johnston - drive between brain and subject- an immanent critique of lacanian neuropsychoanalysis

DRIVE BETWEEN BRAIN AND SUBJECT:AN IMMANENT CRITIQUE OF LACANIAN

NEUROPSYCHOANALYSIS

Adrian Johnston

ABSTRACT: Despite Jacques Lacan’s somewhat deserved reputation as an adamantantinaturalist, his teachings, when read carefully to the letter, should not be con-strued as categorically hostile to any and every possible interfacing of psychoanalysisand biology. In recent years, several authors, including myself, have begunexploring the implications of reinterpreting Lacan’s corpus on the basis of questionsconcerning naturalism, materialism, realism, and the position of analysis withrespect to the sciences of today. Herein, I focus primarily on the efforts ofanalyst François Ansermet and neuroscientist Pierre Magistretti to forge a specifi-cally Lacanian variant of neuropsychoanalysis (as distinct from Anglo-Americanvariants). Taking up Ansermet and Magistretti’s interlinked theories of drive(Trieb) and autonomous subjectivity, I develop an immanent critique of theirproject. Doing so in a manner that is intended to acknowledge and preserve thisneuropsychoanalytic duo’s significant insights and contributions, I seek to bringinto sharper relief the exact set of necessary, as well as sufficient, conditionsfor what Ansermet, Magistretti, and I all are commonly pursuing: an accountof the genesis of denaturalized subjects out of embodied libidinal econo-mies, itself situated within the framework of a nonreductive, quasi-naturalistmaterialism synthesizing resources drawn from psychoanalysis, neurobiology, andphilosophy.

Adrian Johnston is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of NewMexico at Albuquerque and an Assistant Teaching Analyst at the Emory PsychoanalyticInstitute in Atlanta. He is the author of Time Driven (2005), Žižek’s Ontology (2008), and Badiou,Žižek, and Political Transformations (2009), all published by Northwestern University Press. He hasthree books scheduled for publication over the course of the next year: Self and Emotional Life(coauthored with Catherine Malabou, Columbia University Press), Adventures in TranscendentalMaterialism (Edinburgh University Press), and The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy(Northwestern University Press).

The Southern Journal of PhilosophyVolume 51, Spindel Supplement2013

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 51, Spindel Supplement (2013), 48–84.ISSN 0038-4283, online ISSN 2041-6962. DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12019

48

1. IN THE ORGANIC MORE THAN THE ORGANICITSELF—THE SELF-SUBVERTING CENTRAL

NERVOUS SYSTEM

In his 2002 book Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are surveying theimplications of neurobiology for ideas regarding personal identity and sub-jectivity, Joseph LeDoux remarks that “different brain systems . . . can be butare not always in sync.”1 Although this might at first seem like a banalobservation, it signals a profound paradigm shift in thinking about the humanbrain. Admittedly, the brain is, by definition, an organ in an organism. As aset of images and notions automatically accompanying talk of organs andorganisms 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, LeDoux’s commentsuggests that conceiving of the central nervous system, which reaches a peakof multifaceted intricacy and internal differentiation in human beings, alongexclusively organicist lines risks leading to serious distortions and oversights.More precisely, highlighting the coordinated synchronization of the brain quaorgan in an organism correspondingly heightens the danger of obscuring themultiple ways in which this material seat of the subject is nonorganic quadisorganized and out of synch with itself, permeated by intraneurologicalconflicts, discrepancies, incompatibilities, and the like.2

Panning back for a moment to a very broad and basic perspective, I amconvinced that the life sciences, in order to do real justice to the richly andunpredictably weird sorts of subjects humans are, must supplement theframing worldview of their spontaneous organicism with the notion that(phrased in Lacanian fashion) there is something in the organic more thanthe organic itself. In other words, a nonorganicity is immanent to the mostcomplex forms of the organic. This is by virtue of the reality that, abovecertain 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: PenguinBooks, 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: SlavojŽižek, Antonio Damasio, and a Materialist Account of Affects,” in “Žižek and Political Sub-jectivity,” ed. Derek Hook and Calum Neill, special issue, Subjectivity 3 (2010): 89–91; AdrianJohnston, “Misfelt Feelings: Unconscious Affect Between Psychoanalysis, Neuroscience, andPhilosophy,” in Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou, Self and Emotional Life: MergingPhilosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neurobiology, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013),73–210.

DRIVE BETWEEN BRAIN AND SUBJECT 49

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 Beyondthese thresholds of complexity, more is less (i.e., more complexity equalsless functionality).4 Arguably, as suggested by psychoanalysis and someneuroscientific thinkers, the human organism, with its incredibly elaboratecentral nervous system, is organically hard-wired to misfire along lines sub-verting this being’s straightforward status as a mere organism in the senseof a self-integrated totality of parts peacefully cooperating according tothe governing master plan of a whole smoothly consistent within itself.However, this complexity-induced category of the nonorganic is not simplyequivalent 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 asublating negation of this negation, namely, the complex organism’s auto-disruption of the organic part-whole organization of itself as a living systemconsisting of a plethora of levels and layers. For the sake of clarity, in whatfollows, 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 bynon-Whole/not-One living systems themselves.

LeDoux is far from alone in stressing the importance of paying attention tothe anorganic disorganization of the central nervous system in addition to itsorganic organization. Cognitive scientist Keith Stanovich, whose 2004 bookThe Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin advances an immanentcritique of crudely reductive versions of evolutionary psychology, similarlyemphasizes the lack of thoroughgoing integration among the human brain’smany individual components and subcomponents. In Stanovich’s estimation,any sophisticated living system resulting from evolution—this movement ofhistoricized 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 reproduce”—is bound to be riddledwith 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, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, (Evanston:Northwestern University Press, 2008), 170–71.

4 Adrian Johnston, “Reflections of a Rotten Nature: Hegel, Lacan, and MaterialNegativity,” in “Science and Thought,” ed. Frank Ruda and Jan Voelker, special issue, FilozofskiVestnik (2013): 23–52.

5 Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, trans.Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 96–98, 112–13, 116–17, 145–46.

50 ADRIAN JOHNSTON

with itself ”).6 Given the actual absence of top-down design guidance, theevolutionary criterion of clearing the relatively low bar of passing on geneticmaterial is hardly a recipe for engendering optimally functional complexorganisms. 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 itsway 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-theoretictheses along the same lines as Stanovich and me.8 And, following in thefootsteps of Varela, LeDoux, and Stanovich, among others, neuroscientistDavid Linden and psychologist Gary Marcus, in 2007 and 2008 booksrespectively, both depict the human brain as a “kludge,” namely, a subopti-mal, hodge-podge device slapped together under pressure out of whateverdisparate, unrelated materials happen to be available. They each contendthat a number of humanity’s distinctive features are the surprising fruits ofthis “kludginess.”9

Although the preceding might seem to be utterly foreign to Lacanianism—this would be due more to its generally predominant antinaturalist animositytoward all things biological than to the above-mentioned research postdatingLacan’s death—Lacan himself probably would not be so averse to suchtrajectories of science-inspired speculation.10 Even if one questionably

6 Keith E. Stanovich, The Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2004), 53.

7 Stanovich, The Robot’s Rebellion, xii, 12–13, 15–16, 20–22, 25, 28, 53, 60, 66–67, 82–84,122, 142, 186–87, 247; Adrian Johnston, “The Weakness of Nature: Hegel, Freud, Lacan, andNegativity Materialized,” in Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic, ed. Slavoj Žižek,Clayton Crockett, and Creston Davis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 168–69.

8 Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Rootsof Human Understanding (Boston: New Science Library, 1987), 115, 117; Francisco J. Varela, EvanThompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 195–96, 205; Johnston, “The Weakness of Nature,” 162–63.

9 David J. Linden, The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams,and God (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 2–3, 5–7, 21–24, 26, 235–46; GaryMarcus, Kludge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind (New York: Houghton MifflinHarcourt Publishing Company, 2008), 6–16, 161–63; Johnston, “The Misfeeling of WhatHappens,” 90; Johnston, “Misfelt Feelings,” 175–76.

10 Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed inPsychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (NewYork: 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,”163–70.


maintains that the sole natural fact appealed to by him is the young child’sprematurational helplessness, as already underscored by Freud,11 this singlefact 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 morcelé).12 According to a certain standard but erroneous inter-pretation, the Lacanian corps morcelé is carved into slices precisely by theexternal interventions of the signifiers of the big Other; that is to say, thecutting up into bits and segments of the endogenous body is, on thisflawed textbook reading, an effect produced from the extracorporeal out-side by impressions and incisions made by an exogenous sociosymbolicorder.13

However, this widely accepted interpretation of Lacan’s corps morceléignores 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 sichindependent of and/or prior to Imaginary-Symbolic mediation. Againand again, Lacan speaks in the same constant thematic vein of “organicdisturbance and discord,”15 “intraorganic . . . discordance,”16 “an originalorganic chaos,”17 “a vital dehiscence constitutive of man,”18 “the organism’spseudototality,”19 “the congenital gap presented by man’s real being in his

11 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. JamesStrachey, et al., 24 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis,1953–1974). From here, I will refer to the Standard Edition with the abbreviation SE, followedby the volume number and page. SE 1: 318; SE 20: 154–55, 167; SE 21: 17–19, 30; JacquesLacan, “Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu: Essai d’analyse d’une fonctionen psychologie,” in Autres écrits, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001), 33–35;Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in PsychoanalyticExperience,” 76, 78; Jacques Lacan, “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” Écrits, 92; JacquesLacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre 6: Le désir et son interprétation, 1958–1959 (unpublishedtypescript), session of November 12th, 1958; Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre 8:Le transfert, 1960–1961, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, 2nd ed. (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001), 427.

