Learn Lacan
Secondary literature 2013

Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience

Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou

by Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou (2013)

→ Concept index for this source

Synopsis

Self and Emotional Life is a collaborative volume in which Catherine Malabou and Adrian Johnston independently but convergently pursue a single programmatic wager: that a credible materialist theory of subjectivity today must pass through both psychoanalysis and the neurosciences, and that doing so transforms all three disciplines involved — philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience — from within. Malabou's contribution ("Go Wonder") traces the philosophical genealogy of affect through Descartes, Spinoza, Derrida, Deleuze, and Damasio, arguing that contemporary neurobiology does not merely confirm but radically displaces the classical philosophical motif of autoaffection, replacing a self-present subject with a "deserted subject" constitutively estranged from its own emotional life, a subject whose very selfhood is destructible rather than merely displaceable. Johnston's contribution ("Misfelt Feelings") conducts a meticulous philological and philosophical excavation of the Freudian and Lacanian metapsychologies of affect, demonstrating that Freud's genuine vacillation about unconscious affects — traceable from 1907 through the second topography — has been systematically suppressed by Lacanian orthodoxy in a way that is both textually indefensible and theoretically impoverishing. Johnston's central argument is that affects in speaking subjects are irreducibly "misfelt" — reflexive, mediated, second-order phenomena whose qualitative character is inflected by the ideational-signifying matrices in which they are embedded — and that this structure of misfeeling aligns, in productive tension, with the findings of affective neuroscience (Damasio, LeDoux, Panksepp). The book's culminating provocation, delivered as Johnston's "infinite judgment," is that affects are signifiers: a claim designed not to eliminate the distinction between affect and signifier but to name the constitutive desynchronization, the gap-ridden interference, between emotional life and the symbolic orders through which speaking subjects are formed, a gap that both Lacanian theory and affective neuroscience illuminate but neither, alone, can adequately theorize.

Distinctive contribution

The book's most singular achievement is its systematic attempt to hold Lacanian psychoanalysis and affective neuroscience in productive, non-reductive tension around the specific problem of unconscious affect. Where most Lacanian-adjacent work either dismisses neuroscience as biologistic reduction or, conversely, abandons Lacanian theory in favor of a simpler neuropsychoanalytic synthesis, Johnston and Malabou together insist that neither move is philosophically or clinically defensible. Johnston's painstaking re-reading of Freud's German — distinguishing Affektbildung, Affekt, Gefühl, and Empfindung as genuinely differentiated terms — allows him to show that Freud's own texts support a position more nuanced than either the Lacanian orthodoxy (affects are invariably conscious; only signifiers/Vorstellungen are repressed) or the naive empirical position (emotions are simply unconscious biological states). The resulting concept of "misfelt feelings" — affects that are felt but felt wrongly, whose qualitative character is distorted by displacement along signifying chains — gives the book its central conceptual contribution and provides a bridge between Freudian metapsychology and Damasio's tripartite schema of emotion, feeling-had, and feeling-known.

Malabou's contribution brings an equally distinctive intervention from the side of Continental philosophy. Her reading of Damasio through Derrida and Deleuze, using wonder as a pivot-affect that is at once the most fundamental and the most fragile of all emotions, argues that neurobiological "heteroaffection" — the constitutive non-presence of the subject to its own affective life — is not simply a biological redescription of deconstruction's results but introduces something new: the possibility of a total, irreversible destruction of affective subjectivity that neither Derrida, Deleuze, nor Lacan has the resources to theorize. By introducing the neurobiological concept of destructive plasticity (as opposed to the positive plasticity of experience-driven neural formation), Malabou proposes a "new materialism" in which subjectivity is not merely split or decentered but ontically fragile, subject to annihilation by purely accidental somatic events. This positions the book as a rare work that brings deconstruction, Spinozist ontology, and neuroscience into genuine mutual contact rather than merely juxtaposing them.

A further distinctive feature is the book's treatment of the Four Discourses and the parlêtre as resources for thinking through the affective consequences of symbolic subjectification. Johnston's detailed reading of the Lacanian concept-chain from Vorstellungsrepräsentanz through lalangue and jouis-sens to the anxiety-generating uncertainties of the speaking subject provides one of the most sustained attempts in the secondary literature to extract from Lacan's occasional and scattered remarks on affect a coherent, if incomplete, metapsychology — one that can then be set in dialogue with the emotional neurosciences without either capitulating to biologism or retreating into linguistic formalism.

