Autoaffection
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All occurrences
Where it appears in the corpus (18)
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#01
Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.29
Part I. > Introduction > From the Passionate Soul t o t h e E m o t i o n a l B r a i n
Theoretical move: The passage stakes out a programmatic confrontation between neurobiology, Continental philosophy, and psychoanalysis around the question of whether the "emotional brain" merely repeats or genuinely deconstructs the classical motif of autoaffection, proposing in its place a model of an originary "deserted subject" that is not present to itself.
emotions and affects are still considered rooted in an originary process of autoaffection of the subject—where the subject has to touch itself in order to be moved or touched by objects
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#02
Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.31
Part I. > Introduction > Affects and Autoaffection: Definitions
Theoretical move: The passage establishes a conceptual genealogy of *affect* (Spinoza/Deleuze) and *autoaffection* (Kant/Heidegger) in order to pose the question of whether affects can exist without a pre-given subject, staging a confrontation between philosophical autoaffection and neurobiological heteroaffection/non-affection as rival models of subjectivity and emotion.
Heidegger declares: 'Time, that is pure autoaffection, constitutes the essential structure of subjectivity.'
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#03
Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.34
Part I. > Introduction > The Issue of Wonder
Theoretical move: The passage argues that wonder (*admiratio*) occupies a structurally ambiguous position between autoaffection and heteroaffection, and that this ambiguity makes it a privileged site for the philosophical, psychoanalytic, and neurobiological redefinition of subjectivity — with the neurobiological possibility of the total *loss* of wonder representing the one deconstruction of subjectivity that philosophy and psychoanalysis have not yet theorized.
Is wonder open to alterity or is it the very form of autoaffection (a passion of the soul, an emotion that the soul 'refers particularly' to itself)?
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#04
Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou
1. > A "Self-Touchin g You " > Derrida and Descartes
Theoretical move: The passage tests whether Descartes' concept of the passions of the soul entails a structure of autoaffection (self-touching), asking whether their sensual, embodied character can be reduced to a purely spiritual affectivity — which is Derrida's interpretive move.
the very notion of passions of the soul implies a conception of the self-touching of subjectivity that confirms the very structure of autoaffection
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#05
Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.45
1. > A "Self-Touchin g You " > Autoaffection and Self-Touching
Theoretical move: Derrida's deconstruction of autoaffection demonstrates that there is no pure autoaffection: the self-touching structure of subjectivity is always already divided by heteroaffection, such that the "I" is constitutively split by an internal alterity (the "heart of the other"), making autoheteroaffection—not originary self-presence—the real source of all affective life.
Derrida does not challenge autoaffection as such—there is an unmovable autoaffective dimension of subjectivity—but he criticizes the way in which philosophers always present it as pure (i.e., as purified of any heteroaffection).
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#06
Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.47
1. > A "Self-Touchin g You " > A Nonspatial Space
Theoretical move: The passage traces Derrida's shift from logocentrism to "haptocentrism," using Descartes's pineal gland as the paradigmatic site of autoaffection—a nonspatial, ideal locus of the soul's self-touching—and argues that this structure of self-differentiation (activity/passivity) is the precursor of Kantian apperception, raising the question of whether autoaffection can be interrupted or breached.
autoaffection is characterized as the subject's structural self-touching... The pineal gland is the soul's hand, the nonspatial space of the soul's self-touching.
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#07
Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.51
1. > A "Self-Touchin g You " > "Ontological Generosity"
Theoretical move: The passage argues that genuine affective openness (wonder, generosity) must be understood as heteroaffection — an affect arriving from an anonymous outside (being itself) rather than from a self-touching subject — thereby displacing Cartesian autoaffection and grounding ethics in an impersonal, non-subjective ontological movement.
The affective opening of the self cannot signify autonomy or autoaffection any longer. It is to be thought, each time, as an event: something coming from outside, from the other.
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#08
Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.52
3. > The Neural Self
Theoretical move: The passage argues that contemporary neurobiology, by positing a plastic, distributed, and non-fixed neural substrate for subjectivity, structurally reopens Freud's abandoned 1895 "Project" and creates the conditions for a neuro-psychoanalytic rapprochement—one in which the self is neither a static essence nor a consciously self-present structure, but an open, affect-modifiable formation whose damage is simultaneously damage to subjectivity itself.
if neurobiologists acknowledge the existence of autoaffection, they define it as a nonconscious structure.
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#09
Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.59
3. > *On Wonder, Fragility, and Impairment*
Theoretical move: The passage argues that neurobiological inquiry yields a radical concept of heteroaffection — not derived from Derridean deconstruction but from the materialist finding that autoaffection is constitutively unconscious — such that the subject is biologically a stranger to itself, accessible only negatively (through pathological impairment), which reframes subjectivity as a fragile, evanescent state rather than a self-present substance.
Autoaffection becomes sensible only when we lose it or at least when its fundamental mechanism is impaired. Autoaffection, which is the root of all other affects, is subjectively invisible.
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#10
Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.62
4.