12 Lacan, “Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu,” 41–42; Lacan, “SomeReflections on the Ego,” 13, 15; Jacques Lacan, “On My Antecedents,” Écrits, 55; Lacan, “TheMirror 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 PossibleTreatment of Psychosis,” Écrits, 461; Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre 6, session ofJanuary 7th, 1959.

13 Johnston, “The Weakness of Nature,” 163–64.14 Jacques Lacan, Freud’s Papers on Technique: 1953–1954, 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 Lacan, “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” 94.18 Lacan, “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” 94.19 Jacques Lacan, “The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in

Psychoanalysis,” Écrits, 346.

52 ADRIAN JOHNSTON

natural relations,”20 “the fantasized reality of any sort of ‘totality’ of theorganism,”21 and “gaps in the organic Gestalt.”22 In black and white within thevery text of the renowned 1949 écrit on the mirror stage, one finds theinvocation of “a certain dehiscence at the very heart of the organism, aprimordial discord.”23

Phrased in the manner of the later Lacan, there is a barred corpo-Real inexcess of the barred (and barring) big Other. Moreover, this thesis is perfectlycompatible with the corresponding emphases on structural-Symbolic(i.e., signifier-induced) and phenomenal-Imaginary (i.e., the helpless infant’sanxious, distressing experience of its “motor impotence and nurslingdependence”24) fragmentation of what would thus be the overdeterminedBorromean body, a corps whose piecemeal (denaturalized) nature takes(mis)shape at the intersection of the registers of the Real, the Symbolic, andthe Imaginary. As regards the mediation of the child’s body in and throughImaginary-Symbolic realities, infantile helplessness as foregrounded by Freudand Lacan inclines the young subject-to-be in the two entwined directions ofreliance on sociolinguistic relationships and identifications with others. But,the anorganic corpo-Real of the Lacanian body-in-pieces, specifically asindependent of and prior to the emergent dual configurations of the ego andsubjectivity (i.e., as the baseless base of anatomical and physiological facticity),is a biomaterial condition of possibility for any such phenomenal and/orstructural mediations. Were the human organism to enter the world as theproduct of an evolutionary-genetic preestablished harmony, as a cog in aclockwork, organic order running according to the programs and designs ofa pseudosecular naturalistic theodicy, it would be impervious to beingaffected 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 bigOther brooking no nonnatural others or Others (as per a reductionist oreliminativist Weltanschauung). Lacan clearly postulates that denying theoriginal existence of a synchronized instinctual monad at one with bothitself 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 Lagache’s Presentation: ‘Psychoanalysis andPersonality Structure,’” Écrits, 545.

22 Lacan, “Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: ‘Psychoanalysis and PersonalityStructure,’” 545.

23 Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in PsychoanalyticExperience,” 78.



natural balance, is absolutely axiomatic for a properly psychoanalyticmetapsychology accounting for ontogenetic subject formation in a plausibleand nonreductionist/noneliminativist way.25

Also in the text of “The Mirror Stage” (as well as elsewhere26) is to be foundan almost never noticed detail: an explicit positive appeal to neurobiology.27

Therein, Lacan describes “the cerebral cortex” of “the central nervoussystem” as what “psychosurgical operations will lead us to regard as theintraorganic mirror.”28 Like Freud before him, he presciently anticipates witha welcoming attitude future empirical corroborations of core components ofpsychoanalytic theory via studies of the brain. Indeed, recent discoveriesconcerning mirror neurons and neuroplasticity dovetail with and appear toreinforce Lacanian interpretive glosses on identification, transitivism, andspecific sorts of psychopathological symptoms.29 The historical and philo-sophical reasons for the near total neglect of these features of Lacan’s 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 meto make the move of positing a cerveau morcelé as a crucial biological fact withrespect to analytic metapsychology.31 Lacan’s reiterated insistence on thebody-in-pieces as being “organic,” specifically in the sense of a biologicalreal(ity) inherent to the human condition from the very beginning of physicaland mental development, further encourages me along these lines. As Iindicated at the outset, select trajectories of contemporary neuroscientificthinking are coming to suggest such a concept on the basis of intrascien-tific considerations. Additionally, as neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeuxexplains, the human brain itself, like the rest of the newborn’s body, is

25 Lacan, “Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: ‘Psychoanalysis and PersonalityStructure,’” 545; Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre 8, 410; Adrian Johnston, Time Driven:Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005),xxxvi–xxxviii, 294–98; Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, 212–13.

26 Lacan, “Some Reflections on the Ego,” 13; Lacan, “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,”92.

27 Johnston, “The Weakness of Nature,” 164–65; Johnston, “Reflections of a RottenNature.”


29 Johnston, “The Weakness of Nature,” 164–70; Giacomo Rizzolatti and CorradoSinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions, trans. Frances Anderson(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), xi–xii.

30 Adrian Johnston, “Repeating Engels: Renewing the Cause of the Materialist Wager forthe Twenty-First Century,” in “animal.machine.sovereign,” special issue, Theory @ Buffalo 15(2011): 141–48.

31 Johnston, “The Misfeeling of What Happens,” 89–90; Johnston, “Misfelt Feelings,”175–76.

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distinctively premature, with this genetically dictated prematurity leavingthe plastic brain to be substantially shaped and reshaped by epigeneticvariables.32

In a separate piece of writing, and already with the idea of an anorganicbrain-in-pieces in mind, I maintain (paraphrasing Alain Badiou) that, “thereis, within each human being, no Brain, only some brains.”33 This assertion isadvanced there in conjunction with citations of two of Antonio Damasio’sclaims: one, “Evolution is not the Great Chain of Being”34 and, two, “thebrain is a system of systems.”35 As I implied before in connection withLeDoux 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” [morcelé] qua being “a system ofsystems,” namely, a detotalized, not-thoroughly-systematic/systematizedsystem). Current neurobiological research programs are starting to reveal thatthe Brain-with-a-capital-B, as the supposed sum total of cerebral componentsand operations, is nothing more than a fiction of a fully organic materialground of thinking and feeling subjectivity, a fantasy-construct smoothingover the fragmentary anorganicity of this organ of organs37 (this would be theneuroscientistic correlate of the myth of evolution as an uninterrupted marchof continuous, steady progress toward ever-greater achievements of synthe-sized biological complexity). Lacan already warns against attributingthe imagined unities of sums/totalities resembling Aristotelian souls (orvon Uexküllian “worlds” as harmonious symbioses between Innenwelten andUmwelten) to what is involved with human beings, their physical bodiesincluded.38

32 Jean-Pierre Changeux, The Physiology of Truth: Neuroscience and Human Knowledge, trans. M.B.DeBevoise, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 189, 208–09.

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,” 175–78.38 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre 10: L’angoisse, 1962–1963, ed. Jacques-

Alain Miller (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004), 253–54; Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de JacquesLacan, Livre 12: Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse, 1964–1965 (unpublished typescript), sessionof March 10th, 1965; Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre 14: La logique du fantasme,1966–1967 (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 (NewYork: W.W. Norton, 1998), 109–10; Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre 21: Lesnon-dupes errent, 1973–1974 (unpublished typescript), session of November 20th, 1973; Jacques


I have a further motive for mentioning Damasio in this setting. In his latestbook, 2010’s Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, he raises anumber of issues both directly related to the preceding discussion, as well asvital for the formulation of a possible Lacanian neuropsychoanalytic theoryof drive (something I will propose below). In language audibly resonating withStanovich’s main motif of “the robot’s rebellion,” Damasio states:

If nature can be regarded as indifferent, careless, and unconscionable, then humanconsciousness creates the possibility of questioning nature’s ways. The emergence ofhuman consciousness is associated with evolutionary developments in brain, behav-ior, and mind that ultimately lead to the creation of culture, a radical novelty in thesweep of natural history. The appearance of neurons, with its attending diversifica-tion of behavior and paving of the way into minds, constitutes a momentous eventin the grand trajectory. But the appearance of conscious brains eventually capableof self-reflection is the next momentous event. It is the opening of the way into arebellious, 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, unlikemany enthralled by the life sciences, obviously repudiates reductive or elimi-native types of naturalist materialism (in Self Comes to Mind, he argues againstany sort of epiphenomenalist dismissal of autonomous selfhood qua self-determining reflective/reflexive subjectivity41). One might even be tempted todetect quasi-Badiouian echoes herein, with Damasio’s talk of “events” of“radical novelty” as “revolutions” allowed for by the self-subverting naturalstructures 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 linedeposited within the architecture of the human central nervous system by“careless nature” (i.e., the unorchestrated contingencies of a plurality ofevolutionary forces and factors). He zeroes in on the brain stem and cerebralcortex.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 andCompany, 1990), 6; Jacques Lacan, “Aristotle’s Dream,” trans. Lorenzo Chiesa, Angelaki: Journalof the Theoretical Humanities 11 (2006): 83–84.

39 Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York: Pantheon,2010), 287.

40 Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 288–89, 291–92.41 Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 271–72.42 Adrian Johnston, The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy: Prolegomena to Any Future

Materialism, Volume One (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013), forthcoming.43 Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 250–51.

