Mortal Subjects E-Book

Christina Howells

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 491

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This wide ranging and challenging book explores the relationship between subjectivity and mortality as it is understood by a number of twentieth-century French philosophers including Sartre, Lacan, Levinas and Derrida. Making intricate and sometimes unexpected connections, Christina Howells draws together the work of prominent thinkers from the fields of phenomenology and existentialism, religious thought, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, focussing in particular on the relations between body and soul, love and death, desire and passion.

From Aristotle through to contemporary analytic philosophy and neuroscience the relationship between mind and body (psyche and soma, consciousness and brain) has been persistently recalcitrant to analysis, and emotion (or passion) is the locus where the explanatory gap is most keenly identified. This problematic forms the broad backdrop to the work’s primary focus on contemporary French philosophy and its attempts to understand the intimate relationship between subjectivity and mortality, in the light not only of the ‘death’ of the classical subject but also of the very real frailty of the subject as it lives on, finite, desiring, embodied, open to alterity and always incomplete. Ultimately Howells identifies this vulnerability and finitude as the paradoxical strength of the mortal subject and as what permits its transcendence.

Subtle, beautifully written, and cogently argued, this book will be invaluable for students and scholars interested in contemporary theories of subjectivity, as well as for readers intrigued by the perennial connections between love and death.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

1 Introduction: Love and Death

2 Phenomenology of Emotion and Forgetfulness of Death

Jean-Paul Sartre

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Simone de Beauvoir

3 Religious Philosophy: Keeping Body and Soul Together

Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973)

Paul Ricœur (1913–2005)

Vladimir Jankélévitch (1903–1985)

Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995)

4 Psychoanalytic Thought: Eros and Thanatos, Psyche and Soma

Jacques Lacan

Didier Anzieu

Julia Kristeva

5 The Deconstruction of Dualism: Death and the Subject

Jacques Derrida

Jean-Luc Nancy

Epilogue

Bibliography

Index

Copyright © Christina Howells 2011

The right of Christina Howells to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2011 by Polity Press

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Acknowledgements

There are many people I would like to thank for their help with this project, which I have been working on since 2002 – and probably longer. Wadham College and the University of Oxford have granted me several periods of sabbatical leave during this time, the John Fell Fund paid for some vital editing and translating and the AHRC generously funded an extra term’s leave in Spring 2010, during which I managed to complete the work. But there are also many individual friends and colleagues who have been kind enough to discuss ideas with me and correct and improve chapters, passages, and even sentences – whether because I was keen to share the excitement I felt at a new discovery or simply because I was suddenly terrified by the vastness of the task I had, perhaps foolishly, undertaken. These include Colin Davis, Jennifer Gosetti, Scott Sturgeon, Ralph Wedgewood, and my husband Bernard (who continues to regret that I did not include Ficino in my Introduction). Special thanks are due to Gerald Moore who read the whole typescript, translated the quotations, and was a great interlocutor and iconoclast. I should also like to thank my children, Marie-Elise and Dominic, for sometimes discussing Plato with me, or love, or death. The errors that remain are, of course, all my own. The study was initially inspired by the early death of John Flemming, Warden of Wadham from 1993 to 2003, who brought me face to face with mortality in a way I had not previously experienced.

Note

Material from Chapters 1 and 5 was published as ‘Mortal Subjects: Passions of the Soul in Sartre, Derrida and Nancy’, in Paragraph, A Journal of Modern Critical Theory, vol. 32, no. 2, July 2009, Theory-Tinged Criticism: Essays in Memory of Malcolm Bowie.

1

Introduction: Love and Death

Love’s mysteries in soules doe grow

But yet the body is his book.

(John Donne: The Extasie)

Only we see death.

The whole reach of death, even before one’s life is underway.

(Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies)

Several interweaving strands traverse this study, which attempts to explore the relations between body and soul, love and death, desire and passion. These have been the subjects of literature and philosophy from their origins and it may seem a hopeless or hubristic task to try to bring them together in a single book. But it does not seem possible to work on subjectivity in the twenty-first century without considering the mind–body relationship, and an investigation of human mortality tends to lead directly or indirectly to questions of love and desire. What is more, the impulse to undertake this work arose from an acute personal experience of love and death that has necessarily given the book much of its particular flavour and texture. The difficulty of reconciling philosophical reflection with experience is especially severe where mortality is concerned, and it seems as though grieving for the dead may never be able to escape the aporias that Derrida detects in Freud’s notion of the work of mourning.1 It is impossible as well as necessary to ‘mourn well’, that is to say to respect individual specificity at the same time as avoiding melancholia and abjection.2

The focus on death inevitably brings passion into the frame, for the relationship between love and death, and passion and death, seems to be more than intimate; it is intrinsic to human subjectivity. All experience is predicated on its ultimate transience, in other words on its death.3 It is the inevitable death of the other, be s/he friend, lover, mother, child, that gives our relationship with them its poignancy and intensity. This was the theme of all Derrida’s obituary eulogies for his friends, and will be an important element of this study. Friendship, love, and passion are always already permeated by loss and death. As I look on the face of my sleeping baby or lover I am acutely aware that I cannot contain or possess the moment. As Roland Barthes points out so beautifully, this provokes the pain and pleasure of the photograph which, in capturing the moment as it passes, brings us face-to-face with death, irrespective of whether the subject of the image is still alive when we contemplate his portrait.4Sic transit gloria mundi.

But awareness of transience does not simply give human experience its ambivalent and bitter-sweet quality as we try to hold onto the moment that we cannot suspend in its flight towards oblivion; it is fundamentally constitutive of that experience. In Rilke’s terms, ‘we live our lives, forever taking leave’.5 Human subjectivity does not pre-exist its relationship to the other: as we shall see, identity and alterity are mutually self-creating; indeed, one of the constants of twentieth-century French thought is precisely its sensitivity to the inescapable imbrication of self and other, subject and object, love and loss. It is our awareness of mortality that creates the lack or fissure in the self through which subjectivity is born; it ultimately prevents the closure that would ossify the subject and allow the rigid ego to take hold. In existential terms, we desire the impossible combination of liberty and identity – to know (and be) who we are while still remaining fully free. In psychoanalytic terms, we seek narcissistic closure, that is to say self-sufficiency and self-identity, but such closure would entail the death of the subject: paradoxically, perhaps, the subject remains alive and mobile only because of its relation to mortality, both its own and that of others.

It is love that makes us fear death, love of self, and love of the other: we fear losing our very selves when we risk losing what we love.6 And it is our anguish in the face of loss and death that lies at the heart of our uncertainty about the ontological significance of the body. If I am my body, I die when my body dies; but this prospect of ineradicable loss (be it of self or other) is precisely what is most inimical, since it puts my very identity at stake. Consequently, I am tempted to differentiate myself from my body in a form of natural dualism. But this dualism too founders, as we shall see, on the reefs of experience and imagination: if I – or the beloved – am not to be identified with the body, what does this mean for the powerful physical affection and desire that accompanies and arguably constitutes human love? We are trapped between the Scylla of dualism and the Charybdis of materialism in all our diverse attempts to understand and conceptualize human embodiment.

It will already be clear that, looked at in this way, the question of the relationship between subjectivity and mortality is not easily circumscribed. Indeed, this became increasingly evident to me throughout the writing of this project, as the paradoxical and even aporetic nature of this relationship made closure and conclusion impossible. Moreover, since it would not be feasible to write even a brief ‘history of everything’, much as I might like to, the subject matter itself will of course be limited. I shall focus in particular on French thought of the second half of the twentieth century, broadly understood, starting from phenomenology and existentialism (Sartre, Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty), ending with deconstruction (Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy), and exploring religious philosophy (Gabriel Marcel, Ricœur, Levinas, and Vladimir Jankélévitch) and psychoanalysis (Lacan, Kristeva, and Didier Anzieu) along the way, dipping, from time to time, into the texts of other theorists, such as Freud and Barthes. These approaches constitute the four major philosophical discourses about mortality and subjectivity of the twentieth century, and will enable us to explore how well the modern age deals with this most fundamental problematic.

Ancient and contemporary philosophers have, of course, examined these questions many times before, and I have drawn on them for inspiration and regulation as well as sparring partners. If Plato’s Symposium and Aristotle’s De Anima still engage modern lovers of wisdom, advances in neuroscience remind us of the very real claims of radical materialism, and analytic philosophy – by which I am surrounded in Oxford – has been a true friend in keeping me a little closer to the straight and narrow path, despite all my Continental wanderings. This introduction will attempt to situate my work fairly schematically with respect to a variety of different philosophical traditions, before passing on to a more detailed exploration of recent currents in French thought and theory. For this purpose I shall take as exemplary Aristotle and Descartes in particular, as well as some strands of the current debate between contemporary philosophy and neuroscience. Then I will look briefly at the implications of the notorious ‘death of the subject’ in twentieth-century French philosophy and consider how it relates to the issues of mortality, subjectivity, and passion that constitute the major preoccupations of this project.

