaptic self. The whole point of her critique of this neo-liberal ideology isn’t that we aren’t “synaptic selves”, but that this revolutionary thought hasn’t been pushed as far as it can go. Did we read the same book?
April 15, 2009 at 11:49 pm
She even endorses pharmacology, talking about how she eagerly follows the developments with these new drugs, underlining that they do have a role to play, while also recognizing the dangers of these drugs.
April 16, 2009 at 12:21 am
this might be of anecdotal interest re: the present debate.
I casually picked up, about a year ago, a used copy of a book called “Neuronal Man” by a french neurologist – Jean-Pierre Changeux.
Subtitled “the biology of mind” the book is an “intelligent layman’s” introduction to neurology circa the late seventies.
I was surprised later to read the following opening paragraph to the original preface:
“Neuronal Man was born in 1979 A ewaulr od SIAXUAAION QIRH Jx
April 16, 2009 at 12:28 am
this might be of anecdotal interest re: the present debate.
I casually picked up, about a year ago, a used copy of a book called “Neuronal Man” by a french neurologist – Jean-Pierre Changeux.
Subtitled “the biology of mind” the book is an “intelligent layman’s” introduction to neurology circa the late seventies.
I was surprised on opening it to read the following opening paragraph to the original preface:
“Neuronal Man was born in 1979 as a result of a discussion with Jacques-Alain Miller and his colleagues on the review Ornicar?. . . this lively dialogue between psychoanalysts and neurobiologists demonstrated, against all expectations, that the protagonists could talk to each other and even come to an agreement. . . ”
I just remembered this on reading the discussion above. Sadly the book itself got sidelined by other reading and I never got ’round to it (it’s now back on my desk) . . . but it’s interesting that JAM et. al. were tackling these issues head on some thirty years ago.
April 16, 2009 at 12:56 am
When she says “You are your synpases,” she’s deliberately invoking the Hegelian speculative identity: “The spirit is a bone.” It’s not a commonsense identity, or an empirical identity, but a speculative identity. She even says it in her text. She makes deliberate references to Hegel, over and over and over.
April 16, 2009 at 1:00 am
And yes, to affirm Mikhael’s point: the difference between neuronal and mental is not parallax, but antinomy–and the difference, although subtle, is crucial. And it isn’t Zizek’s idea, but Kojin Karatani’s.
April 16, 2009 at 1:08 am
>Of course, in this parallax you attempt to draw, you create a tidy line that allows you to preserve a humanist dualism by advancing the thesis that we only look at the face (the mental), not the lamp (the brain), effectively banishing the brain.
This is an absurd caricature of what I said. If you can’t summarize what I said accurately, how can we trust your summary of Malabou? Here is what I said:
>The Kantian dimension of Malabou’s claim is that, in distinguishing the “mental” from the “neuronal,” we encounter an antinomy: that our world can be explained either at the neuronal level (cognitive scientific), or at the mental level (phenomenologically), but we can never see them both at the same time, like that famous optical illusion of the lamp/face: we either see the lamp, or we see the faces, but never both.
I did not say that we only see the face, but never the lamp, but we can only see one at a time, but never both together. If we try and see both together we lose the entire picture. The thing-in-itself designates the fact that seeing both at once is a structural impossibility. But if I had said we could only see the face, but never the lamp, it would indeed be idiotic and “humanist dualism,” but I didn’t say anything even remotely resembling that. And if you’re going to criticize me for presupposing a predetermined differentiation between these two levels, I’ll just refer you again back to the top where I explain how they come about through bracketing.
April 16, 2009 at 1:13 am
Also: my criticism of you as an analyst does not have that much to do with signifiers or whatever. I left it relatively vague, so that isn’t any fault of your own for misinterpreting. What I meant instead was that I think your “philosophical inquiry” has shifted from discourse of the analyst to discourse of the hysteric, it just happens that your new objet a is object-oriented philosophy.
April 16, 2009 at 2:02 am
[…] a reaction implicitly at work in a comment responding to my post on Catherine Malabou. There Bryan writes: I also don’t think Malabou’s book refutes Mikhael’s point at all, but it does put into […]
April 16, 2009 at 2:09 am
My apologies for mischaracterizing your position. I suppose my problem with the antinomy thesis is that the neurological dimension always seems to be on the losing side of the equation. That is, it simply becomes excluded from the discussions and we go back to talking about the mental like we did before. Sometimes with Zizek’s (and more recently Johnston’s) discussions of these issues I get the feeling that they’re just dressed up theology. Just as the creationist folks changed the language in their textbooks to talk about “intelligent design” and sound more scientific and different from creationism (recall the Dover, PA trial where all of this came to light), there’s a way in which this sort of move functions in the same way. I certainly share the thesis that we can either look at consciousness or neurology, but never both at the same time, but I desire a treatment of this thesis where one term of the antinomy doesn’t take a privileged status.
April 16, 2009 at 3:08 am
Well then I agree, I don’t think either one should be privileged as well. As another example, I think Karatani’s thesis apropos Marxism is spot on: Soviet-style Marxism viewed production as the privileged locus of truth in the economy, but Karatani points out that truth is located just as much in production as it is in consumption (the process of circulation, the conversion of value into money).
But I also don’t think theology and creationism are identical. While I’m not very familiar with theology and consider myself an atheist, on the other hand I think theology is an important field. For Kierkegaard, for example, there is something irreducibly absurd about existence. I think this is true whenever we are confronted by antinomy: wherever there is antinomy, we encounter the absurdity of existence. This isn’t to say that theology is itself absurd, but there seems to be something inherently absurd about existence.