Drive Between Brain and Subject: An Immanent Critique of Lacanian Neuropsychoanalysis - Adrian Johnston

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 con-
strued 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 specifi-
cally 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 significant insights and contributions, I seek to bring
into sharper relief the exact set of necessary, as well as sufficient, conditions
for what Ansermet, Magistretti, and I all are commonly pursuing: an account
of the genesis of denaturalized subjects out of embodied libidinal econo-
mies, 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
48
DRIVE BETWEEN BRAIN AND SUBJECT 49
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 sub-
jectivity, Joseph LeDoux remarks that different brain systems . . . can be but
are not always in sync.1 Although this might at first seem like a banal
observation, it signals a profound paradigm shift in thinking about the human
brain. Admittedly, the brain is, by definition, 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 organ-
ism 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
conflicts, 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, computa-
tional, 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 Sub-
jectivity, 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.
50 ADRIAN JOHNSTON
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
neuroscientific thinkers, the human organism, with its incredibly elaborate
central nervous system, is organically hard-wired to misfire along lines sub-
verting 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, assum-
ing the organic to be an Aufhebung-type negation of the inorganic, is a
sublating negation of this negation, namely, the complex organisms auto-
disruption 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, desig-
nates 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 contin-
gencies5 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 conflicts (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, Reflections 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.
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-than-
complete orchestration within and between its organs, with these body parts
(and subparts) being outgrowths of disparate periods and influences of strati-
fied, nonunified evolutionary history, so long as an organism can muddle its
way into eventually copulating, that suffices for evolution alone.7 Incidentally,
a German saying succinctly conveys this stumbling-into-sex base require-
ment: Dumm kann ficken.
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 subopti-
mal, 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 Infinite: 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 Mifflin
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 Reflections on the Ego,
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, no. 34 (1953), 14; Johnston, The Weakness of Nature,
16370.
52 ADRIAN JOHNSTON
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 first glance. To begin with,
Lacan links the Hilflosigkeit highlighted by Freud specifically to the body-in-
pieces (corps morcel).12 According to a certain standard but erroneous inter-
pretation, the Lacanian corps morcel is carved into slices precisely by the
external interventions of the signifiers of the big Other; that is to say, the
cutting up into bits and segments of the endogenous body is, on this
flawed textbook reading, an effect produced from the extracorporeal out-
side 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 ground-
zero 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
Reflections 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 Reflections on the Ego, 15.
16
Lacan, Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis, 92.
17
18
19
Jacques Lacan, The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in
Psychoanalysis, crits, 346.
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 finds 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., signifier-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 identifications with others. But,
the anorganic corpo-Real of the Lacanian body-in-pieces, specifically as
independent of and prior to the emergent dual configurations 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,
346.
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
Experience, 78.
24
Experience, 76.
54 ADRIAN JOHNSTON
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 identification, transitivism, and
specific sorts of psychopathological symptoms.29 The historical and philo-
sophical reasons for the near total neglect of these features of Lacans teach-
ings are too numerous and messy for me to delve into at present.30
On several of the occasions cited earlier, Lacan addresses the body-in-
pieces 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, specifically 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 neuroscientific
thinking are coming to suggest such a concept on the basis of intrascien-
tific 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 Reflections on the Ego, 13; Lacan, Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,
92.
27
Johnston, The Weakness of Nature, 16465; Johnston, Reflections of a Rotten
Nature.
28
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.
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 evo-
lutionary 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 fiction 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 synthe-
sized 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. Jacques-
Alain 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
56 ADRIAN JOHNSTON
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, behav-
ior, 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 diversifica-
tion 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-reflection 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 reflexive 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 elimi-
native types of naturalist materialism (in Self Comes to Mind, he argues against
any sort of epiphenomenalist dismissal of autonomous selfhood qua self-
determining reflective/reflexive 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
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 sand-
wiches together (without seamlessly and exhaustively melding) a motley
assortment of components and subcomponents reflecting the sculpting
powers of different, unsynchronized evolutionary eras and influences.48 This
collage-like, sedimentary juxtaposition of distinct temporal-historical layers
and strata, with these levels sometimes entering into conflict with one
another, cannot but remind those familiar with Freudian psychoanalysis of
Freuds famous description of the conflicted, temporally elongated psyche as
resembling an image of Rome in which, as in a type of virtual, computer-
generated 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 func-
tions) and the (relatively) recent, primate cortex (with its sophisticated cogni-
tive 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 interdepen-
dence 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
44
LeDoux, Synaptic Self, 32223.
45
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
51
58 ADRIAN JOHNSTON
exert reciprocal modulating mediations back on the brain stem as its ground-
ing 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 devel-
opment 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 first and indispensable provider of primordial feel-
ings. 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 difficult. 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 linger-
ing investment in the pseudosecular visions of a scientistic organicism
problematized by the exact types of intraevolutionary and intracerebral dis-
harmonies 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 conflict 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
LeDoux, Synaptic Self, 32223.
enduring human nature, but, rather, discontinuous jumps beyond this (dis-
rupted 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 neuroscientific triad of cognition, emotion, and
motivation, he identifies 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 specifically 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 fibers 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 flows of mutual influences
back-and-forth between the oddest couple. Apropos these particular fea-
tures 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
57
60 ADRIAN JOHNSTON
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
specifically 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 first and foremost by Mark Solms. In the third and final section,
I will touch upon the relationship between Trieb and subjectivity in Freudian-
Lacanian 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 short-
comings afflicting Ansermet and Magistrettis reflections, 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-than-
organic/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
conflicted, and self-sabotaging. Armed with many of the insights of Lacanian
theory, I return to Freuds metapsychological definition 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.
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). Moti-
vated 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 difficulty so as to make
progress through concentrating instead on drives specifically 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 demand-
ing 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 signifiers) in which differences, however minimal, are inevitable and
ineliminable. Hence, for intrinsic structural reasons, drives not only are
thwarted by inner conflict 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 distinc-
tion 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 affirmation of time, fueled along indefinitely by this
temporal tension between the dual somatic and psychical contraption of its
four ill-fitted 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 writ-
ings, 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,
finalized conceptual solution. However, when Freud says that the Todestrieb is
not a drive unto itself by contrast with other drives and is, rather, a designa-
tion 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.
62 ADRIAN JOHNSTON
to read the death drive in Freud as a name for the split (and this splits myriad
consequences) afflicting 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 signifiers, would correspond with the cognitive cortex. Put in a
somewhat oversimplified 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
first 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 drive-
centered 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 finds itself being so
61
Johnston, Time Driven, xxviixxxviii, 33341, 34347.
62
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
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 gratifications, 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 fulfill
Freuds hopes that such scientific confirmation for drive theory (and psycho-
analysis generally) will arrive eventually.67
Ansermet and Magistretti translate the traditional analytic distinction
between drive and instinct into more contemporary life-scientific language.
They state that, Instinct is a behavior issuing from the genetic program,
whereas drive is precisely the product of the insufficiency of genetic determi-
nation.68 Ansermet and Magistrettis previous coauthored book, chacun son
cerveau, spends a lot of time emphasizing recent biologys intrascientific
delegitimization of scientistic determinisms appealing to fixed genetic codes
and evolutionarily hard-wired neural programs. For them, the steadily increas-
ing importance of neuroplasticity and epigenetics in biological accounts of
human beings amounts to the advancement of a paradoxical scientific case for
the irreducibility of human nature and subjectivity to standard scientific
approaches and explanations.69 Accordingly, they describe humans as geneti-
cally 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 conflate 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, defined 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
66
67
68
69
Franois Ansermet and Pierre Magistretti, Biology of Freedom: Neural Plasticity, Experience, and
the Unconscious, trans. Susan Fairfield (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.
64 ADRIAN JOHNSTON
exogenous influences emanating from the denaturalized and denaturalizing