Main themes

  • The problem of unconscious affect: Freud's vacillation and Lacan's suppression thereof
  • Misfelt feelings: affect as reflexive, mediated, second-order phenomenon distorted by signifying displacement
  • Autoaffection versus heteroaffection: the subject's constitutive non-presence to its own emotional life
  • Neural plasticity as both positive autobiographical formation and destructive annihilation of subjectivity
  • Wonder as paradigm-affect bridging autoaffection and heteroaffection in Descartes, Spinoza, Derrida, Deleuze, and Damasio
  • The Vorstellungsrepräsentanz and the signifier: Lacan's reading of Freud's metapsychology of ideational representation and affect
  • Lalangue, jouis-sens, and the parlêtre: affective life as the residue of speaking subjectivity
  • Materialist psychoanalysis: the necessity of engaging neuroscience without biologistic reduction
  • Affects are signifiers: the infinite judgment of a Lacanian affective neuroscience
  • The limits of psychoanalytic treatment versus the theorizable domain of neuropathology

Chapter outline

  • Preface: From Nonfeeling to Misfeeling — Affects Between Trauma and the Unconscious — p.11-24
  • Part I, Introduction: From the Passionate Soul to the Emotional Brain (Malabou) — p.29-37
  • Chapter 1: What Does 'of' Mean in Descartes's Expression 'The Passions of the Soul'? (Malabou) — p.38-44
  • Chapter 2: A 'Self-Touching You': Derrida and Descartes (Malabou) — p.45-51
  • Chapter 3: The Neural Self — Damasio Meets Descartes (Malabou) — p.52-60
  • Chapters 4–5: Spinoza, Deleuze, and Damasio on Ontological Affect (Malabou) — p.61-75
  • Chapter 6 (Malabou): Damasio as a Reader of Spinoza — p.76-81
  • Chapter 7 (Malabou) and Conclusion: Neural Plasticity, Trauma, and the Loss of Affects — p.82-98
  • Chapter 8: Guilt and the Feel of Feeling — Toward a New Conception of Affects (Johnston) — p.101-117
  • Chapter 9: Feeling Without Feeling — Freud and the Unresolved Problem of Unconscious Guilt (Johnston) — p.114-127
  • Chapter 10: Affects, Emotions, and Feelings — Freud's Metapsychologies of Affective Life (Johnston) — p.128-143
  • Chapter 11: From Signifiers to Jouis-sens — Lacan's Senti-ments and Affectuations (Johnston) — p.144-183
  • Chapter 12: Emotional Life After Lacan — From Psychoanalysis to the Neurosciences (Johnston) — p.176-210
  • Chapter 13: Affects Are Signifiers — The Infinite Judgment of a Lacanian Affective Neuroscience (Johnston) — p.211-236
  • Postface: The Paradoxes of the Principle of Constancy (Malabou) — p.237-250

Chapter summaries

Preface: From Nonfeeling to Misfeeling — Affects Between Trauma and the Unconscious *(p.11-24)*

The preface, written by Johnston on behalf of both authors, establishes the intellectual-biographical occasion for the collaboration and, more importantly, articulates the book's foundational commitments and fault lines. Johnston frames the project as emerging from a shared conviction — against the dominant antinaturalist proclivities of Continental philosophy — that no genuinely materialist theory of subjectivity can afford to neglect the life sciences. He then identifies the book's central problematic: the question of whether, and in what precise sense, affects can be unconscious, a question that has remained scandalously unresolved since Freud himself and that carries both metapsychological and clinical stakes.

Johnston introduces a fourfold taxonomy for locating the intersection of psychoanalysis and neuroscience: conditions that are both theorizable and treatable by analysis; conditions treatable but not theorizable; conditions theorizable but not treatable; and conditions falling outside analytic reach entirely. He uses the case of Phineas Gage to argue that neuropathological cases belong to the third category — conditions that analytic theory can illuminate even if analytic treatment cannot cure them — and uses this to mark the boundary between his own approach (analysis enriched and extended by neuroscience) and Malabou's (analysis interrupted and challenged by neuroscience). The preface closes by proposing the concept of 'misfelt feelings' as the book's programmatic contribution: a model of affect as a reflexive, second-order phenomenon in which feelings can be felt but felt wrongly, the qualitative character of emotional experience being inflected and distorted by its embedding in signifying chains and ideational matrices.

Key concepts: Misfelt feelings, Unconscious Affect, Splitting of the Subject, Repression, Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, Autoaffection Notable examples: Phineas Gage case; schizophrenia as paradigm of neuropathology analyzable but not curable

Part I, Introduction: From the Passionate Soul to the Emotional Brain (Malabou) *(p.29-37)*

Malabou's introduction establishes the terms of her inquiry by posing the fundamental question: does contemporary neurobiology merely reformulate the traditional philosophical analysis of affects, or does it introduce a genuinely novel, materially grounded deconstruction of subjectivity? The central concept at stake is autoaffection — the classical philosophical idea that the subject constitutes itself affectively by touching or hearing itself — and Malabou asks whether the 'emotional brain' of the neuroscientists reopens and displaces this concept or simply repeats it in biological vocabulary.