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brain could not be further apart. They embody a chasm of chronologybetween the relatively old (brain stem) and new (cerebral cortex), a temporalgap 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 inother mammals, whereas the brain stem is a lowest common denominatoracross 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 motleyassortment of components and subcomponents reflecting the sculptingpowers of different, unsynchronized evolutionary eras and influences.48 Thiscollage-like, sedimentary juxtaposition of distinct temporal-historical layersand strata, with these levels sometimes entering into conflict with oneanother, cannot but remind those familiar with Freudian psychoanalysis ofFreud’s famous description of the conflicted, temporally elongated psyche asresembling an image of Rome in which, as in a type of virtual, computer-generated hologram, all of this city’s separate and successive past phases andstates are represented as copresent, simultaneously existing together in thesame space.49

Damasio begins by describing the kludgy mismatch between the ancient,reptilian brain stem (responsible for regulating the body’s 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, thefunctions of the brain stem were not duplicated in the cortical structures. Theconsequence 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

Damasio’s wording (“fatal,” “forced”) emphasizes that the parceling-out oflife’s 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 tasksessential to life regulation to the cortex. What is more, the cortex comes to

44 LeDoux, Synaptic Self, 322–23.45 Stanovich, The Robot’s Rebellion, 60, 122, 186–87.46 Linden, The Accidental Mind, 6, 21–22, 26.47 Marcus, Kludge, 12–14, 161.48 Johnston, “The Misfeeling of What Happens,” 89–92, 97; Johnston, “The Weakness of

Nature,” 168–70; Johnston, “Misfelt Feelings,” 175–78.49 SE 21: 69–71.50 Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 250.51 Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 250.


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 eachother. 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, themismatch may have a lot to say about the way the human mind evolves. In myformulation the brain stem will remain a provider of the fundamental aspects ofconsciousness, because it is the first and indispensable provider of primordial feel-ings. Increased cognitive demands have made the interplay between the cortex andbrain stem a bit rough and brutal, or, to put it in kinder words, they have made theaccess 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 thisquotation), Damasio evinces his faith that evolution, like a slow-moving butultimately benevolent divinity, can and will iron out these kinds of wrinkles inthe human central nervous system.53 (Likewise, LeDoux hints that they shouldbe viewed as transitory imperfections.54) Not only does this betray a linger-ing investment in the pseudosecular visions of a scientistic organicismproblematized 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 thecentral place of conflict in psychoanalytic thinking, that an evolutionaryovercoming of the anorganic brain-in-pieces would be tantamount to anundermining of the very humanity of human beings. Put differently, if, à laLinden and Marcus, the human brain’s incomplete internal harmonizationgives rise to various fundamental features of minded human subjectivity, thenevolving past the cerveau (et corps) morcelé very well might not be an extension ofhumanity’s evolution; instead, it might amount to an unprecedented sort ofdehumanization, an evolutionary liquidation of precisely what makes humanbeings human. In other words, given the varied dialectics of continuities anddiscontinuities arguably legible in the evidence of natural history as it hasunfolded thus far, there is the potential that certain of humanity’s futureevolutionary eventualities would not be continuous developments of an

52 Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 251.53 Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 250–51.54 LeDoux, Synaptic Self, 322–23.

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enduring human nature, but, rather, discontinuous jumps beyond this (dis-rupted and, perhaps, self-disrupting) nature—leaps leaving it behind.55

Having articulated these critical reservations with regard to Damasio stilloccasionally clinging to an organicist paradigm contested by many of his ownobservations, an additional detail of his account of intracerebral discord callsfor attention. In terms of the neuroscientific triad of cognition, emotion, andmotivation, he identifies the thalamus as a go-between bridging the dividebetween, 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 imagesonly in the cerebral cortex and cannot be fully imaged in the brain stem”56):

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 awidespread territory of the cortical mantle. In turn, the hugely expanded cerebralcortex, both directly and with the assistance of subcortical nuclei such as those inamygdalae and basal ganglia, funnels signals to the small-scale brain stem. Maybe inthe 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 recommendcomparing the separate regions of the brain stem and the cerebral cortex tothe discrepancy between the two positions of sexual difference à la Lacan.Thereby, the upshot would be, in connection with Lacan’s (in)famous “il n’ya pas de rapport sexuel,” that, in certain instances, il n’y a pas de rapport intracérébral,an axiomatic formulation of the anorganic barred corpo-Real specifically atthe level of the human central nervous system.

That said, the thalamus—this region is situated near the very middle of thebrain, sitting atop the brain stem and projecting nerve fibers out to thecurving expanses of the cortex—indeed appears to be, both structurally andfunctionally, an intermediary relay station between brain stem and cerebralcortex. As per Damasio, it facilitates the two-way flows of mutual influencesback-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 withone of Lacan’s best-known one-liners. In their 2010 book Les énigmes du plaisir,the Lacanian neuropsychoanalytic couple of analyst François Ansermet andneuroscientist Pierre Magistretti zoom in on a brain region closely related tothe thalamus: the insular cortex. This book’s fourth chapter is entitled “The

55 Johnston, “The Misfeeling of What Happens,” 91–92; Johnston, “Misfelt Feelings,”177–78.

56 Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 250.57 Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 251.


‘Island’ of the Drive” (“L’«île» de la pulsion”), with the word “insula” beingLatin for “island.”58 With respect to Freudian-Lacanian drive theory,Ansermet and Magistretti’s fundamental thesis is that a mismatch betweenbrain stem and insular cortex (resembling the one between the former and thecerebral cortex of interest to Damasio) lies at the neurobiological basis of whatpsychoanalysis 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 layout a careful reconstruction of Ansermet and Magistretti’s efforts to forge aspecifically Lacanian variant of neuropsychoanalysis, with a focus on theircontributions to theorizing the drives (insofar as Trieb is a “fundamentalconcept of psychoanalysis,”59 any neuropsychoanalysis must accommodate itwithin its theoretical architecture). In tandem with this, I will refer to my ownearlier work on drive theory (in the 2005 book Time Driven: Metapsychology andthe Splitting of the Drive) as well as the non-Lacanian neuropsychoanalysischampioned 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 sodoing, I will critically assess both the productivity and limitations of the effortsof Ansermet and Magistretti to articulate a neuropsychoanalytic “biology offreedom” (the title of the English translation of their 2004 book À chacun soncerveau). Through diagnosing a number of far-from-minor philosophical short-comings afflicting Ansermet and Magistretti’s reflections, I hope to outlinewhat would be required, building on their very helpful contributions, for thecompletion of a rigorous, systematic theory of the denaturalized, more-than-organic/physical subject nourished by the combined intellectual resources ofphilosophy, psychoanalysis, and neurobiology.

2. SPLIT BRAIN, SPLIT DRIVE—THE NEUROBIOLOGICALBASES OF THE LIBIDINAL ECONOMY

In Time Driven, I recast each and every drive as inherently divided, internallyconflicted, and self-sabotaging. Armed with many of the insights of Lacaniantheory, I return to Freud’s metapsychological definition of Trieb. According toFreud, anything qualifying as a drive is a borderline entity both straddling thedivide between soma and psyche as well as consisting of four interrelated

58 François Ansermet and Pierre Magistretti, Les énigmes du plaisir (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2010),39–57.

59 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: 1964, book 11, The Seminar ofJacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977),12, 161–62.

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constituents: source (Quelle), pressure (Drang), aim (Ziel ), and object (Objekt). Iargue that these four dimensions line up on two antagonistic axes: an “axis ofiteration” (source-pressure) and an “axis of alteration” (aim-object). Moti-vated partly by a cautious reluctance to confront the daunting mind-bodyproblem—since then, I have lost this particular hesitant wariness—I opt inTime Driven to sidestep this perennial philosophical difficulty so as to makeprogress through concentrating instead on drives specifically in light oftemporality.

Maintaining that the split within the very structure of Trieb is temporal, Idepict the axis of iteration as a non/sub-representational movement demand-ing pure, unadulterated repetition—the eternal return of the same. Thisinsistence on repetition is routed through the mediating matrices of the axisof alteration, with its shifting concatenations of representations (i.e., imagesand signifiers) in which differences, however minimal, are inevitable andineliminable. Hence, for intrinsic structural reasons, drives not only arethwarted by inner conflict within and between themselves—they even areself-thwarting, since the very attempt at representational repetition made bythe axis of alteration at the behest of its corresponding axis of iteration itselfgenerates repetition-defying difference. As regards the Lacanian distinc-tion between drive and desire, my Hegelian move at the level of themetapsychology of drive is to propose that this distinction is internal to (theFreudian) Trieb itself, with Lacanian pulsion corresponding to the axis ofiteration and désir to the axis of alteration. Each and every drive is tornbetween the negation and affirmation of time, fueled along indefinitely by thistemporal tension between the dual somatic and psychical contraption of itsfour ill-fitted components (i.e., the Lacanian “montage of the drive”60).

Related to the preceding, I claim that the notion of the death drive(Todestrieb), in its various scattered expressions throughout Freud’s later writ-ings, is really a quasi-concept, an inconsistent jumble of phenomena looselyresembling each other (and occasionally even being incompatible with oneanother). In other words, I deny that Freud himself presents readers with aclear 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 isnot 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 veryseriously. In conjunction with a substantial amount of other textual evidenceand supporting argumentation on my part, this Freudian avowal licenses me

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


to read the death drive in Freud as a name for the split (and this split’s myriadconsequences) afflicting drives in general.61

Jonathan Lear’s Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life, published after thewriting of Time Driven, proposes something similar. Therein, Lear contendsthat the Todestrieb is not a positive feature or entity of the libidinal economy.Although Freud often hypostatizes it as such, Lear’s thesis, with which I agree,is that the death drive is better thought of as a dysfunctionality plaguing thepleasure principle, namely, a negativity qua the lack of an unwaveringlyoptimized and successful libidinal economy.62

Furthermore, Damasio’s previously-examined “oddest couple” of brainstem and cerebral cortex, held together by the “marriage brokering” of thethalamus, looks like a leading candidate for the neurobiological ground of thesplitting of the drive along the lines of the two incongruous axes of iterationand alteration. The drive’s source and pressure (i.e., the axis of iteration),involving a repetitive somatic “demand for work,” would correspond mainlywith the motivational and emotional brain stem. The drive’s aims and objects(i.e., the axis of alteration), involving shifting successions of differing psychicalimages and signifiers, would correspond with the cognitive cortex. Put in asomewhat oversimplified version of Lacanian locution, the cerebral cortex,via the thalamus, is the conduit for the phenomena and structures ofImaginary-Symbolic reality to affect and mediate the bodily Real, embodiedfirst and foremost by the brain stem.