phenomena and structures of experiential fields 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,
flexibility, fluidity, malleability, and volatility, and, on the other hand, fixity,
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, chiefly 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, cross-
resonating networks of memories and representations they combine to con-
stitute and reconstitute repeatedlythis would be the dimension (or, to resort
to one of Lacans neologisms, dit-mension) of Freudian Vorstellungen and
Lacanian signifiers as conceptualized beyond the confines 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 pro-
cesses 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 flowing 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
Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, xvi.
74
Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, xiiixvi, xvii, 67.
75
Johnston, Time Driven, 30015.
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,
testifies to the truth of these psychoanalytic hypotheses regarding the plastic-
ity (as combined fixity and fluidity) 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 configurations of associations forming
the constellations of Vorstellungen/signifiers in the networks of the cerebral
psyche periodically are modifiedliquidate any past as such in itself, intro-
ducing 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 verified aspect of the neurobiological
functioning of memory deconsolidation. This recommended terminologi-
cal change is meant to indicate their psychoanalytic emphasis on discontinu-
ity 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-than-
imperviously-solid biological grounds.79
76
Johnston, Time Driven, 522, 21827.
77
Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, 4546, 8889, 10911, 11518, 175;
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.
66 ADRIAN JOHNSTON
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 (aim-
object), with the push-and-pull between iteration and alteration being itself
the plasticity of drive per se in its (dis)integrated (mal)functioning.81 Further-
more, given that, as I observed earlier, Ansermet and Magistretti distin-
guish 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. Hilflosigkeit 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/signifiers of the drives aims and objects bear
witness to the enveloping influences of intersubjective Imaginary others and
transsubjective Symbolic Others. These denaturalizing influences 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 struc-
tures 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 specific 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 reflex type.84
80
Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, 14041, 15152, 156.
81
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
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 reflex 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 reflexes specific to
inferior species. . . .85
Obviously, this underscoring of the primate-specific 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 reflexive 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 signifier-like Vorstellungen
(inscribed in the posterior insula) and Vorstellungsreprsentanzen (inscribed in the
anterior insula) of sensory-perceptual phenomena and socio-linguistic struc-
tures.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 representa-
tional 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
68 ADRIAN JOHNSTON
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 cogni-
tive, emotional, and motivational systems of the brain. Specifically 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 interoceptive-
exteroceptive re-representations.91 The latter mark the intrusion of denatu-
ralizing mediators that literally bed down in the flesh 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 conflicts between the biological and the more-
than-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 com-
pletely) 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 amplified by their remarking upon the temporal
essence of the Hebbian plasticity so markedly affecting the representational
88
89
90
91
92
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 neuroscientific 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 flux 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 fields (psychoanalysis, philoso-
phy, 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 diver-
sities 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 repetition-
related 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 neuropsy-
choanalytic framework of Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbulls The Brain and the
Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of Subjective Experience (2002)
93
94
95
Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, 185; Ansermet and Magistretti, Les nigmes du
plaisir, 157.
70 ADRIAN JOHNSTON
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
firm neural basis for the fundamental distinction between energies and rep-
resentations 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 repre-
sentational. As seen, both Damasio as well as Ansermet and Magistretti
furnish precise neurological specifications regarding the structures and
dynamics of the brain embodying these defining aspects of Trieb.
Solms and Turnbull naturally present the emotional-motivational
SEEKING systemneuroscientific discourse nowadays identifies four
basic-emotion command systems in the brain . . . SEEKING, RAGE,
FEAR, and PANIC97as underlying the neurobiology of libidinal
drive.98 The first connection they establish between Freudian Trieb and
neurobiological SEEKING has to do with Freuds insistence on the object-
less 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 predeter-
mined type of object as its natural telos):99
What does the SEEKING system do? As the name suggests, it seeks. The more
difficult question is: What does it seek? One might think that it seeks the specific
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 nonspecific way. All that it seems to
know is that the something it wants is out there. A nonspecific 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 specific 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 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 specific 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 significant 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 deter-
mined instinctual object-choices (i.e., drives being objectless) dooms the drive-
centered libidinal economies of human beings to inevitable dissatisfaction
and disappointments.103 That is to say, whereas Solms and Turnbull pur-
sue 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 incorpo-
rating that which lies beyond the pleasure principle.
In the block quotation above, Solms and Turnbull examine a neuro-
