Adrian Johnston is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and an assistant teaching analyst at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta. He is the author of Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive; Zizek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity; and Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change. Catherine Malabou is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Centre For Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, U.K. She is the author of several books translated into English, including The Future Of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality And Dialectic; What Should We Do With Our Brain; Plasticity At The Dusk Of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction; and Changing Difference.
Self and Emotional Life is a timely and wholly original intervention into one of the most debated questions of recent years: the place of the affects in psychoanalytic, neuroscientific, and philosophical accounts of the subject. It is doubly valuable in being authored by two scholars of the stature of Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou, philosophers whose range and depth of erudition in recent and emerging scholarship in the neurosciences (especially work on the 'emotional brain') and in clinical psychoanalysis seem to be without peer among scholars working at this intersection today. -- Tracy McNulty, Cornell University While neuroscientists joyfully proclaim the death of philosophy and psychoanalysis, Johnston's and Malabou's Self and Emotional Life enacts the necessary counter-move. It conclusively demonstrates, from a strict materialist standpoint, how brain sciences cannot account for the unconscious processes discovered by Freud, and how they remain entangled in a cobweb of their own philosophical presuppositions. The book's subtitle could have been Prolegomena to any future relationship between philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neurosciences -- which is why it should be read by everyone in these fields. -- Slavoj i ek I have often been surprised by how continental philosophy and psychoanalysis managed to ignore biology and at times even reject it. It made no sense to me, and it clearly makes no sense to Catherine Malabou and Adrian Johnston, philosophers and psychoanalysts, who embrace neurobiology and are enriched by it. Their essays make for valuable and often pleasurable reading. -- Antonio Damasio, Author of Descartes' Error and Self Comes to Mind This book flows from the obvious conviction that a philosophy of subjectivity simply cannot ignore the body, and therefore simply must engage with today's biological sciences. The authors' conviction that the link between the subject and the body is best theorized in relation to affect is perhaps less obvious to some -- but surely equally correct. It is no surprise, then, that their book touches on many of the deepest questions confronting the mental sciences of our time. It will provoke much disputation -- even outrage -- but it focuses our attention on just the right questions. -- Mark Solms, University of Cape Town