To frame the stakes, she introduces two terminological clarifications: following Deleuze's reading of Spinoza, she distinguishes affectio from affectus (affection versus affect), locating the affect as a modification that reveals 'the very feeling of existence' through variations in the force of existing; and following Heidegger's reading of Kant, she introduces autoaffection as the structural self-affecting of time, the condition of the subject's self-presence. The confrontation she announces — between philosophical autoaffection (Derrida, Deleuze), psychoanalytic accounts of affect, and neurobiological heteroaffection — is organized around the figure of wonder (admiratio) as the affect that is simultaneously the most basic and the most philosophically revealing. Wonder is the affect that both discloses the subject to itself and opens it to alterity, and it is the affect whose neurobiological loss — in anosognosia and related pathologies — represents the most radical form of the 'deserted subject.'

Key concepts: Autoaffection, Heteroaffection, Unconscious, Facticity, Subjectivity, Drive Notable examples: Deleuze's 1978 Vincennes lectures on Spinoza; Heidegger's Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics

Chapter 1: What Does 'of' Mean in Descartes's Expression 'The Passions of the Soul'? (Malabou) *(p.38-44)*

This chapter performs a close structural reading of Descartes's Passions of the Soul, focusing on the tripartite architecture of the treatise and especially on the distinction between passions 'in' the soul (effects of bodily movements, including both involuntary visceral processes driven by blood circulation and animal spirits, and voluntary muscular actions) and passions 'of' the soul proper (psychical affects caused by movements of the animal spirits but felt as disturbances of the soul's intimacy, what Descartes calls 'emotions of the soul'). This distinction is crucial because the passions of the soul are caused by and relate to the body but are not reducible to it; they are effects of the psychosomatic union itself, localized through the intermediary of the pineal gland.

Malabou identifies the pineal gland as the pivotal figure in Descartes's account: it is the 'soul's body,' a paradoxically de-spatialized spatial locus that represents either the soul's alter ego in autoaffection or a genuine alterity, the bodily breach within the subject's self-determination. She traces the ethical loop from wonder (the first primitive passion, lacking a contrary, an affect of pure attention that makes no judgment about its object) to generosity (self-directed wonder grounded in recognition of the freedom of the will), arguing that this movement from surprise at the world to esteem for oneself constitutes the ethical arc of the treatise. The question left open — whether wonder reflects the soul's encounter with genuine alterity or with its own mirrored image — sets up the subsequent confrontations with Derrida and Damasio.

Key concepts: Autoaffection, Psychosomatic Phenomenon, Drive, Facticity, Subjectivity, Anxiety Notable examples: Phineas Gage (briefly, in preface); Descartes's account of Harvey's blood circulation theory; Descartes on the pineal gland as 'principal seat of the soul'

Chapter 2: A 'Self-Touching You': Derrida and Descartes (Malabou) *(p.45-51)*

Moving from Descartes's text to Derrida's reading of it, Malabou traces Derrida's deconstruction of autoaffection across his trajectory from logocentrism (hearing-oneself-speak) to 'haptocentrism' (the self-touching subject analyzed in On Touching — Jean-Luc Nancy). The chapter argues that, for Derrida, autoaffection is always already interrupted by heteroaffection: there is no pure, originary self-presence because the structure of touching implies a constitutive spacing, a 'syncope,' that fractures the supposed continuity between the touching and the touched. The pineal gland becomes, in Derrida's reading, the paradigm of this nonspatial self-touching: an ideal, punctual space that tries to give the soul a body without really doing so, representing the soul's attempt to ground itself in autoaffection while failing to escape ideality.

Malabou then brings in Jean-Luc Nancy's contribution to this deconstructive project: Nancy's 'self-touching you' (se toucher toi), his notion of touch as structurally fractured by syncope, discontinuity, and interruption. Heteroaffection, in this framework, means not just that we are affected by others, but that the very act of self-affection is constitutively the touching of an other, such that no pure interior emotional life is possible. The chapter closes by tracing Derrida's rereading of wonder and generosity: genuine generosity cannot be a decision of a subject but must arrive as an 'ontological generosity,' a gift from being itself, impersonal and anonymous. This displaces the Cartesian ethics of self-mastery and raises the question — unanswered by deconstruction — of whether affects can be totally destroyed rather than merely deconstructed.

Key concepts: Autoaffection, Heteroaffection, Méconnaissance, Subjectivity, Symptom, Facticity Notable examples: Derrida's On Touching — Jean-Luc Nancy; Nancy's Corpus; Derrida's 'To Speculate — on Freud'

Chapter 3: The Neural Self — Damasio Meets Descartes (Malabou) *(p.52-60)*

This chapter introduces Damasio as a third interlocutor in the conversation about affect and autoaffection, arguing that his neuroscience performs a materially grounded deconstruction of subjectivity that both parallels and diverges from Derrida's philosophical deconstruction. Malabou begins by noting Damasio's rejection of a purely brain-centric reduction: to reduce subjectivity to brain events alone repeats Descartes's error in a neurological key, disembodying the organism by cutting it off from its bodily and social environments. Instead, Damasio's neural subjectivity is plastic, distributed, fragile, and constitutively open to modification by internal and external events.