anatomical and neurophysiological juxtaposition between that which is non-
representational (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 signifier-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 five 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
72 ADRIAN JOHNSTON
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
amplified further by their location at the intersection of numerous biological
and more-than-biological lines of influence, 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 cog-
nitive 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 significant Other (i.e.,
the adult caretaker als Nebenmensch as per the 1895 Project for a Scientific
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 advo-
cate 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 sufficient
104
105
SE 1: 318, 331.
106
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.
conditions for subjective autonomyis what I now will turn to addressing in
the third and final 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 final 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 gratification, 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 conflict-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 conflicts internal to the libidinal economy mark
the precise places where a freedom transcending mundane materiality has a chance
briefly to flash 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 conflicted 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 identifies as the
guilt-inducing burden of duty and its corresponding pangs of anxious, awe-inspiring
110
111
74 ADRIAN JOHNSTON
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.,
conflicts 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 conflicted 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 first 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 deter-
mined,115 with the purported consequence that, the subject hence would
find itself determined by the default of its determination.116 Natural genetic
openness to more-than-natural epigenetic modifications 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 confluence 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
Pommier, Comment les neurosciences dmontrent la psychanalyse, 378, 401.
114
Stanovich, The Robots Rebellion, 13, 28, 67, 8284.
115
Ansermet, Des neurosciences aux logosciences, 378.
116
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 conflate uniqueness with autonomy is reflected in the two
different titles of Ansermets first 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
confirm this suspicion. Therein, the two-part equation of neuroplasticity with
individuation and individuation with freedom is affirmed 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 main-
tain 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 becom-
ing of the subject. . . . Neurosciences and psychoanalysis hence meet each other in
117
118
119
120
Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, xvi, 10, 211, 21516, 22930.
121
Magistretti and Ansermet, Introduction, 7.
122
76 ADRIAN JOHNSTON
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., mecha-
nistic, reductive, and/or eliminative materialisms associated with both the
natural sciences generally as well as the life sciences specifically) 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 fun-
damental philosophical problem plaguing these claims is that full-fledged
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
affirm 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
insufficiency on the side of knowledge, but, instead, as a reflection of real
randomness on the side of being in and of itselfbare chance or arbitrariness
is not sufficient 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 sufficient condition
for such a theory.
123
124
Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, 18183, 185; Magistretti and Ansermet,
Plasticit et homostasie linterface entre neurosciences et psychanalyse, 28.
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 influencesis a profoundly important incarnation of such inde-
terminism 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 significant 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 Hilflosigkeit, 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 denatu-
ralization.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 specu-
lations. 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.
78 ADRIAN JOHNSTON
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 modifications of
the plastic brain are nothing more than expressions of a second-order natural
determinism, mere epiphenomena of a never-actually-denaturalized human-
ity. In order to combat such opponents brandishing a reductive naturalistic
determinism with more than just unconvincing foot stamping and fist
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 investiga-
tions, especially if it is invested in cross-breeding psychoanalysis and
neurobiology.129 Lacanians must bring themselves to recognize the momen-
tous 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 evolu-
tionary psychologies.
To be clear, like Lacan, Ansermet, and Magistretti, I am entirely unsym-
pathetic 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
intrascientific refutations of these pseudoscientific 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.
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 back-
ground 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 reflections of an evolutionary thinking encompass-
ing 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 scientifi-
cally 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 deter-
minism 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, Conflicted 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,
Reflections 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 Scientific 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).
80 ADRIAN JOHNSTON
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 subjectification 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 pseudo-
Marxists 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 signifiers 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 mecha-
nisms. 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 influences
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 Anglo-
American analytic philosophy of mind and cognitive science, Ansermet and
132
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 indepen-
dence 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 fleshed 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 prob-
lems. 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 unqualified
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 insufficiently
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.
82 ADRIAN JOHNSTON
nuanced identification of Trieb-beyond-Instinkt with being free sounds as

