The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage

Preamble

xi p r e a m b l e She must think I’ve forgotten her since she died, how alone and abandoned she must feel! Oh! I must run and see her this very minute, I can’t wait for my father to come, but where is it? How can I have forgotten the address? If only she still recognizes me! How can I have forgotten her all these months? It’s dark, I won’t find her, the wind is stopping me from advancing; but here is my father walking in front of me; I cry out to him: “Where’s Grandmother? Tell me the address. Is she all right? Is it quite certain she’s got all she needs?” “No, no,” my father says to me, “you can rest assured. Her nurse is an orderly person. We send a very small sum from time to time so they can buy her the little she has need of. She sometimes asks what’s become of you. She’s even been told that you were going to write a book. She seemed pleased. She wiped away a tear.” — m a r c e l p r o u s t , Sodom and Gomorrah1 There are two personal experiences at the origin of the present work. In the first place, this book is a belated reaction to the ordeal of depersonalization to which my grandmother was subjected as Alzheimer’s disease operated upon her. I say “operated” because it seemed to me that my grandmother, or, at least, the new and ultimate version of her, was the work of the disease, its opus, its own sculpture. Indeed, this was not a diminished person in front of me, the same woman weaker than she used to be, lessened, spoiled. No, this was a stranger who didn’t recognize me, who didn’t recognize herself because she had undoubtedly never met her before. Behind the familiar halo of hair, the tone of her voice, the blue of her eyes: the absolutely incontestable presence of someone else. This other person, however, was strangely absent. My grandmother no longer cared about anything anymore; she was xii Preamble indifferent, detached, cool. In the end, she spent whole days creasing and uncreasing a corner of her blanket. Why wasn’t I comforted by this turn of events? After all, to desert life in this way, to die before being dead, isn’t this the most beautiful way to die? To die to death itself? No longer to know oneself mortal? No longer to have to die in person? Such thoughts, however, brought me no solace. I was perfectly aware—along with everyone who must endure the same spectacle in their own lives—that this absence, this disaffection, this strangeness to oneself, were, without any possible doubt, the paradoxical signs of profound pain. Later, I learned that Alzheimer’s disease is a cerebral pathology. Could it be that the brain suffers? Could it be that this suffering manifests itself in the form of indifference to suffering? In the form of the inability to experience suffering as one’s own? Could it be that there is a type of suffering that creates a new identity, the unknown identity of an unknown person who suffers? Could it be that cerebral suffering is precisely such suffering? Another Relation to Philosophy It took me a long time to understand how the second motive for this book, which pertains to the evolution of my relation to philosophy, is related to my grandmother’s illness. For many years, my work has been devoted to the concept of “plasticity,” which I encountered for the first time in Hegel’s philosophy. However, the theoretical elaboration of this concept led me gradually to enlarge the field of my investigations beyond traditional philosophy into different domains of knowledge where the concept plays a decisive role—initially psychoanalysis and then cellular biology and neuroscience. This is how I became increasingly interested in the study of the brain—its functioning, its organization, and its pathologies. This expansion of my field of research had real repercussions upon my thought, to such an extent that I can now say that there is a distinct “before” and “after” of my incursion into the domain of neuroscience. Not that I have become a “cognitivist” or a “reductionist.” On one hand, I remain fundamentally attached to continental philosophy; on the other, I do not see any danger (what would be endangered by what?) in...