19 - How is Subjectivity Undergoing Deconstruction Today? Philosophy, Auto-Hetero-Affection and Neurobiological Emotion

Summary

Contemporary neurobiological research is engaged in a deep redefinition of emotional life: the brain, far from being a non-sensuous organ, one devoted only to logical and cognitive processes, now appears on the contrary to be the centre of what we might call a new libidinal economy. A new conception of affect is undoubtedly emerging.

The general issue I would like to address here1 is the following: does the neurobiological approach to affect accomplish a material and radical deconstruction of subjectivity? I mean: does neuroscience engage in a more material and radical deconstruction of subjectivity than the one led by deconstruction itself? Does this approach help us to think of affects outside the classical conception of auto-affection, of affects that would not proceed from a primary auto-affection of the subject? Does the study of the emotional brain challenge the vision of a self-affecting subjectivity in favour of a hetero-affected one?

I borrow the concepts of auto- and hetero-affection from Derrida, the concept of affects from Deleuze, and the concept of the emotional brain from Damasio, the famous neurobiologist and author of Descartes’ Error, Looking for Spinoza and The Feeling of What Happens. Intertwining these notions will help me set the stage for a confrontation between the three authors, as well as between continental philosophy and neuroscience. I will start with some definitions.

Affects, Auto- and Hetero-Affection and the Emotional Brain

First, affects. This generic term includes emotions, feelings and passions and characterises a modification. To be affected means to be modified or altered by somebody or something. In his 24 January 1978 lecture on Spinoza, Deleuze refers to The Ethics, Book III, Definition III, where Spinoza says, ‘By affect (affectus) I understand the affections of the body by which the body's power of activity is increased or diminished, assisted or checked, together with the ideas of these affections.’ Deleuze then declares: ‘I would say that for Spinoza there is a continuous variation – and this is what it means to exist – of the force of existing or of the power of acting […] An affect is a continuous variation of the force of existing, insofar as this variation is determined by the ideas one has’ (Deleuze 1978).