The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage

Conclusion

211 In his Anxiety seminar, Lacan reproaches Lévi-Strauss and structuralism in general for confusing “structure” with the form of the brain. “The play of structure,” he writes, “of the combinatory that was so powerfully articulated in the discourse of Lévi-Strauss only rejoins for example the very structure of the brain, indeed the structure of matter, of which it would merely represent , in accordance with the form called materialist in the eighteenthcentury sense, the doublet, and not even the inner lining (doublure).”1 Such coincidence between symbolic structure and cerebral structure would be the sign of what Lacan calls “primary materialism.”2 It is precisely such “primary materialism”—which is Lacan’s expression of contempt for the cerebral localization of the symbolic—that I have attempted to assume and to uphold throughout my discussion. Extending the closing argument of What Should We Do with Our Brain? I continue to defend the thesis that the only valid philosophical path today lies in the elaboration of a new materialism that would precisely refuse to envisage the Conclusion In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, binding is the most important function of the psychical apparatus, which binds the destructive external quantities of excitation in order to master them, even before the intervention of the pleasure principle. Binding is thus the mechanism that serves to protect the organism against the unpleasurable unbinding of the ego caused by excessive stimulation, or trauma. . . . By binding excitations, the organism defers its own death drive. Binding carries also an explicitly political meaning: by binding or bonding the individual with the other or outside in an emotional bond of identification that constitutes the homogeneous group or mass, individuals neutralize their lethal tendency to disband into a disorderly panic or all against all. — r u t h l e y s , Trauma: A Genealogy 212 Conclusion least separation, not only between the brain and thought but also between the brain and the unconscious. It is thus such a materialism, as the basis for a new philosophy of spirit, that determined my definition of cerebrality as an axiological principle entirely articulated in terms of the formation and deformation of neuronal connections . The “symbolic” is obviously not far away, since the elementary form of the brain is the emotional and logical core where the processes of autoaffection constitute all identity and all history. This process is radically exposed to the possibility of an accident that might destroy it and thereby interrupt the continuity of the psychic personality . Such vulnerability is the major question of contemporary psychopathology . The study of brain damage reveals that traumas and wounds have a new signification that psychoanalysis can only ignore at the price of failing to grasp present-day psychic suffering. This new signification is linked to negative or destructive plasticity. Its result can be characterized as a metamorphosis unto death or as a form of death in life marked by affective indifference. Recognizing the existence of negative plasticity beyond any promise of remission or any soteriological horizon is the necessary prelude to any attempt to account for psychic suffering today. The confrontation of the etiological regimes of sexuality and cerebrality, and thus of psychoanalysis and neurology, can be fruitful only if it begins from such recognition. In order to establish such recognition, I have attempted to elaborate the concept of the material event. Conceived as an accident or threat of destruction , this material event—which goes beyond the Lacanian triad of the symbolic, the real, and the imaginary—results as much from the contingency of its occurrence as from the internal work of the drive, work that demands a new understanding of the contingency and the necessity of the death drive. To insist on the role of destructive plasticity beyond all horizon of redemption does not amount to denying the possibilities of new therapies. This is not a matter of despair or pessimism. I am simply arguing that, before interrogating the hypothetical possibility of a “beyond of the beyond” of the death drive, before asking how to treat or how to heal, it is important, according to the most elementary logic, to inquire what those who suffer are suffering from. Conclusion 213 This is why we have had to spend so much time profiling the new wounded. Our inquiry revolves around the identification of evil. Defining the characteristics of today’s traumas—characteristics that turn out...