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Eleven: The Subject of the Accident
- Fordham University Press
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203 Who, today, is this modifiable and metamorphosable subject, the site of conflict between the two plasticities—constructive and destructive—that entwine and menace its life? Before concluding, I will attempt to outline the theoretical and philosophical framework that makes it possible to glimpse this subject. I said, at the beginning of this study, that in large measure “continental” philosophers have nothing but contempt for the “cerebral” subject. None see in it the future of the subject, the future of the very concept of the subject , while, as Gauchet has argued, it has become increasingly obvious that neurobiological discoveries are intimately concerned with “the idea of human functioning in general, which includes subjectivity.”1 e l e v e n The Subject of the Accident What we have learned about the structure and functioning of the cerebrospinal apparatus means that we must change the way in which we represent the mechanism of subjectivity in general—hence, the displacement that the notion of the cerebral unconscious seeks to register. — m a r c e l g a u c h e t , L’inconscient cérébral 204 On the Beyond of the Pleasure Principle Another Chapter of The History of Sexuality? It would certainly be possible to conclude that this reconception of the subject, made possible by neuroscientific advances, is nothing but a new episode of what Michel Foucault has analyzed as the relations between the subject and truth. Contemporary neurobiological research, then, would contribute nothing new and would only be a further episode within the history of “subjection.” The category of cerebrality could be reduced to and counted among the “discursive productions” or the “effects of power” that lead one to formulate the truth of the subject at a specific moment in its history.2 If it is true that “power passes within the materiality of bodies,” if it is true that we now live within the sphere of “biopower and somato-power,” then the preponderant place granted to the discourse on the brain within the contemporary global scientific and cultural horizon only amounts to a new modality of the disciplinary techniques that produce the subject as they normalize it. The brain would emerge as the contemporary form of subjectivity only “because relations of power had established it as a possible object.”3 In the present book, I decided not to rehash the analysis of the coercive ideological power of contemporary neurobiological discourse that I undertook in What Should We Do with Our Brain? I have not addressed the fact that the brain today has become the site of the truth of the subject and, as such, its organization has emerged as the dominant sociobiological model for thinking and regulating every systematic configuration— from business to social relations in general and, of course, to the form of bodies. One might object that my method in this book of redefining the brain in terms of affective economy, showing how cerebrality is constituted as an etiological principle, constitutes a displacement of the concept of sexuality that does nothing to change the meaning of this concept, for such a displacement would remain inscribed within the order of the “erotics of truth”—that is, within a “mixed regime of pleasure and power.”4 The Foucauldian critique of the way in which psychoanalysis constitutes sex as a site of truth is founded precisely upon a refusal to identify pleasure and sexuality: “The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.”5 [54.224.90.25] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:57 GMT) The Subject of the Accident 205 However, the recognition that there is a freedom of pleasures independent of sexual development as Freud described it effectively stripped sexuality of its autonomous explicative power. Another body appeared that would not and could not be folded into this interpretative matrix. But it remains uncertain whether upholding cerebrality as an etiological principle against sexuality functions in the same way to liberate the body. From a Foucauldian point of view, cerebrality would be yet another avatar of sexuality, a normative power aiming to organize new emotions by giving them a natural basis. In this sense, the present book would simply be the propaedeutic to a new chapter of The History of Sexuality. Nonetheless, I think that situating subject beyond the pleasure principle also obviously places the subject beyond the will to know. This would be the case...