Resonating with my rendition of drives as “perpetual frustrationmachines,”63 Ansermet and Magistretti characterize the brain as a failuremachine (machine à rater), doing so precisely in the context of discussing drivein the strict psychoanalytic meaning of the term.64 The very title of the bookin which they explore in depth the neurobiological foundations of the drive-centered libidinal economy of psychical subjectivity, Les énigmes du plaisir,refers to the mysterious, opaque “beyond” of the pleasure principle troublingthe later Freud and compelling him to run through a series of inconsistentspeculations about a death drive (or drives).65 Reasonably assuming that Triebis rooted in the body of the human (an)organism (or, at least, not without [passans] such a rapport with the somatic), they ask, “how can it be thatwhat functions for the body’s physiological regulations finds itself being so

61 Johnston, Time Driven, xxvii–xxxviii, 333–41, 343–47.62 Jonathan Lear, Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2000), 80–81, 84–85; Johnston, “The Weakness of Nature,” 159–60.63 Johnston, Time Driven, xxxi.64 Ansermet and Magistretti, Les énigmes du plaisir, 92.65 Ansermet and Magistretti, Les énigmes du plaisir, 7–10.

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dysfunctional in psychical life?”66 Of course, as is well known, Freudian drivesarise from and take shape around such rudimentary vital activities as eating,defecating, and copulating. Ansermet and Magistretti rightly wonder abouthow and why these basic functions of organic life, apparently unproblematicfor other animals wallowing in their gratifications, get derailed and becomesources of agitation, displeasure, and suffering in minded subjects. AlthoughFreud never secured a biological explanation for the existence of things“beyond the pleasure principle,” Ansermet and Magistretti aspire to fulfillFreud’s hopes that such scientific confirmation for drive theory (and psycho-analysis generally) will arrive eventually.67

Ansermet and Magistretti translate the traditional analytic distinctionbetween 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 Magistretti’s previous coauthored book, À chacun soncerveau, spends a lot of time emphasizing recent biology’s intrascientificdelegitimization of scientistic determinisms appealing to fixed genetic codesand evolutionarily hard-wired neural programs. For them, the steadily increas-ing importance of neuroplasticity and epigenetics in biological accounts ofhuman beings amounts to the advancement of a paradoxical scientific case forthe irreducibility of human nature and subjectivity to standard scientificapproaches and explanations.69 Accordingly, they describe humans as “geneti-cally determined not to be genetically determined.”70 In the third section of thisintervention, I will spell out, contra Ansermet and Magistretti, why theirneuropsychoanalytic mobilizations of neuroplasticity and epigenetics do notsucceed at establishing a full-blown “biology of freedom” (this has to doprimarily with their tendencies to conflate autonomy with indeterminism andidiosyncrasy). For now, additional exegetical labor is needed with respect toLacanian neuropsychoanalysis à la Ansermet and Magistretti.

The concept-term “trace,” defined as the neural-somatic inscription ofsubjective-psychical experience, plays a pivotal role in Ansermet andMagistretti’s theorizations.71 Thanks to the brain’s endogenous epigeneticplasticity, it is exposed to being shaped and reshaped at the synaptic level by

66 Ansermet and Magistretti, Les énigmes du plaisir, 14.67 Ansermet and Magistretti, Les énigmes du plaisir, 36.68 Ansermet and Magistretti, Les énigmes du plaisir, 15.69 François 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 François Ansermet, “Plasticité et homéostasie à l’interface entre

neurosciences et psychanalyse,” in Neurosciences et psychanalyse: Une rencontre autour de la singularité,ed. Pierre Magistretti and François Ansermet (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2010), 17.


exogenous influences emanating from the denaturalized and denaturalizingphenomena and structures of experiential fields qua Imaginary-Symbolicrealities as conceived of by Lacan (realities organized around intersubjectivelittle-o others and transsubjective big-O Others). Alluding to the FreudianTrieb, Ansermet and Magistretti depict synaptic traces as materializing at thetension-ridden intersection between soma and psyche.72 Additionally, theyinvoke Catherine Malabou’s Hegel-inspired dialectical-speculative renditionof 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, formedat the intersection of body and mind, are plastic in the precise Malabouiansense. Furthermore, in their fusion of neurobiology and psychoanalysis, theymaintain that this plasticity holds both within and between the somatic andthe psychical.74

Thus far, the plasticity of the body, chiefly as the neuroplasticity of thecentral nervous system, seems to be the dominant preoccupation of Ansermetand Magistretti’s musings. They devote a great deal of effort to stressing howthe human brain of the life sciences is a system of synaptic networks open tomore-than-natural/neural inscriptions marking the impacts of subjectivelyregistered images and words on the biophysical substance of the underlyingliving being. However, these images, words, and the complex, cross-resonating networks of memories and representations they combine to con-stitute and reconstitute repeatedly—this would be the dimension (or, to resortto one of Lacan’s neologisms, dit-mension) of Freudian Vorstellungen andLacanian signifiers as conceptualized beyond the confines of the linguisticstudy of natural languages75—are plastic too.

Throughout their works, Ansermet and Magistretti associate the plasticityof psychical (as distinct from, yet bound up with, somatic) traces with pro-cesses of “retranscription” and “reconsolidation,” the latter being theneurobiological equivalent of the psychoanalytic former. Retranscription, asper Ansermet and Magistretti, is consistent with Freud’s models of mnemictraces according to which these mental marks are retained and reworkedthrough oscillating, back-and-forth dynamics flowing between past, present,and future (the key Freudian texts here are Studies on Hysteria [1894], “Letter52” to Wilhelm Fliess [1896], “Screen Memories” [1899], and “Creative

72 Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, 84.73 Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, xvi.74 Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, xiii–xvi, xvii, 6–7.75 Johnston, Time Driven, 300–15.

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Writers and Day-Dreaming” [1907]76). These coauthors claim, one, that thetraces laid down at the crossroads of soma and psyche obey the twistedtemporal logics of Freudian Nachträglichkeit and Lacanian après-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 thecounterintuitive implications of retranscription as per neuropsychoanalysis isthat the mnemic mechanisms for retaining the past—these mechanisms relyon the inscriptions of experiences as dual-aspect (i.e., simultaneously mentaland physical) traces in the psychical brain—are, at one and the same time,both conditions of possibility and impossibility for such retentions. On the onehand, only through such traces are prior experiences retained. But, on theother hand, the repeated retroactive retranscriptions of these traces—this isthe “deferred action” through which configurations of associations formingthe constellations of Vorstellungen/signifiers in the networks of the cerebralpsyche periodically are modified—liquidate any past as such in itself, intro-ducing the distances of differences as lost time is recontextualized againand again. The sole temporal-historical continuity available to the subjectof memory is one the establishment of which also necessarily createsdiscontinuities.77

Ansermet and Magistretti take their concept of reconsolidation, closelyrelated to retranscription, from neurobiologist Cristina Alberini.78 However,they propose renaming this empirically verified aspect of the neurobiologicalfunctioning 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 bringsto bear on mnemic systems the effects of psychical subjectivity as itself a locusof the very experiences leaving plastic somatic-psychical traces behind in thebrain-psyche. Thus, reconsolidation is equally a deconsolidation in whichmore-than-biological agencies inject changes into plastic qua less-than-imperviously-solid biological grounds.79

76 Johnston, Time Driven, 5–22, 218–27.77 Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, 45–46, 88–89, 109–11, 115–18, 175;

Ansermet and Magistretti, Les énigmes du plaisir, 179.78 Cristina M. Alberini, “La dynamique des représentations mentales: Consolidation de

la mémoire, reconsolidation et intégration de nouvelles informations,” in Neurosciences etpsychanalyse, 31–32, 37–38.

79 Pierre Magistretti and François Ansermet, “Introduction,” Neurosciences et psychanalyse,10–11; Magistretti and Ansermet, “Plasticité et homéostasie à l’interface entre neurosciences etpsychanalyse,” 18–19.


Returning to the topic of drive theory, Ansermet and Magistretti portrayTrieb as a plastic coupling of somatic states with psychical fantasies.80 Put inthe Freudian vocabulary of Time Driven, a drive is a pairing of a corporeal axisof iteration (source-pressure) with a representational axis of alteration (aim-object), with the push-and-pull between iteration and alteration being itselfthe 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 geneticdetermination—an instinct is programmed by evolution and genetics while adrive is not—drives have to be “educated” in and through experience,namely, taught what aims and objects to pursue by surrounding material andsocial milieus. Following Freud and Lacan, they note that the prolongedperiod of prematurational helplessness in human beings destines them to thepredominance of nurture over nature. Hilflosigkeit as a contingent-yet-a-prioribiological state of development of human infants lends support to the theme,dear to Ansermet and Magistretti, of humans as preprogrammed to bereprogrammed (as in genetic indeterminism, namely, a coded absence ofcoding).82 The Vorstellungen/signifiers of the drives’ aims and objects bearwitness to the enveloping influences of intersubjective Imaginary others andtranssubjective Symbolic Others. These denaturalizing influences exploitopenings of possible implantation as gaps built into the “natural” (an)organicbody of the living subject-to-be (i.e., the barred corpo-Real).83

With the preceding reconstruction of various of Ansermet andMagistretti’s views in place, their neuropsychoanalytic mapping of the struc-tures and dynamics of drives onto the anatomical and physiological rapportbetween brain stem and insular cortex now can be properly appreciated.Ansermet and Magistretti adamantly draw attention to the fact that themediating role of the insular cortex is specific to primates alone among themembers of the animal kingdom:

in primates, there exists a representation of the physiological state of the body in theinsula (posterior and dorsal) that is connected to other regions implicated in motivatedbehaviors . . . in other species, by contrast, the integration is made essentially at thelevel of the brain stem, which implies homeostatic motor responses of a reflex type.84

80 Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, 140–41, 151–52, 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, Žižek’s Ontology, xxiii, 176, 203–09, 213, 279.83 Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, 168; Magistretti and Ansermet, “Plasticité et

homéostasie à l’interface entre neurosciences et psychanalyse,” 23–25.84 Ansermet and Magistretti, Les énigmes du plaisir, 47.