The chapter's core is Damasio's tripartite model of the self: the protoself (a nonconscious, purely organic neural map of the organism's internal states supporting homeostatic regulation), the core self (a zero-level form of consciousness arising as a modification of the protoself when the organism encounters objects, constituting a minimal sense of 'I'), and the autobiographical self (the extended, narrative self constructed from memory across time). Malabou argues that this hierarchy reveals autoaffection to be, at its most fundamental, a nonconscious biological process: the self is attached to itself through homeostatic affect before it is ever consciously aware of this attachment. This amounts to a 'neural heteroaffection,' since the self knows nothing of its own most basic autoaffective processes. The chapter closes by noting that neural autoaffection becomes perceptible only negatively — through its pathological impairment, as in anosognosia — and that this negative access constitutes both Damasio's 'method' and the ground for a new philosophical understanding of subjectivity as a fragile, evanescent, and potentially destructible state.

Key concepts: Autoaffection, Heteroaffection, Unconscious, Subjectivity, Psychosomatic Phenomenon, Facticity Notable examples: Damasio's analysis of Phineas Gage; Elliot case ('modern Phineas Gage'); Ramachandran's work on phantom limbs; Luria's functional systems approach

Chapters 4–5: Spinoza, Deleuze, and Damasio on Ontological Affect (Malabou) *(p.61-75)*

These two chapters shift the philosophical register from Cartesian dualism to Spinoza's monism, using Deleuze and Damasio as competing readers of the Ethics to press the question of whether affects can be truly ontological — belonging to Being or Nature rather than to any individual subject. Malabou begins with Spinoza's critique of Descartes: affects are not defects of human nature but natural ontological phenomena, following from the same necessity as all other things, because the human mind has no independence from Nature (God/Substance). The conatus — the ontological tendency of each thing to persist in its own being — is the key concept: it is neither a third substance mediating body and mind (as the pineal gland was for Descartes) nor a consciously felt drive, but the common ontological ground of both mental and bodily striving. Affects, as increases or decreases in the power of acting, are thus modulations of the conatus's variability — and since no one fully knows the extent of their own conatus, the subject is constitutively 'heteroaffected' by its own striving.

Deleuze's reading of Spinoza (via his 1978 and 1981 Vincennes lectures and Cinema 1) reconfigures autoaffection as a surface-mapping phenomenon rather than a subjective self-touching. In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze develops the concept of the 'plane of immanence' as the surface on which philosophical concepts are inscribed as events; Descartes's cogito is not a constituted subject but a 'conceptual persona,' a figure produced by the encounter of affects and events on a surface. The face becomes, in Cinema 1, the paradigmatic affective surface — a plane of immanence for the expression of affects, as in Eisenstein's close-up — dissolving the individual subject into an impersonal intensity. Damasio's reading of Spinoza, by contrast, approaches the conatus biologically, treating neural mapping as the equivalent of Spinozist spatial inscription: emotions are 'internal simulations,' feelings are mappings of emotions, and the brain's activity of self-modeling is the biological form of the conatus's self-preservation. Malabou notes that Deleuze and Damasio share the language of maps and surfaces but understand these in incompatible ways — Deleuze's maps are immanent ontological events, while Damasio's are empirical neural representations — and she presses both accounts at the point where the infinite essence (God/Nature) itself must be 'affected,' asking whether ontological autoaffection is available to the infinite or only to finite modes.

Key concepts: Autoaffection, Heteroaffection, Drive, Jouissance, Facticity, Subjectivity Notable examples: Deleuze's lectures on Spinoza (Vincennes, 1978–1982); Eisenstein's film close-ups as Deleuzian affection-images; Damasio's Looking for Spinoza

Chapter 6 (Malabou): Damasio as a Reader of Spinoza *(p.76-81)*

This shorter chapter focuses specifically on Damasio's Looking for Spinoza, examining how the neuroscientist mobilizes Spinoza to ground his neuroscientific account of the relationship between emotions and feelings in an ontological framework. Damasio finds in Spinoza's non-dualism and emphasis on the conatus as biological self-preservation an anticipation of his own central argument: that emotions and feelings together constitute the mechanism by which life is regulated and survival is promoted. For Damasio, Spinoza is 'the first neurobiologist' because he grasped that drives, motivations, emotions, and feelings form a unified affect-economy in which reason is grounded in and dependent upon emotional processes.

Malabou focuses on Damasio's concepts of 'emotions' (basic, nonconscious, physiological processes involved in homeostasis) and 'feelings' (the mental representations or maps of those emotional states, also potentially nonconscious), arguing that Damasio's neural mapping activity is the biological equivalent of Spinoza's ontological mapping — the spacing of Being through finite modes. The chapter notes both the convergence and the divergence between Deleuze's and Damasio's readings of Spinoza: while both invoke maps and surfaces, Damasio's neural maps are strictly empirical-representational structures, while Deleuze's 'plane of immanence' is a pre-empirical, immanent ontological surface that dissolves the subject rather than grounding it.

