The Neural Subject in Popular Culture and the End of Life

Scholars in the humanities increasingly scrutinize the contemporary significance of cognitive neuroscience in reshaping the contours of the human subject. The essay considers a specific dimension of this new epistemic and ontological frontier—the neuroscience of consciousness as a threshold of life and death—to develop the argument that the biology of consciousness as a cultural problem is part and parcel of the end of life as a biopolitical problem. It turns to two sites of contemporary popular culture to unpack how a particular rationality of freedom intertwines with neural life in order to give form to, and contain, the concrete material, economic, and political problems faced by the end of life. It argues that contemporary reflections on the biology of consciousness must link the cultural problem of organizing a neural subject to specific economic, legal, and ethical problems of late-modern rationalities of government.