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Spinoza's theory of affects is fundamentally ontological rather than subjective — affects belong to Being/Nature itself, not to an autonomous human subject — and uses this to stage a comparative reading between Deleuze and Damasio that reveals two incompatible interpretations of what 'ontological' means in the context of affect theory.
Deleuze brings to light a theory of a nonsubjective autoaffection in Spinoza, an element that seems to confirm the similarity of his reading to Damasio's.
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#11
Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.67
4. > Definition of the Emotions (Affects)
Theoretical move: The passage moves from a Spinozist-Deleuzian account of affect as variability of conatus (heteroaffection) to the problem of how infinite Being itself can be "affected," proposing that a non-subjective autoaffection opens a space or "map" in Being — a move that reframes affect as ontological inscription rather than phenomenological feeling.
can we reduce its mode of being affected to a pure and simple divine autoaffection? If it is so, finite affects (heteroaffection of the conatus) would be defective copies or reflections of a primary autoaffection
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#12
Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.75
5. > A Nonmetaphysical Philosophy
Theoretical move: By reading Descartes through Deleuze's nonmetaphysical concept of philosophy, the passage argues that affects are not modifications of a pre-constituted subject but rather events that produce subjectivity itself as a "conceptual persona" on a plane of immanence — thereby displacing the classical metaphysics of autoaffection in favor of a heteroaffection that dissolves the substantial "I."
affects and autoaffections are heteroaffections to the extent that they separate the human subject, the 'I,' from itself.
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#13
Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.76
5. > Damasio as a Reader of Spinoza
Theoretical move: By reading Damasio's neuroscientific interpretation of Spinoza, the passage argues that the conatus—as biological self-preservation enacted through emotions, feelings, and neural mapping—constitutes a form of auto-heteroaffection in which subjectivity is grounded in impersonal, nonconscious processes, thereby challenging any first-person account of selfhood and opening toward a third-person perspective on neural subjectivity.
They constitute the elementary form of autoaffection. Damasio defines emotions as simple 'internal simulations' with no specific content. Feelings, for their part, transform emotions into what Damasio calls a 'concern.'
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#14
Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.85
5. > On Neural Plasticit y, Trauma , and the Loss of Affects > The Loss of Affects
Theoretical move: By reading Damasio's neurological cases (Elliot, L, anosognosia/Anton's Syndrome) through the lens of affect theory, the passage argues that brain-damage-induced "disaffectation" represents an extreme deconstitution of subjectivity — the collapse of autoaffection into either heteroaffection or its complete abolition — thereby using neuroscientific evidence to radicalize and destabilize the philosophical concept of the subject.
In what case is the deconstruction of autoaffection the more radical: when wonder proceeds from heteroaffection, or when affects are definitely impaired?
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#15
Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.89
5. > Conclusion
Theoretical move: The passage concludes a study by arguing that affects cannot be grounded in originary autoaffection; instead, Derrida, Deleuze, and Damasio each radicalise a structure of heteroaffection that determines a distinct concept of alterity, a privileged metaphor, and a specific spatiality — with wonder serving as the ambivalent test-case affect that straddles the auto/hetero divide.
autoaffection, which coincides, according to Derrida, with the inner voice and the possibility of hearing and feeling oneself, is defined as a kind of self-touching.
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#16
Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.92
5. > Conclusion > Damasio establishes a distinction between pain and emotion caused by pain:
Theoretical move: The passage argues that heteroaffection—the impossibility of the self coinciding with or touching itself—is confirmed simultaneously by neuroscience (Damasio's protoself/conscious-self dissociation), phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty's touching-touched), and Freud/Lacan's structurally external psyche; it then pivots to show that Lacan's agalma and gaze articulate this same structure of wonder/heteroaffection within the transference relation.
Affects, including autoaffection, separate the human subject, the 'I' from itself. I am not affected.
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#17
Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.226
13. > Affects Are Si gnifier s
Theoretical move: The passage argues that a properly formulated neuro-psychoanalysis must perform a double move: grounding the denaturalized speaking subject (parlêtre/$) in naturalist accounts of neural plasticity while simultaneously using Freudian-Lacanian metapsychology to theorize subjects whose genesis exceeds bare organic anatomy — thereby resisting both reductive scientism and an antinaturalist 'laicized soul' dualism.
is autoaffecting, an autoaffection that both (re)acts on the neural foundations participating in its generation and is routed through the heteroaffective mediation of others and Others
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#18
Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.286
13. > Inde x > affects (*continued*)
Theoretical move: This index passage maps the book's theoretical terrain by cross-referencing key psychoanalytic, philosophical, and neuroscientific concepts around affect, unconscious affect, autoaffection, and the body-mind connection, revealing how the text triangulates Freudian-Lacanian metapsychology with neuroscience and Continental philosophy.
autoaffection, xvi; autoaffection as temporality as the origin of all other affects (Heidegger's concept), 6; cerebral autoaffection, 221–23; Damasio and, 31, 33–34, 51, 64; deconstruction of, 7; defined, 5–6, 21, 221