though it makes the mistake of allowing for the conflation 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 finer-grained model of the
rapport between drive and subject in which the gesture of this conflation 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
specifically, 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-fledged neuropsychoanalysis of autonomy to fall short in
two basic respects: first, there are other necessary conditions for subjective
freedom apart from the ones Ansermet and Magistretti touch upon, condi-
tions of a general ontological type underlying the specific properties of human
organisms latched onto by this Lacanian neuropsychoanalytic pair; second,
necessary conditions are not sufficient 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
specific ingredients missing from Ansermet and Magistrettis attempts to
assemble a materialist yet nonreductive account of denaturalized self-
determining subjectivity. My ongoing labors to construct a transcendental
materialism, starting in my 2008 book ieks Ontology: A Transcendental Mate-
rialist Theory of Subjectivity136 and more thoroughly pursued in a trilogy-in-
progress (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 equiva-
lence 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 affirm 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
subjects irreducible (and yet still immanent) to the domains covered by
physics and biology must offer a two-tiered enumeration of necessary condi-
tions 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 sufficient conditions absent from Ansermet and
Magistrettis reflections? For the sake of brevity, I will restrict consideration
here to the type of sapient subjectivity of the signifier 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 significant 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.) Addi-
tionally, an examination is requisite of the link between, on the one hand,
specific aspects of syntax and semantics and, on the other hand, the reflexive
and recursive capacities displayed by minded subjects conscious and uncon-
scious. These are but a few of the ingredients that would have to be involved
with thoroughly spelling out the sufficient (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 psycho-
analysis, the multiple domains of the neurosciences, linguistics, and Marxism,
among other bodies of knowledge.138
137
Johnston, The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy; Johnston, A Weak Nature Alone.
138
Johnston, The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy; Johnston, A Weak Nature Alone.
84 ADRIAN JOHNSTON
In both his 2000 speech accepting the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medi-
cine 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-first century will be accomplishing a synthesis of psychoanalysis
and neurobiology.139 Observing that psychoanalysis enters the twenty-first
century with its influence in decline, he laments, this decline is regrettable,
since psychoanalysis still represents the most coherent and intellectually sat-
isfying 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
edifice rapidly are being met.141 I close by proposing that if the twenty-first
century is to fulfill 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 Intellec-
tual 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 Frame-
work 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.