Key concepts: Autoaffection, Heteroaffection, Unconscious, Facticity, Drive, Subjectivity Notable examples: Damasio's Looking for Spinoza; Spinoza's Ethics Book 3; Deleuze's Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza

Chapter 7 (Malabou) and Conclusion: Neural Plasticity, Trauma, and the Loss of Affects *(p.82-98)*

The final chapter of Malabou's contribution confronts the neuroscientific concept of destructive plasticity — the formation of a new identity through the annihilation of a previous one by brain damage — and sets it against Freud's exclusively positive conception of psychic plasticity as imperish-ability and resilience. For Freud, the psyche preserves everything that has ever entered it; mental illness is regression to earlier stages, not irreversible destruction. Malabou argues, through Damasio's cases (Phineas Gage, Elliot, patient 'L'), that neurobiology reveals a form of 'disaffectation' — the loss of wonder, concern, and emotional engagement — that is not assimilable to Freudian regression or Lacanian jouissance. The patients become 'cold': not repressed but genuinely emptied of affective subjectivity.

This distinction between a 'good' plasticity (experience-driven neural formation, akin to the autobiographical self) and a 'bad' plasticity (traumatic disconnection producing a new, empty identity) leads Malabou to argue for a new form of materialism that takes seriously the brain as a space of possible psychic destruction — what she calls the 'neuronal unconscious,' as distinct from the Freudian unconscious. The neuronal unconscious is bound to time and mortality (the brain's self-reconstruction is the biological form of finitude), whereas the Freudian unconscious is timeless and in some sense immortal. This contrast culminates in the conclusion's call for a philosophical engagement with neurobiological accounts of indifference and 'cold blood' that would require developing the concept of a 'neural death drive' — an impersonal destructive plasticity beyond Freud's own formulation of the death drive — as the theoretical core of a new Continental-neurobiological materialism.

Key concepts: Trauma, Death Drive, Unconscious, Autoaffection, Heteroaffection, Subjectivity Notable examples: Phineas Gage; Elliot case; Patient 'L'; Oliver Sacks's 'Lost Mariner' case; Solms on dreaming and brain lesions

Chapter 8: Guilt and the Feel of Feeling — Toward a New Conception of Affects (Johnston) *(p.101-117)*

Johnston's opening chapter establishes the central problematic of his contribution: the relationship between the unconscious and affective life, which has remained a site of persistent controversy in psychoanalysis from Freud onward. He surveys the major positions at stake: certain Anglo-American post-Freudian strands treat affects as the primary targets of analytic interpretation without a philosophically rigorous metapsychological account of how they can be unconscious; Lacan, by contrast, is virtually unwavering in insisting that Freud categorically rules out the possibility of unconscious affects as a contradiction in terms. Johnston argues that neither position is satisfactory, and that both sides have misread Freud.

The chapter introduces the book's governing thesis — that affects are reflexive, second-order phenomena, 'the feelings of feelings,' in which unconscious forces operate in the gap between feelings and the feelings of feelings — and frames this as a Hegelian-inspired critique of the immediacy imputed to emotional experience. Drawing on Hegel's repeated demonstrations that supposed immediacies contain unrecognized mediations, Johnston proposes to show that affective experiences are never simply self-evident qualia but are always already inflected, filtered, and folded by the signifying matrices through which speaking subjects are constituted. He invokes Freud's early (1907) reference to an 'unconscious sense of guilt' as the key exhibit: here, guilt manifests not as a felt conscious state but as a set of compulsive thoughts and behaviors that exhibit an 'as if' association with guilt, betraying a registration of culpability at some level without any corresponding conscious awareness. This contradiction-in-terms, which Freud acknowledges without resolving, becomes Johnston's entry point into the wider problem of misfelt feelings.

Key concepts: Unconscious, Anxiety, Repression, Superego, Splitting of the Subject, Méconnaissance Notable examples: Freud's 'Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices' (1907); Hegel's critique of immediacy; McDowell's Hegelian epistemology of perception

Chapter 9: Feeling Without Feeling — Freud and the Unresolved Problem of Unconscious Guilt (Johnston) *(p.114-127)*

This chapter provides the most sustained philological and textual argument of Johnston's contribution: a detailed re-reading of Freud's evolving positions on unconscious affect across the span of his career, with particular attention to the apparently contradictory positions of the 1915 metapsychological paper 'The Unconscious' and the 1923 second topography. Johnston demonstrates that the common story — a pre-1923 Freud categorically denying unconscious affects, a post-1923 Freud accepting the unconscious sense of guilt under pressure from clinical evidence — is too simple. From 1907 onward, Freud repeatedly circles back to the hypothesis he nominally dismisses, and by 1923 he is openly acknowledging that the 'unconscious sense of guilt' plays 'a decisive economic part' in the neuroses while simultaneously confessing bewilderment at this conclusion.

