Tags
Antonio Damasio, Catherine Malabou, Epistemology, Metaphysics, neurobiology, Neuroscience, psychoanalysis, Speculative Philosophy
This past summer I was invited to read a book along with a group of my friends. However, most young budding philosophers that I have met are a bit more ambitious ideologically then we accept at times. Thus the book was a great idea for us to read for future ideas but the book was never read, together that is. Personally I read it and am using it in my upcoming paper for TheoRemes (see prior post). The book is a Columbia Press co-authored publication with independent lengthy essays composing the book by Catherine Malabou and Adrian Johnston: Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion. Prior to reading “Self” I wanted to become acclimated with Catherine Malabou and what she was doing with her overall philosophical project. I primarily did this because one of our friends, Jordan, in the upcoming reading group did his undergraduate thesis on her corpus and, therefore, I wanted to make sure I could contribute and push him along in his endeavors as well as see if there was anything I could scavenge from Malabou myself. This lead me to buy four of her books and break back into Jacques Derrida as she was an understudy of his. The books I bought and read were: The Heidegger Change: On the Fantastic in Philosophy (SUNY Series in Contemporary French Thought) (an incredibly hard read if you never extensively read Heidegger!), Changing Difference, What Should We Do with Our Brain? (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy) and The Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity.
I read each chronologically in her still growing philosophical corpus. Quickly, I figured out why Jordan was so fascinated with her work. To think of the brain as an inevitable production and plastic structure for scripting a life constitutive of its sociocultural lived-in context ripped me from my theological dogmatism, and to this day her meme ‘plasticity’ stays firing from neuron to neuron in my memory ‘bank’ as I think through other philosopher’s works. She is clear at times and opaque in others, but overall her work was and is modern, impactful, and most importantly illustrative of philosophical acumen. This leads me to the purpose of this post.
Malabou’s book “What Should…?” introduced me to Antonio Damasio, a modern neurobiologist, established professor, and prolific author. He is tenured at the University of Southern California, and also at USC he and his wife Hanna Damasio lead the Brain and Creativity Institute (http://dornsife.usc.edu/bci/). Growing more and more fascinated with what he had to say pertaining to emotional expressiveness and cognitive embodiment due to chemical release and rational reflection via neurophysiological mapping by our body’s local (spatial) context and temporal apperception of consciousness (synchronic and diachronic) – i.e. a process of continuous apperception and simultaneous synthesization of present-past events developing and morphing the pre-/post-natal plastic psyche. Interested, I bought a few of his books as well to continue the stripping process of my once philosophy of overly freighted immaterialisms and other worldly abstractisms; and the aid and help of modern neurobiology would painlessly disabuse my ideological ignominy. However, I became derailed due to a variety of academic strictures at the cusp of Fall 13′ and was unable to read them, though I turned their backs on me I knew I’d call on them eventually. Now that my education is over and my academic writing is taking place I finally have the time and luxury to explore my personal interests with zero syllabi strictures and have elected to pick Damasio back up – as well as Malabou.
For the next month or two part of my blog will be composed with quotes, links, questions, and personal reflection while I read Damasio’s Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. If anyone is following I encourage you to comment, help, and excavate with me as I explore a modern, conversationally lacking understanding of how our somatic and plastic consciousness with its machinations of the world facilitate our embodied lives tout court.