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They continue:

It is necessary to insist on the unity of the interoceptive path that the insula investsin 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 afferencesform a relay directly with the center of the neurovegetative system in the brainstem—motor centers that govern homeostatic regulations, through an automaticmode, by way of the performance of the neurovegetative system or neuroendocrineloops. In these animals, homeostasis is reestablished in a reflex manner—withoutmentalization, one could say. In the human being, by contrast, information comingfrom the body consists of primary representations in the posterior insula that areassociated with others in secondary re-representations, thereby opening a freermode of regulation that escapes from the automatisms and reflexes specific toinferior species. . . .85

Obviously, this underscoring of the primate-specific role of the insular cortexis bound up with the standard analytic move of distinguishing human drivesfrom animal instincts. In terms of the anatomy and physiology of the brain,the addition of insular mediation disrupts what otherwise would be theautomatic reflexive regulation of life’s vital functions by the brain stem alone(i.e., sans “mentalization” qua cognitive representation). It does so precisely byrouting the tasks for maintaining organic homeostasis through matrices ofrepresentations and re-representations, namely, the signifier-like Vorstellungen(inscribed in the posterior insula) and Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen (inscribed in theanterior insula) of sensory-perceptual phenomena and socio-linguistic struc-tures.86 Moreover, the insular cortex’s webs of mentalizations weave togetherinteroceptive and exteroceptive sources of input, with the plasticity of thisbrain region allowing for both the retention and reworking of its representa-tional contents.87

To be more exact, Ansermet and Magistretti identify the posterior insularcortex as registering representations of the body’s internal milieu (Innenwelt)via interoceptive pathways. These representations (Vorstellungen) are thenre-represented (i.e., redoubled as Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen) in the anteriorinsular cortex. The latter, through its receptivity to input coming from thebody’s external surroundings (Umwelt) via exteroceptive pathways, transformsthe representations of the endogenous it duplicates from the posterior insularcortex by combining them with representations of the exogenous; thisactivity of synthesis turns internal representations into internal-external

85 Ansermet and Magistretti, Les énigmes du plaisir, 47–48.86 Ansermet and Magistretti, Les énigmes du plaisir, 49–50.87 Ansermet and Magistretti, Les énigmes du plaisir, 48–49.


re-representations.88 Hence, the anterior insular cortex is the true “island of thedrive” because it is the neurological site at which the denaturalizing forces andfactors 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 theanterior insular cortex, these forces and factors entwine themselves with andoverwrite the nonrepresentational, unthinking mechanisms of the brain stem.In line with Lacanianism, Ansermet and Magistretti foreground the mediatingrole of language as itself “beyond biology.”89 Additionally, they observe thatthe anterior insular cortex is especially deserving of the title “island of thedrive” since it, along with the anterior cingulate cortex, is unique to humanbeings, distinguishing them even from their closest primate relatives.90

Meshing with my emphasis on the idea of the anorganic, Ansermet andMagistretti are careful to insist on the discontinuities (rather than organiccontinuities) 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 theythus colonize. With Ansermet and Magistretti’s positing of an insurmountablegap between these mediators and the organism they mediate92—this divide isable to take hold in the plastic body due to the anatomical and physiologicaldiscrepancies between brain stem and insular cortex—Ansermet andMagistretti link the anorganicity of the human central nervous system to thedysfunctionality of the psyche’s libidinal economy. In other words, theydemystify the enigma of the beyond of the pleasure principle by pinpointingthe intra-biological bases for conflicts between the biological and the more-than-biological. The brain naturally destined for denaturalization—thisanorganic organ is programmed for (partial, never-fully-optimal/successful)reprogramming by being genetically determined not to be (wholly and com-pletely) genetically determined—is fated to be a “failure machine” for aminded subject prone to painful symptoms and psychopathological sufferingsby nature, nurture, and an awkward, unconsummated marriage between thetwo. Therefore, given Ansermet and Magistretti’s thesis that uniquely humandrives are products of this anorganicity at the intersection of soma andpsyche, their proposals resonate with my theory of the self-subverting splitTrieb (a resonance further amplified by their remarking upon the temporalessence of the Hebbian plasticity so markedly affecting the representational

88 Ansermet and Magistretti, Les énigmes du plaisir, 51.89 Ansermet and Magistretti, Les énigmes du plaisir, 168–69.90 Ansermet and Magistretti, Les énigmes du plaisir, 52–53.91 Ansermet and Magistretti, Les énigmes du plaisir, 51.92 Ansermet and Magistretti, Les énigmes du plaisir, 153.

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scaffoldings of the embodied libidinal economy93). Moreover, like Lear andme, Ansermet and Magistretti manage to account for the malfunctioningof the pleasure principle (i.e., the fact that, by virtue of their inherentdysfunctionality, all drives are, in a manner of speaking, death drives) withouthypostatizing this as a dark, mysterious countercurrent maneuvering in thenocturnal depths of the primordial, seething id. They explicitly stipulate thatthe pleasure principle’s beyond is its immanent (self-)blockage rather thanbeing a transcendent power.94

However, Ansermet and Magistretti’s neuropsychoanalytic treatments ofdrive and memory trigger in me a nagging worry. With phenomena such asthe de/re-consolidations of synaptic traces in plastic neural networks in view,Ansermet and Magistretti stress in both their coauthored books that, “wenever use the same brain twice.”95 While agreeing with this as truthfullyaccurate in strict neuroscientific terms, I nonetheless want to raise concernsabout the emphasis (or, I would claim, overemphasis) they place on the sideof a more nominalist ontology primarily tied to neuroanatomy andneurophysiology. Both drive and memory involve repetition. But, if the brainis dissolved in an ever-changing Heraclitian river of flux in which differencesrule supreme, how do Ansermet and Magistretti account for the repetitionsexhibited by libidinal and mnemic mechanisms? Asked another way, whatexplains a plethora of facts evident in multiple fields (psychoanalysis, philoso-phy, cognitive science) indicating that central nervous systems give rise to andsupport recurrences and reiterations of the “same” thoughts, feelings, andactions—and this despite the differences both within the brains of singlesubjects over time as well as across the synchronous and diachronous diver-sities of multiple individuals’ brains? Not only do philosophers, cognitivescientists, 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 theoreticaland clinical, cannot do without references to repetitions for the sake ofprivileging the differences discernible in connection with neurobiology and anaccompanying spontaneous nominalism.

Before proceeding to detailed criticisms of Ansermet and Magistretti’smore ambitious philosophical speculations, the non-Lacanian neuropsy-choanalytic framework of Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull’s The Brain and theInner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of Subjective Experience (2002)

93 Ansermet and Magistretti, Les énigmes du plaisir, 154.94 Ansermet and Magistretti, Les énigmes du plaisir, 24.95 Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, 185; Ansermet and Magistretti, Les énigmes du

plaisir, 157.


warrants a few comments. Therein, Solms and Turnbull cover much of thesame territory mapped above. To begin with, they maintain that there is afirm neural basis for the fundamental distinction between energies and rep-resentations so crucial to Freud’s metapsychology.96 This distinction is aparticularly prominent feature of Freudian drive theory, with the drive’ssource and pressure (i.e., the axis of iteration) being associated with theenergetic and its aims and objects (i.e., the axis of alteration) with the repre-sentational. As seen, both Damasio as well as Ansermet and Magistrettifurnish precise neurological specifications regarding the structures anddynamics of the brain embodying these defining aspects of Trieb.

Solms and Turnbull naturally present the emotional-motivational“SEEKING system”—neuroscientific discourse nowadays identifies “four‘basic-emotion command systems’ in the brain . . . SEEKING, RAGE,FEAR, and PANIC”97—as underlying “the neurobiology of ‘libidinaldrive.’”98 The first connection they establish between Freudian Trieb andneurobiological SEEKING has to do with Freud’s 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 moredifficult question is: What does it seek? One might think that it seeks the specificobject of a current need, as determined by the need detectors. The reality is slightlymore complex. The SEEKING system itself does not appear to know what it isseeking. (In psychoanalytic parlance, one might say that it is “objectless.”) TheSEEKING 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 toknow is that the “something” it wants is “out there.” A nonspecific system like thiscannot 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 incomprehensiblewithout reference to the memory systems with which it is intimately connected. Thesesystems provide the representations of objects (and past interactions between the selfand those objects) that enable the organism to learn from experience. One of themost basic tasks that these combined systems have to perform is to distinguish whichobjects in the outside world possess the specific properties that the internal milieulacks when a particular need detector switches “on.”100

96 Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to theNeuroscience of Subjective Experience (New York: Other Press, 2002), 34.

97 Solms and Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World, 115; Johnston, “Misfelt Feelings,”186–94.

98 Solms and Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World, 117.99 SE 7: 147–48; SE 14: 122–23, 132.100 Solms and Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World, 118–19.

70 ADRIAN JOHNSTON

Solms and Turnbull take their taxonomy of affective neural systems fromneuroscientist Jaak Panksepp’s comparative cross-species investigations intothe emotional brain.101 One of the problems with this is that Panksepp intendshis taxonomy to cover mammalian brains in general.102 By contrast,Damasio, with his focus on the circuit between brain stem, thalamus, andcerebral cortex, zeroes in on the primate brain; and, with their focus on thefrictions within and between brain stem and multi-dimensional insular cortex,Ansermet and Magistretti target features specific to human beings (as issuitable when what is of interest are drives presumably peculiar to humans).In this regard, Solms and Turnbull’s talk of the “animal” and “organism” inthe preceding quotation is telling. Their reliance on Panksepp, howeverhelpful and productive, risks renaturalizing Trieb, namely, reducing it toanimal Instinkt.