Johnston pays close attention to the German terminology: the 'contradiction in terms' in unbewußten Schuldbewußtseins (unconscious consciousness of guilt) signals precisely the difficulty of the concept. He traces Freud's discussions through The Ego and the Id, Civilization and Its Discontents, and the New Introductory Lectures, noting how Freud repeatedly substitutes the less theoretically problematic 'need for punishment' for 'unconscious sense of guilt' in clinical practice (to avoid confusing analysands) while privately maintaining that the latter is the theoretically more accurate designation. The chapter concludes that Freud's hesitations are not inconsistencies to be explained away but symptoms of a genuine theoretical problem — the possibility that the same 'quantity of affect' can feel like guilt when in 'true connection' with its proper ideational representative and not feel like guilt when displaced into 'false connections,' with the result that guilt becomes 'unconscious' not as an oxymoronic unfelt feeling but as a misfelt feeling, consciously registered but qualitatively distorted by displacement.

Key concepts: Unconscious, Repression, Anxiety, Superego, Displacement, Unconscious Affect Notable examples: Freud's 'Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices' (1907); Freud's The Ego and the Id (1923); Freud's 'The Economic Problem of Masochism'; Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents; Freud's New Introductory Lectures

Chapter 10: Affects, Emotions, and Feelings — Freud's Metapsychologies of Affective Life (Johnston) *(p.128-143)*

Johnston here performs the core philological work underlying his entire argument: a careful reconstruction of Freud's complex and internally differentiated vocabulary for affective phenomena, focusing on the 1894 'Neuro-Psychoses of Defense,' the 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology, and the 1915 'The Unconscious.' He distinguishes four key terms: Affektbildung (affective structure, the ideational-energetic formation capable of generating affective charge), Affektbetrag (quota of affect, the economic quantity of excitation), Affekt-qua-Gefühl (a liminal, in-between term designating the discharge process of which only the 'final manifestations' are consciously registered), and Empfindung (feeling as conscious sensory experience, the phenomenally felt quality). Johnston argues that Lacan and most of his followers have systematically conflated Affekt/Gefühl with Empfindung, thereby producing a false conclusion: that Freud treats all affective phenomena as invariably conscious.

On the basis of this philological reconstruction, Johnston argues that the genuine position buried in Freud's texts is more complex: what Freud would rule out is the idea of unconscious Empfindungen (unfelt feelings, genuine contradictions in terms), but Affekte-qua-Gefühle can and do operate nonconsciously or semiconsciously as intermediate discharge processes. Furthermore, Freud explicitly states that an affect will be 'perceived but misconstrued' ('wahrgenommen, aber falsch gedeutet') when it is displaced from its proper ideational representative onto another idea — and that 'the nature of that substitute determines the qualitative character of the affect.' This, Johnston argues, is precisely the logic of misfelt feelings: the same affective charge, the same Affektbetrag, can feel qualitatively different depending on the signifying matrix with which it is associated, making 'unconscious guilt' not an unfelt feeling but a feeling felt as something other than guilt — as anxiety, somatic distress, or diffuse unease.

Key concepts: Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, Unconscious Affect, Repression, Displacement, Anxiety, Drive Notable examples: Freud's 'Neuro-Psychoses of Defense' (1894); Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895); Freud's 'The Unconscious' (1915); Sydney Pulver's debates on unconscious affect

Chapter 11: From Signifiers to Jouis-sens — Lacan's Senti-ments and Affectuations (Johnston) *(p.144-183)*

This is the most technically demanding chapter of Johnston's contribution, tracing Lacan's treatment of affect systematically across his seminars and published texts while mounting a sustained critique of Lacan's reading of Freud on this point. Johnston identifies Lacan's dominant position — articulated especially in Seminars I, VI, VII, IX, X, and XVII and in 'Television' — as the claim that affects are invariably conscious, that only signifiers (Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen) are properly repressed, and that affects are therefore merely displaced (never repressed), shifting across the surface of conscious experience as secondary effects of signifying dynamics. Johnston argues that this position, while textually grounded in Freud's 1915 paper, is based on a systematic conflation of Affekt with Empfindung that Freud's own German texts do not support.

However, Johnston also undertakes a recovery of the more nuanced Lacanian positions available in Seminars X and XVII. In Seminar X, Lacan's treatment of anxiety as the one affect that 'doesn't deceive' (ne trompe pas) implies, Johnston argues, that all other affects can and do deceive — that the deceptiveness of feelings is a structural feature of subjectivity as constituted through the signifier. In Seminar XVII, the concept of jouis-sens emerges as a hybrid formation between jouissance (the affective-libidinal) and sens (the intellectual-signifying), suggesting that the sharp dichotomy between affect and signifier that dominated Lacan's earlier work is being reworked. Johnston then traces the neologistic cluster of lalangue, jouis-sens, senti-ment, and affectuation in Lacan's later teaching, arguing that these terms point toward a theory of affect as the residual, idiosyncratic, and material deposit of the parlêtre's immersion in signifying systems — a theory that both requires and resists the more systematic metapsychological elaboration that Johnston attempts to provide.

