Heteroaffection

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (13)

1. #01

   Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.32

   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.

   Is it by positing the existence of what Derrida identifies as originary 'heteroaffection,' where the subject is primarily and profoundly alien to itself?

2. #02

   Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.35

   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.

   wonder may well be considered the affect of the other as such. Because it is deeply linked with the ability to be surprised or raptured, wonder appears to be the emotional consequence of the intrusion of alterity into the soul.

3. #03

   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.

   Heteroaffection means the affect of the other, in the double sense that (1) the one who is affected in me is always the other in me, the unknown 'me' in me, a dimension of my subjectivity that I don't know and don't perceive, and that (2) what affects me is always somebody other that myself.

4. #04

   Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.49

   1. > A "Self-Touchin g You " > Syncope

   Theoretical move: Drawing on Derrida's reading of Nancy, the passage argues that a nonmetaphysical sense of touch is constitutively interrupted—structured by syncope, discontinuity, and heteroaffection—such that self-touching is always already the touching of an other, making originary self-presence impossible and grounding all particular affects in an irreducible alterity.

   The subject's self-touching is always discontinuous—absent to itself, as it were—as if it were the touching of an other: heteroaffection as such.

5. #05

   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.

   Heteroaffection might then be defined as an affect which doesn't touch me to the extent that it doesn't touch itself. Such would be the 'generosity of nonsubjective freedom.'

6. #06

   Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.60

   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.

   It thus seems that the neurobiological approach provides us with a radical concept of heteroaffection... The subject is fundamentally, immediately, biologically a stranger to itself, which never encounters itself, which never touches itself.

7. #07

   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.

   Are we confronted with a genuine theory of heteroaffection? It seems that Deleuze and Damasio agree on that point: the Spinozist theory of affects exceeds the realm of consciousness and subjectivity.

8. #08

   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.

   We may therefore consider that we are 'heteroaffected' by our conatus.

9. #09

   Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.83

   5. > On Neural Plasticit y, Trauma , and the Loss of Affects > The Two Meanings of Plasticity

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that neural plasticity has two opposed forms — a positive plasticity of experience-driven connection-formation that constitutes the autobiographical self, and a destructive plasticity of brain-damage that "sculpts" a new identity by annihilating the previous one — and that the latter is irreducible to any psychic assimilation or "becoming-subject," functioning instead as a biological deconstruction of subjectivity.

   All the questions Derrida raises under the name of heteroaffection—the impossibility of a presentation of the self to itself, of the I to itself, the impossibility of regarding the event as an accident belonging to the subject—all these questions seem to coincide precisely with the problems that are addressed in the neurobiological redrawing of the self.

10. #10

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.84

    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.

    a subjectivity without affects, the extreme form of heteroaffection

11. #11

    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.

    We characterized heteroaffection as the affection of the other, in the double sense of the genitive: the affection coming from the other, from the utterly other, without any expectation or anticipation, and my being affected by the other in me.

12. #12

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.95

    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.

    If we are allowed to consider that Freud and Lacan elaborate a vision of a psyche that, contrary to the classical philosophical subject, is never autoaffected, but seems always affected from outside, without any possibility of appropriating this alterity, it seems that the principle of this heteroaffection cannot be destroyed.

13. #13

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.97

    5. > Conclusion > Damasio establishes a distinction between pain and emotion caused by pain:

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that neurobiology's discovery of a fully destructible, brain-based unconscious demands a new materialism that radicalizes the concepts of heteroaffection, the death drive, and the nonhuman — moving Continental philosophy beyond its metaphysical residues by confronting the brain as the site of psychic lesions, neural death drives, and a transparent self-model that is process rather than being.

    They are heteroaffections to the extent that they come from the other... Such a position might help in radicalizing the notions of heteroaffection, the nonhuman, or the death drive.