This problem noted, there nonetheless is significant overlap between theLacanian and non-Lacanian neuropsychoanalytic delineations of drive putforward by Ansermet and Magistretti and Solms and Turnbull respectively.Ansermet and Magistretti likewise uphold the importance of objectlessnessin any account of drive. And yet, unlike Solms and Turnbull, they stressdispleasure 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 dissatisfactionand 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 ofanorganic drive on the foundations of Freud’s 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 thatwhich is representational (i.e., memory systems as cognitive in addition toemotional and motivational, systems containing constellations of signifier-likemnemic Vorstellungen). This division lines up in parallel with those proposed byDamasio and Ansermet and Magistretti between brain stem and cortices(whether cerebral or insular). For all five of these authors under considerationat present, the types of motive forces elucidated by psychoanalysis are highlydistributed in the human brain, corresponding to complex circuits wiring

101 Solms and Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World, 112–33, 277–78; Jaak Panksepp,Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1998), 47, 52–54.

102 Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, 4, 10, 43, 47, 50–51, 56, 77, 79, 122–23, 325–30.103 Ansermet and Magistretti, Les énigmes du plaisir, 132.


together a dappled ensemble of diverse systems and subsystems affected byboth endogenous and exogenous inputs. As both I and at least a few of theseother researchers would argue, such neural circuits, in their hypercomplexityamplified further by their location at the intersection of numerous biologicaland more-than-biological lines of influence, are anorganic qua features of akludgy, malfunction-plagued corpo-Real (of which Trieb as split between axesof iteration and alteration is a prime example).

As Solms and Turnbull indicate, the widely spread out neural architectureof drive makes it such that, in humans especially, even supposedly base-levelimpulses and urges are modulated and nudged around by higher-order cog-nitive functions.104 Put in the parlance of Freudian metapsychology, theSEEKING system on its own resembles the source and pressure of drives(minus their aims and objects). Consistent with Freud’s linkage of the natureof infantile helplessness with the nurture of the helpful significant Other (i.e.,the adult caretaker als Nebenmensch as per the 1895 “Project for a ScientificPsychology”105), Solms and Turnbull assign a major role to sociolinguisticdirection (typically provided by parents) in teaching the SEEKING system ofthe developing child’s brain what it can and should need and want.106 Lacan’stwo triads of alterity Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary as well as need, demand,and desire provide much more nuanced accounts of the processes operativein these developments.

Alluding to the realities of epigenetics and neuroplasticity, Solms andTurnbull refer several times to “blanks” built into the arrangements andworkings of the apparatus of the central nervous system.107 These blanks aretheir equivalent to what Ansermet and Magistretti repeatedly characterize asgenetic indeterminism,108 namely, preprogramming for reprogramming,natural determination not to be naturally determined (or, as another advo-cate of a Lacanian neuropsychoanalysis, Gérard Pommier, words it, “innatethat it not be innate”109). The question of whether such indeterminism,as claimed by Ansermet and Magistretti, is tantamount to a “biologyof freedom”—put more precisely, the issue is whether a nonreductiveneuropsychoanalytic theory of denaturalized drives furnishes sufficient

104 Solms and Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World, 120.105 SE 1: 318, 331.106 Solms and Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World, 122–23.107 Solms and Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World, 133–34, 277–78.108 François Ansermet, “Des neurosciences aux logosciences,” Qui sont vos psychanalystes? ed.

Nathalie Georges, Nathalie Marchaison, and Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Éditions du Seuil,2002), 383; Magistretti and Ansermet, “Introduction,” 11.

109 Gérard Pommier, Comment les neurosciences démontrent la psychanalyse (Paris: Flammarion,2004), 27.

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conditions for subjective autonomy—is what I now will turn to addressing inthe third and final section of this intervention.

3. FROM THE BARRED BRAIN TO THE BARREDSUBJECT—NECESSARY AND SUFFICIENT CONDITIONS FOR

A MATERIALIST METAPSYCHOLOGY OF FREEDOM

In Les énigmes du plaisir, Ansermet and Magistretti gesture at a connectionbetween 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 humannature 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. Sincedrives are essentially dysfunctional, subjects are able to act otherwise than as wouldbe dictated by instinctually compelled pursuits of gratification, satisfaction, andpleasure. In fact, subjects are forced to be free, since, for such beings, the mandateof nature is forever missing. Severed from a strictly biological master-program andsaddled with a conflict-ridden, heterogeneous jumble of contradictory impulses—impulses mediated by an inconsistent, unstable web of multiple representations,indicated by Lacan’s “barring” of the Symbolic Other—the parlêtre has no choice butto bump up against the unnatural void of its autonomy. The confrontation with thisvoid is frequently avoided. The true extent of one’s autonomy is, due to itssometimes-frightening implications, just as often relegated to the shadows of theunconscious as those heteronomous factors secretly shaping conscious thought andbehavior.111

To this is added:

The contradictions arising from the conflicts internal to the libidinal economy markthe precise places where a freedom transcending mundane materiality has a chancebriefly to flash into effective existence; such points of breakdown in the deterministicnexus of the drives clear the space for the sudden emergence of something other thanthe smooth continuation of the default physical and sociopsychical “run of things.”Moreover, if the drives were fully functional—and, hence, would not prompt amobilization of a series of defensive distancing mechanisms struggling to transcendthis threatening corpo-Real—humans would be animalistic automatons, namely,creatures of nature. The pain of a malfunctioning, internally conflicted libidinaleconomy is a discomfort signaling a capacity to be an autonomous subject. This is apain even more essential to human autonomy than what Kant identifies as theguilt-inducing burden of duty and its corresponding pangs of anxious, awe-inspiring

110 Ansermet and Magistretti, Les énigmes du plaisir, 54–55.111 Johnston, Time Driven, 340.


respect. Whereas Kant treats the discomfort associated with duty as a symptom-effectof a transcendental freedom inherent to rational beings, the reverse might (also) be thecase: 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 betantamount to divesting them, whether they realize it or not, of an essential feature oftheir dignity as subjects. As Lacan might phrase it, the split Trieb is the sinthome ofsubjectivity proper, the source of a suffering that, were it to be entirely eliminated,would entail the utter dissolution of subjectivity itself. Humanity is free preciselyinsofar as its pleasures are far from perfection, insofar as its enjoyment is neverabsolute.112

Like Ansermet and Magistretti as well as me, others, such as Pommier113 andStanovich,114 also seize on intrabodily and/or intramental antagonisms (i.e.,conflicts within and between soma and psyche) as the very groundless groundof human freedom. Although I still agree with the fundamental thrust of theparagraphs from Time Driven quoted above—I continue to maintain that aninternally conflicted libidinal economy encompassing both mind and body isa condition for the ontogenetic emergence of a denaturalized free subjectivityimmanently transcending its material bases—I have come to think that thisway 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 aself-critique.

Ansermet, in a 2002 essay (“From the Neurosciences to the Logosciences”)preceding the publication of his first book with Magistretti (2004’s À chacun soncerveau), already reveals his desire to paint a neuropsychoanalytic portrait ofsubjective freedom. Therein, he touches upon the now-familiar theme ofhumans as being “genetically determined not to be genetically deter-mined,”115 with the purported consequence that, “the subject hence wouldfind itself determined by the default of its determination.”116 Natural geneticopenness to more-than-natural epigenetic modifications is expressed moststrikingly by the plasticity of the human central nervous system. Ansermet’sthesis in this particular text is that the psychical subject’s autonomy resultsfrom its plastic brain being individuated to the point of utter uniqueness bythe confluence of forces and variables colliding within this lump of folded,wrinkly matter, itself the incarnate intersection of mind and body, Innenweltand 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 Johnston, Time Driven, 340–41.113 Pommier, Comment les neurosciences démontrent la psychanalyse, 378, 401.114 Stanovich, The Robot’s Rebellion, 13, 28, 67, 82–84.115 Ansermet, “Des neurosciences aux logosciences,” 378.116 Ansermet, “Des neurosciences aux logosciences,” 383.

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idiosyncratic brain-psyche; two, such plasticity-facilitated singularization isequivalent to freedom.117 Ansermet underscores this argument when heasserts that, “the subject remains the exception to the universal that carrieshim.”118 As he subsequently reiterates this assertion in collaboration withMagistretti, “the individual can be considered to be biologically determinedto be free, that is, to constitute an exception to the universal that carrieshim.”119

This tendency to conflate uniqueness with autonomy is reflected in the twodifferent titles of Ansermet’s first book with Magistretti: the French original,À chacun son cerveau (To each his own brain), and the English translation, Biologyof Freedom. The original French title emphasizes the irreducible particularity ofindividuals’ brains; the English title substituting for it already hints thatAnsermet and Magistretti consider this particularity to be itself an embodiedrealization of autonomy. And, indeed, the contents of the book amplyconfirm this suspicion. Therein, the two-part equation of neuroplasticity withindividuation and individuation with freedom is affirmed many times.120

More recently, Ansermet and Magistretti, in a 2010 collection of papersthey assembled based on a 2008 conference, assign even greater importanceto idiosyncrasy. This edited collection, entitled Neurosciences et psychanalyse, isgiven by them the subtitle Une rencontre autour de la singularité. In the lastsentence of the opening paragraph of their editors’ introduction, they main-tain that, “neurosciences and psychoanalysis share the impossible-to-ignorequestion of the emergence of singularity.”121 Near the end of this sameintroduction, they state:

The default of determination, on the basis of determination, implied by plasticityand reconsolidation, cannot do otherwise than to open to the impact of contingency.To render account of contingency and its unpredictable consequences constituteswell and truly one of the most important end-points that the contemporaryneurosciences encounter.122

Ansermet and Magistretti continue:

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

117 Ansermet, “Des neurosciences aux logosciences,” 376–77.118 Ansermet, “Des neurosciences aux logosciences,” 383.119 Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, 10.120 Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, xvi, 10, 211, 215–16, 229–30.121 Magistretti and Ansermet, “Introduction,” 7.122 Magistretti and Ansermet, “Introduction,” 12.