Key concepts: Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, Jouissance, Signifier, Parlêtre, Lalangue, Anxiety Notable examples: Lacan's Seminar X (anxiety); Lacan's Seminar XVII (The Other Side of Psychoanalysis); Lacan's 'Television' (1973); Bruce Fink's readings of Lacan on affect; Colette Soler's Les affects lacaniens

Chapter 12: Emotional Life After Lacan — From Psychoanalysis to the Neurosciences (Johnston) *(p.176-210)*

This chapter performs the pivotal movement of Johnston's argument: having established that Lacan's handling of affect is more complicated than the orthodox Lacanian story suggests, Johnston now turns to the neurosciences — especially Damasio and LeDoux — to develop the resources for a genuinely post-Lacanian metapsychology of affective life. The chapter begins by examining Joan Copjec's Lacanian reading of shame and jouissance in Seminar XVII, acknowledging its insights while criticizing its uncritical acceptance of the claim that affects are never repressed and only ever displaced. Johnston argues that Copjec (and Zupančič) are right that Seminar XVII marks a reworking of the affect/signifier dichotomy through jouis-sens, but wrong to accept without question the Lacanian reading of Freud that underwrites the sharp distinction.

The chapter then reconstructs Damasio's tripartite schema (emotions as nonconscious physiological states, feelings-had as nonconscious or semiconscious mental representations of those states, feelings-known as consciously attended-to experiential qualia) and maps it onto the Freudian Affekt/Gefühl/Empfindung triad: emotions (as Affekt) are the expressively embodied correlates of Triebrepräsentanzen; feelings-had (as Gefühl) are potentially nonconscious, paralleling the 'unconscious sense of guilt'; feelings-known (as Empfindung) are consciously felt qualia. This mapping generates the notion of 'misfelt feelings' (distinguishable from 'unfelt feelings'): feelings-had that are consciously registered (hence not unfelt) but registered in a qualitatively distorted form due to displacement along signifying chains (hence misfelt). Johnston also engages Žižek's Lacanian critique of Damasio, defending Damasio against Žižek's charge of naturalism while accepting Žižek's core point that symbolic mediation 'transubstantiates' the neural substrate. LeDoux's research on the emotional brain (particularly the discordance between the amygdala-based 'low road' and cortex-mediated 'high road' of emotional processing) is used to provide neuroscientific grounding for the Lacanian thesis of the split subject: the brain itself is a 'kludge,' a pastiche of evolutionarily mismatched systems that do not harmonize into a unified self.

Key concepts: Jouissance, Splitting of the Subject, Parlêtre, Unconscious Affect, Repression, Anxiety Notable examples: Joan Copjec's 'May '68, The Emotional Month'; Damasio's The Feeling of What Happens; LeDoux's The Emotional Brain; Žižek's The Parallax View; Panksepp's Affective Neuroscience

Chapter 13: Affects Are Signifiers — The Infinite Judgment of a Lacanian Affective Neuroscience (Johnston) *(p.211-236)*

The culminating chapter formulates Johnston's central thesis as a Hegelian 'infinite judgment': affects are signifiers. This is deliberately paradoxical — an infinite judgment, in Hegel's logic, predicates of a subject something that appears radically heterogeneous to it (as in 'the spirit is a bone') — and Johnston uses the paradox to name the constitutive entanglement of the affective and the signifying in the parlêtre, an entanglement that is neither reducible to identity nor separable into clean distinction. The chapter begins by noting the irony that neuroscience is now confirming many of Freud's core insights at precisely the moment when analysts have been most prone to dismissing him; it then draws on Panksepp's affective neuroscience and his taxonomy of primary emotional systems (FEAR, RAGE, SEEKING, PANIC/GRIEF, LUST, CARE, PLAY) to argue that even 'basic' emotions in mammals are never purely 'instinctual' in adult humans, since they are always already filtered and modified by higher cognitive activity in a two-way dialectic of mutual modulation between neural emotional systems and cortical representational structures.

Johnston then addresses André Green's 1966 proposal that 'the affect takes on the status of signifier' and his simultaneous insistence that affect is 'non-combinatory' (unlike signifiers, affects cannot enter into combination). Johnston argues for a twist on Green's formulation: what makes affects function 'like signifiers' is not that they have the combinatory, relational structure of Saussurean signifiers, but that they are subject to the same vicissitudes of displacement, substitution, and false connection as ideational representations — they are caught up in the signifying chains of lalangue and jouis-sens that structure the parlêtre's emotional life. The chapter closes by proposing that the term 'affect' be retained precisely to name the uniquely human desynchronizations between emotions, feelings, and the feelings of feelings — the gaps, mismatches, and short circuits that are the affective correlate of what Lacan calls the split subject — and by calling for sustained Lacanian engagement with affective neuroscience as both a theoretical and clinical necessity.