Drive Between Brain and Subject: An Immanent Critique of Lacanian Neuropsychoanalysis - Adrian Johnston

Diunggah oleh

Informasi Dokumen

Judul Asli

Hak Cipta

Format Tersedia

Bagikan dokumen Ini

Bagikan atau Tanam Dokumen

Opsi Berbagi

Apakah menurut Anda dokumen ini bermanfaat?

Apakah konten ini tidak pantas?

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

Drive Between Brain and Subject: An Immanent Critique of Lacanian Neuropsychoanalysis - Adrian Johnston

Diunggah oleh

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

The Southern Journal of Philosophy

Volume 51, Spindel Supplement

DRIVE BETWEEN BRAIN AND SUBJECT:

ABSTRACT: Despite Jacques Lacans somewhat deserved reputation as an adamant

Adrian Johnston is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New

to generate inner antagonisms, bugs, glitches, loopholes, short circuits,

natural balance, is absolutely axiomatic for a properly psychoanalytic

He proceeds in the immediately following pages to characterize this self,

Damasios wording (fatal, forced) emphasizes that the parceling-out of

Tempted by the last sentence of this quotation, a Lacanian might recommend

2. SPLIT BRAIN, SPLIT DRIVETHE NEUROBIOLOGICAL

exogenous influences emanating from the denaturalized and denaturalizing

Returning to the topic of drive theory, Ansermet and Magistretti portray

Obviously, this underscoring of the primate-specific role of the insular cortex

together a dappled ensemble of diverse systems and subsystems affected by

3. FROM THE BARRED BRAIN TO THE BARRED

In Les nigmes du plaisir, Ansermet and Magistretti gesture at a connection

Ansermet and Magistretti continue:

By this point, a lengthy chain of equivalences has unfurled itself: epigenetics

out-of-bounds.127 In both metapsychological theory and clinical practice,

evolutionary-genetic programming, instead of carving out liberated zones for

nuanced identification of Trieb-beyond-Instinkt with being free sounds as

Anda mungkin juga menyukai