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

By this point, a lengthy chain of equivalences has unfurled itself: epigeneticsequals plasticity equals contingency equals singularity equals unpredictabilityequals autonomy. The bottom line here is that Ansermet and Magistrettiseem to believe that undermining vulgar scientistic determinisms (i.e., mecha-nistic, reductive, and/or eliminative materialisms associated with both thenatural sciences generally as well as the life sciences specifically) is itself alonealready tantamount to establishing a “biology of freedom” in the form of aneuropsychoanalytic rendition of autonomous subjectivity.

What, precisely, is objectionable about Ansermet and Magistretti’s claimsto have advanced a theory of subjective freedom at the intersection ofFreudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis and current neurobiology? The most fun-damental philosophical problem plaguing these claims is that full-fledgedautonomy strictly speaking is much more than a matter of mere contingency,singularity, and/or unpredictability. On any number of varying accountsfurnished over the course of the history of philosophy, the freedom of subjectsis not simply synonymous with indeterminism arising from idiosyncrasyand/or randomness. Nevertheless, Ansermet and Magistretti sometimes talkas though this were so.124 That it is not readily grasped by taking note of theunproblematic compatibility between nominalism and determinism (qua thedenial of the reality of freedom) as ontological positions; one easily couldaffirm a world of nothing but contingently individuated unique particularswhile, at the same time, consistently denying the existence of anything on theorder of autonomous subjectivity proper. Furthermore, even if the failure ofpredictive power cherished by the modern sciences is ascribed to ontologyrather than epistemology—this would be to treat unpredictability not as aninsufficiency on the side of knowledge, but, instead, as a reflection of realrandomness on the side of being in and of itself—bare chance or arbitrarinessis not sufficient for an ascription of autonomy in any robust, meaningful sense.Admittedly, undermining the deterministic picture of nature supportingmechanistic, reductive, and eliminative materialisms is a necessary conditionfor a viable quasi-naturalist and materialist theory of the autonomous subject(in this particular context, a Lacanian neuropsychoanalytic biology offreedom). But, it is just this, namely, a necessary but not sufficient conditionfor such a theory.

123 Magistretti and Ansermet, “Introduction,” 12.124 Ansermet and Magistretti, Biology of Freedom, 181–83, 185; Magistretti and Ansermet,

“Plasticité et homéostasie à l’interface entre neurosciences et psychanalyse,” 28.

76 ADRIAN JOHNSTON

To go into greater critical detail, I want to start by zooming in on theinterlinked topics of epigenetics and neuroplasticity. Much of Ansermet andMagistretti’s presentation of these related biological facts is accurate andinsightful. Epigenetics indeed reveals a genetic indeterminism qua hard-wiringby nature for rewiring by nurture.125 And, the neuroplasticity of the humancentral nervous system—this is one of the main conduits through whichthe endogenous biological body is denaturalized by more-than-biologicalexogenous influences—is a profoundly important incarnation of such inde-terminism as genetic preprogramming for epigenetic reprogramming. Asnoted above, the additional biological fact of humans’ extended early periodof prematurational helplessness (a natural reality crucial for Freud and Lacan)has as a consequence that significant portions of brain development occuroutside the womb. That is to say, many of the brain’s neural networks, insteadof congealing into place in utero in ways that thereby could be determined onlyby innate codes and instructions, are generated and assembled during infancyand 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 alsoentailed by human Hilflosigkeit, the genetically dictated prematuration of thehuman brain, in which much of maturation is left up to epigenetic dictatesthat follow birth, means that human nature is naturally destined for denatu-ralization.126

As regards everything in the preceding paragraph, I am in completeagreement with Ansermet and Magistretti. Nonetheless, I will play devil’sadvocate for the moment by showing how one could concede all of thesepoints apropos epigenetics and neuroplasticity without dropping the stanceof a hard-nosed determinism ruling out the effective existence of thefreedom of truly autonomous subjects. One way to illustrate this is throughreference to Lacan’s teachings and the distinction between ontogeny andphylogeny. Breaking with Freud’s intermittent reliance on this distinction,Lacan consistently and categorically forbids recourse to phylogenetic specu-lations. In Lacan’s eyes, musings about the evolutionary emergence ofhumanity from nonhuman animality and the creation of language out of aprehistoric, nonlinguistic muteness are, at a minimum, epistemologically

125 François Ansermet and Ariane Giacobino, Autisme: À chacun son génome (Paris: Navarin,2012), 9–10, 13–14, 16–17, 20–21, 58–60, 71, 82.

126 Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, 176.


out-of-bounds.127 In both metapsychological theory and clinical practice,Lacanian psychoanalysis arguably limits itself to considering only selectfacets of ontogenetic subject formation.

Ansermet and Magistretti, tacitly in line with their allegiances toLacanianism, remain silent about evolution and phylogeny despite theirinvocations of and reliance upon genetics à la the post-Darwinian life sciences.A determined determinist, so to speak, readily could take advantage of thisavoidance. For instance, if, as per many partisans of a certain evolutionaryworldview, language, culture, and the like really are at root outgrowths of anatural history with its selection mechanisms, then epigenetic modifications ofthe plastic brain are nothing more than expressions of a second-order naturaldeterminism, mere epiphenomena of a never-actually-denaturalized human-ity. In order to combat such opponents brandishing a reductive naturalisticdeterminism with more than just unconvincing foot stamping and fistbanging—even less convincingly, Lacan permits himself to describe theadvent of the symbolic order as the entrance of the “Holy Spirit” into theworld128—Lacanianism has to defy Lacan’s ban on phylogenetic investiga-tions, especially if it is invested in cross-breeding psychoanalysis andneurobiology.129 Lacanians must bring themselves to recognize the momen-tous revolution that bears Darwin’s name and, in so doing, begin seriouslyreckoning with the implications of evolutionary theory. By failing to do thiswhile simultaneously courting the life sciences, Ansermet and Magistrettileave 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 byevolutionary psychologists and their ilk. I too consider the nondialecticalmaterialisms of these ideologues to be intellectually bankrupt. However,different sorts of intellectual bankruptcy loom in the absence of compellingintrascientific refutations of these pseudoscientific opponents’ specious claims:idealist dogmatisms, subjective idealisms, and/or reactive repudiations ofmaterialism and the sciences. Ansermet and Magistretti as well as Lacaneach 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, 2012,91–121; Johnston, The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy.

128 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre IV: La relation d’objet, 1956–1957, ed.Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1994), 41–58; Johnston, “The Weakness ofNature,” 170–76.

129 Johnston, “On Deep History and Lacan,” 91–121.

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science.130 But, I maintain, such commitment is severely compromised ortotally betrayed by either sealed lips or a sharp tongue in response to theDarwin-event and its myriad consequences. Informed by, among other back-ground sources, the historical and dialectical materialisms founded by Marxand Engels in Hegel’s wake, my guiding conviction is that the solenondogmatic and nonidealist route beyond the vulgar materialist beliefs ofscientistic ideologies passes through (rather than bypasses) the life sciences,including the phylogenetic reflections of an evolutionary thinking encompass-ing natural history and human history’s situation within it.131 A Lacanianneuropsychoanalysis leading to a biology of freedom must possess empiricallyand philosophically rigorous arguments countering biologistic determinismson both the ontogenetic and phylogenetic levels. Not only do Ansermet andMagistretti’s exclusively ontogenetic sketches of subjectivity rely on anuntenable equating of autonomy with idiosyncrasy, indeterminacy, andunpredictability—their neglect of phylogenetic issues further weakens theircase here.

In addition to ignoring the challenges posed by naturalist determinismsappealing to evolutionary and/or genetic determinants, Ansermet andMagistretti similarly overlook the possible objections that could be posed byadvocates of sociocultural determinisms. They seemingly take it for grantedthat if the subject of psychoanalytic metapsychology can be shown scientifi-cally to arise out of the biological body by virtue of more-than-biologicalmediators irreducible to the biomateriality falling under the explanatoryjurisdiction of the natural sciences, then this subject is proven to be not onlyreal, but really free. In other words, Ansermet and Magistretti appear simplyto assume that a subject constituted by nonnatural structures and phenomenais 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 thenonnatural mediators overriding (some Lacanians would say “overwriting”)

130 Adrian Johnston, “Conflicted Matter: Jacques Lacan and the Challenge of SecularizingMaterialism,” Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, no. 19 (2008), 166–88; Johnston, The Outcomeof Contemporary French Philosophy; Adrian Johnston, “Turning the Sciences Inside Out: RevisitingLacan’s ‘Science and Truth,’” in Concept and Form, Volume Two: Interviews and Essays on the Cahierspour l’Analyse, ed. Peter Hallward and Knox Peden, (London: Verso, 2012), 103–36; Johnston,“Reflections of a Rotten Nature,” 23–52.