Key concepts: Signifier, Jouissance, Parlêtre, Lalangue, Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, Four Discourses Notable examples: André Green's 'The Logic of Lacan's objet (a) and Freudian Theory' (1966); Panksepp's seven primary emotional systems; Changeux on 'learning as elimination' in language acquisition; Linden's The Accidental Mind on the brain as 'kludge'; Damasio's 'Evolution is not the Great Chain of Being'

Postface: The Paradoxes of the Principle of Constancy (Malabou) *(p.237-250)*

The postface, written by Malabou and translated by Johnston, summarizes and evaluates Johnston's argument from an external vantage point, while also introducing her own reflections on the neurobiological implications for the Freudian principle of constancy. Malabou reconstructs Johnston's central contribution — the concept of misfelt feelings, the philological recovery of the Affekt/Gefühl/Empfindung triad, the argument that Freud's vacillations on unconscious guilt reveal a genuine theoretical problem rather than a mere inconsistency — and endorses its basic direction while pressing its implications further.

Malabou then develops a parallel argument about the principle of constancy (the tendency of the psychic apparatus to maintain excitation at a minimum) and the principle of inertia, arguing, against Freud, that homeostasis is not a mechanical process indifferent to affect but is itself an affective and emotional economy: the brain affects itself in regulating life, so that the principle of constancy produces affects rather than merely presupposing them. This is Damasio's central paradox: 'curiously enough, emotions are part and parcel of the regulation we call homeostasis.' The postface closes by stressing the irreducible distance between the neuronal unconscious — bound to time and mortality, reconstructed moment by moment, accessible only through pathological impairment — and the Freudian unconscious, which is timeless and does not 'believe' in death. Cerebral autoaffection, Malabou argues, is the biological announcement of finitude from within: the self is continuously remade and is therefore never present to itself, a condition that is not philosophical negativity but material fragility.

Key concepts: Unconscious, Drive, Death Drive, Autoaffection, Jouissance, Splitting of the Subject Notable examples: Damasio on the protoself and the homunculus; Freud on the cortical homunculus in The Ego and the Id; Freud's city of Rome analogy for psychic plasticity; Solms and Turnbull's The Brain and the Inner World

Main interlocutors

  • Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id
  • Sigmund Freud, The Unconscious (1915)
  • Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
  • Sigmund Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology
  • Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar X (Anxiety)
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVII (The Other Side of Psychoanalysis)
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis)
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI (Four Fundamental Concepts)
  • Jacques Lacan, Écrits
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXIII (Le sinthome)
  • Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error
  • Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens
  • Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza
  • Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza
  • Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image
  • Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?
  • Spinoza, Ethics
  • Descartes, Passions of the Soul
  • Jacques Derrida, On Touching — Jean-Luc Nancy
  • Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
  • Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus
  • Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View
  • Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
  • André Green, Le discours vivant
  • Joan Copjec
  • Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience
  • Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain
  • Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World
  • Jean-Pierre Changeux
  • Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
  • Aristotle, Metaphysics
  • Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics

Position in the corpus

In the Lacanian secondary literature, Self and Emotional Life occupies an unusual position: it belongs simultaneously to the tradition of close Freudian-Lacanian metapsychological commentary (Johnston's chapters extend work done in his Time Driven and Žižek's Ontology) and to the emerging literature on neuropsychoanalysis, while being distinguished from both by its sustained engagement with Continental European philosophy of affect (Derrida, Deleuze, Spinoza). Readers coming from the Lacanian corpus will find Johnston's chapters to be among the most careful existing treatments of Lacan's scattered remarks on affect, organized around the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz and the Seminar X/XVII axis; they should read this alongside Colette Soler's Les affects lacaniens, André Green's Le discours vivant, and Slavoj Žižek's The Parallax View for the interlocutors Johnston engages most directly. Malabou's contribution belongs to the trajectory of her own developing project on plasticity (Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, What Should We Do with Our Brain?) and will be most productively read in conjunction with those works as well as with Damasio's trilogy and Derrida's On Touching.\n\nWithin the Lacanian corpus, the book is best positioned as a sequel to Johnston's earlier monographs and a companion to works engaging the materialist-naturalist question in Lacanian theory, such as those by Žižek or by thinkers working in the 'transcendental materialist' tradition Johnston develops. Readers approaching from neuroscience or cognitive science should begin with Damasio and Panksepp before using this volume to understand how their work intersects with psychoanalytic and philosophical accounts of subjectivity. The book's chief limitation from a strictly Lacanian perspective — its challenge to the received Lacanian dismissal of unconscious affect — is simultaneously its chief contribution: it forces a confrontation with the textual evidence of Freud's own ambivalence that the Lacanian tradition has largely preferred to suppress.

Canonical concepts deployed