131 Adrian Johnston, “This is orthodox Marxism: The Shared Materialist Weltanschauung ofMarx and Engels,” in “On Sebastiano Timpanaro,” special issue, Quaderni materialisti (2012),103–36; Adrian Johnston, “From Scientific Socialism to Socialist Science: Naturdialektik Thenand Now,” Communism, A New Beginning?, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2013); AdrianJohnston, A Weak Nature Alone: Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume Two, Evanston:Northwestern University Press, 2014 (under review).


evolutionary-genetic programming, instead of carving out liberated zones forfree subjectivity, subject the living body in the sense of subjection asheteronomization (rather than subjectification as autonomization). Thehuman organism is thereby placed under the controlling authority of externalregimes of discipline, education, normalization, and so on. Representatives ofsuch nonnaturalist determinisms include not only unsophisticated pseudo-Marxists as well as those enamored of Nietzschean and Foucauldian historicalnarratives—various professed adherents to the views of Freud and Lacanoften portray ontogenetic subject formation as a process wherein the youngsubject-to-be is marked and cast by family romances and the signifiers of bigOthers. Furthermore, many of those sympathetic to psychoanalysis tend tobelieve in a determinism of the unconscious and/or id in which human beingsare pictured as the unknowing puppets and playthings of asubjectiveschemes transpiring behind the curtains of intrapsychical defense mecha-nisms. Although I consider the construal of Freudian-Lacanian analysisas straightforwardly and foundationally deterministic to be erroneous132—Istrongly suspect Ansermet and Magistretti silently presuppose this withoutfeeling obliged to argue for it—explicit arguments against these types ofnonnaturalist determinisms are mandatory as part of the kind of theoreticalapparatus Ansermet and Magistretti’s texts seek to establish.

Another remaining determinist hitch not removed by Ansermet andMagistretti has to do with the two-way dialectic of to-and-fro influencesbetween brain and experience via plasticity. This co-constituting loop iscentral to Ansermet and Magistretti’s proposals about neuropsychoanalyticsubjectivity. Moreover, as indicated previously, they evince a tendency hastilyto equate the real dialectics of neuroplasticity with freedom in the fullest, mostrobust of senses. But, even if the oscillating, bidirectional movements betweenbrain and experience are perfectly balanced—considering the complexity ofthe material and more-than-material structures and dynamics operative here,unevenness seems far more likely in the vast majority of instances—one mightask 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 lastinstance?” If experience ultimately is a secondary secretion of the brain, thenit is easily imaginable that the loop made possible by neuroplasticity is aclosed one of an auto-affection entirely determined by the material base of ahuman nature, itself laid down by evolution and genetics (at least when all issaid and done “in the last instance”). Put in language common to Anglo-American analytic philosophy of mind and cognitive science, Ansermet and

132 Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, 102.

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Magistretti would have to elaborate and defend an ontology of “strongemergentism” in which more-than-material subjectivity (what they associatewith “experience”) both achieves a self-relating, nonepiphenomenal indepen-dence vis-à-vis its material grounds (in this context, the brain in particular) andalso comes to exert a power of “downward causation” on these grounds. And,as argued above, this philosophical framework required by but lacking inAnsermet and Magistretti’s work would have to be fleshed out at phylogeneticas well as ontogenetic levels.

Stepping back for a moment to survey the larger philosophical landscapein which the preceding issues are situated, another reference to relativelyrecent analytic philosophy of mind is pertinent here. In his 1997 book TheConscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, David Chalmers famouslylabels the enigma of the relationship between matter and consciousness “thehard 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 experiencealone. Hence, along with Ansermet and Magistretti, I am interested in morethan merely the experiential qualia of conscious sentience. Nonetheless, if oneenlarges Chalmers’ hard problem so as to include the mystery of the genesisof sapience over and above sentience—another way to word this is to say thatthere are two (interrelated) hard problems—any ostensible “biology offreedom” cannot credibly avoid confronting and working through these prob-lems. I would allege that Ansermet and Magistretti have yet to face suchchallenges head-on so as to tackle them satisfactorily. Unless and until they doso, their claims to have forged a neuropsychoanalytic theory of autonomoussubjectivity will remain philosophically suspect.

From Plato to the present, an overwhelming majority of philosophersreject the idea that freedom amounts simply to doing what one wants (apartfrom Aristotelian virtue ethics and Kantian deontological ethics, even autilitarian like John Stuart Mill repudiates, following Aristotle, an unqualifiedendorsement of the equivalence between freedom and the hedonistic pursuitof happiness of whatever kind).134 Human autonomy cannot be, for a numberof compelling reasons, just behaving at the behest of desires, automaticallyacting out one’s shifting bundle of impulses and urges. However, not only isAnsermet and Magistretti’s equation of denaturalized drive with subjectivefreedom problematic in light of my prior arguments—their insufficiently

133 David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1997), xii-xiii.

134 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, in Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, The ClassicalUtilitarians: Bentham and Mill, ed. John Troyer (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company,2003), 100–06.


nuanced identification of Trieb-beyond-Instinkt with being free sounds asthough it makes the mistake of allowing for the conflation of autonomyproper with wanton hedonism (with this last adjective, I deliberately amalluding to Harry Frankfurt’s seminal 1971 article “Freedom of the Will andthe Concept of a Person”135). They owe readers a finer-grained model of therapport between drive and subject in which the gesture of this conflation isthwarted and replaced with a more philosophically and psychoanalyticallysatisfactory theory of driven-yet-autonomous subjectivity.

Ansermet and Magistretti deserve a great deal of credit for their daring andinsightful ongoing explorations of the still little-charted territories at theintersections of neurobiology and Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis. Morespecifically, I readily acknowledge that they have made substantial headwayin elucidating several of the necessary conditions for a biologically informedaccount of free subjects. But, despite the many outstanding merits ofAnsermet and Magistretti’s contributions along these lines, I consider theirefforts toward a full-fledged neuropsychoanalysis of autonomy to fall short intwo basic respects: first, there are other necessary conditions for subjectivefreedom apart from the ones Ansermet and Magistretti touch upon, condi-tions of a general ontological type underlying the specific properties of humanorganisms latched onto by this Lacanian neuropsychoanalytic pair; second,necessary conditions are not sufficient conditions, meaning that Ansermetand Magistretti pinpoint certain variables in the absence of which strictdeterminism perhaps would reign without, for all that, actually delivering atheory of really-existing autonomy per se.

In moving toward a conclusion here, I can only wave in passing at thespecific ingredients missing from Ansermet and Magistretti’s attempts toassemble a materialist yet nonreductive account of denaturalized self-determining subjectivity. My ongoing labors to construct a “transcendentalmaterialism,” starting in my 2008 book Žižek’s 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 supplyingmuch of what is needed by Ansermet and Magistretti. So, what are the othernecessary conditions for subjective autonomy not dealt with by this duo? Isuspect Ansermet, Magistretti, and I share the core conviction that an equiva-lence between physical matter and the ground-zero of being is ontologicallyaxiomatic for a materialism properly allied with the natural sciences. Thatsaid, 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 ofPhilosophy 68 (1971): 5–20.

136 Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, 269–87.

82 ADRIAN JOHNSTON

subjects irreducible (and yet still immanent) to the domains covered byphysics and biology must offer a two-tiered enumeration of necessary condi-tions explaining: one, how the physical universe is arranged such that it ispossible for life and sentience to arise out of it; and, two, how the kingdom ofliving organisms functions such that it is possible for sapience and autonomyto emerge and achieve a self-relating independence endowed with powers ofdownward causation on life and matter. A materialist ontology, in the courseof enumerating these necessary conditions for free human being(s), almostcertainly will be forced to revisit questions and controversies having to do withthe cohesiveness (or lack thereof) of the myriad sciences and relations betweendifferent varieties of causality. In an even more abstract, albeit indispensable,philosophical register, the distinctions and dialectics between continuity anddiscontinuity, unity and multiplicity, parts and wholes, and similar timelessproblems 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 andMagistretti’s reflections? For the sake of brevity, I will restrict considerationhere to the type of sapient “subjectivity of the signifier” at stake in theLacanianism common to me and these two authors. For a materialismsquared with the natural sciences, a phylogenetic account of the genesis oflanguages compatible with evolutionary theory—this compatibility can beachieved through an evolutionary-theoretic mapping of the rise of entitiesand processes coming to escape from the realms of natural evolution—mustbe added to Lacanian narratives of ontogenetic language acquisition. (I alsobelieve this account should include significant elements drawn from thetraditions of historical and dialectical materialisms, such as a more elaborateand complete version of the later Lukács’ “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 reflexiveand recursive capacities displayed by minded subjects conscious and uncon-scious. These are but a few of the ingredients that would have to be involvedwith thoroughly spelling out the sufficient (over and above the necessary)conditions for a robust materialism of autonomy. As is apparent, this calls fora massively interdisciplinary endeavor deploying the resources of numerousbranches 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.


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 forthe twenty-first century will be accomplishing a synthesis of psychoanalysisand neurobiology.139 Observing that “psychoanalysis enters the twenty-firstcentury 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 analysiscorresponds to the waxing of biological research programs recognized by fewscientists or analysts (save for such notable exceptions as Ansermet,Magistretti, Solms, and Kandel) as largely complementing and vindicatingFreudian and Lacanian tenets. Most people both inside and outside the worldof academia see these advances in the life sciences as threatening Freud andLacan, for better or worse. The truth is arguably the exact opposite: Freud’sand Lacan’s expectations of future biological buttressing of the analyticedifice rapidly are being met.141 I close by proposing that if the twenty-firstcentury is to fulfill the hopes of Kandel and those of like minds, then it willhave to be the century of the new paradigm of the anorganic, of the barredcorpo-Real of bodies and brains in pieces—namely, what I broadly designate“weak nature.”142

139 Eric R. Kandel, “The Molecular Biology of Memory Storage: A Dialogue BetweenGenes 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,” 164–70.142 Johnston, “The Weakness of Nature,” 163, 175–76; 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 ofPsychoanalysis and Culture [State University of New York at Buffalo], 2011), 76, 86; Johnston,The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy; Johnston, A Weak Nature Alone.

84 ADRIAN JOHNSTON

johnston - drive between brain and subject- an immanent critique of lacanian neuropsychoanalysis

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