Body and soul: some historical signposts

One of the major motifs of twentieth-century philosophy concerns the extent to which I am, or am not, identical with my body and, given the importance of this question for the conceptualization of subjectivity, it will constitute a recurrent theme throughout this book. Even the apparently materialist claim: ‘I am my body’, which is made by both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (EN, 391/326; PP, 175/174), contains a syntactic dualism at odds with its intention, a dualism which Jean-Luc Nancy attempts to overcome with his formulation ‘Corpus ego’ (Corpus, 26/27) and his insistence that ‘the soul is the body’ (C, 67/75). But the attempt to overcome dualism goes back at least as far as Aristotle’s refusal of Plato’s radical separation of soul and body (though the late texts of Plato do recognize a relationship between them).7 It is worth spending a little time with Aristotle now, not only because of the inherent interest of his texts, but more especially because his approach to the most fundamental questions of human existence – life and death, body and soul – is in many ways closer to those of the French philosophers whose work I want to explore than are the prevailing post-Cartesian preoccupations of contemporary philosophy of mind with its obsession with subjectivity, consciousness, and the problems of dualism.

For Aristotle, the soul is precisely the form of the (living) body, the vital, animating, principle without which the body would be purely material. This means that the soul is a feature of all living beings, not just of human beings, and one consequence of his interest in the principle of life is a concomitant concern with the death and decay of the body and the implications of this for the soul. (‘By life we mean self-nutrition and growth and decay.’ De Anima).8 Indeed, it has been claimed that, in the ordinary Greek of Aristotle’s day, ‘the antithetical term to psuche was not “body” but “death” ’.9 Exegetes and interpreters of Aristotle vary widely in their understanding of his views on the body/soul relationship, but one thing is certain: his various formulations all struggle precisely with the problem of how to express the intimacy of the relationship in terms which avoid identity:

Now given that there are bodies of such and such a kind, viz. having life, the soul cannot be a body; for the body is the subject or matter, not what is attributed to it. (De Anima, 412a)

That is why we can dismiss as unnecessary the question whether the soul and body are one; it is as though we were to ask whether the wax and its shape are one … It is clear that the soul is inseparable from its body, or at any rate that certain parts of it are (if it has parts). (De Anima, 412b–413a)

Since it is the soul by which primarily we live, perceive, and think … the body cannot be the actuality of soul; it is the soul which is the actuality of a certain kind of body. Hence the rightness of the view that the soul cannot be without a body, while it cannot be a body; it is not a body but something relative to a body. That is why it is in a body, and a body of a definite kind. It was a mistake, therefore, to do as former thinkers did, merely to fit it into a body without adding a definite specification of the kind or character of that body. (De Anima, 414a)

Aristotle believes that most of the faculties of the soul, such as desire, sensation, movement, are inseparable from the body, which means that his Psychology is necessarily a part of his Physics and that he is not satisfied with the apparent limitations of the expression ‘passions of the soul’ (or ‘affections of the soul’) which seems to overlook the body:

A further problem presented by the affections of the soul is this: are they all affections of the complex of body and soul, or is there any one among them peculiar to the soul by itself? To determine this is indispensable but difficult. If we consider the majority of them, there seems to be no case in which the soul can act or be acted upon without involving the body; e.g. anger, courage, appetite, and sensation generally … It seems that all the affections of the soul involve a body – passion, gentleness, fear, pity, courage, joy, loving and hating; in all these there is a concurrent affection of the body … Hence a physicist would define an affection of soul differently from a dialectician; the latter would define e.g. anger as the appetite for returning pain for pain, or something like that, while the former would define it as a boiling of the blood or warm substance surrounding the heart. The one assigns the material conditions, the other the form or account. (De Anima, 403a–b).

But this is not so clearly the case for the rational soul, some aspects of which (specifically the theoretical intellect, sometimes called ‘nous’) have an ambiguous, possibly immaterial status:10

Thinking seems the most probable exception; but if this too proves to be a form of imagination or to be impossible without imagination, it too requires a body as a condition of its existence. If there is any way of acting or being acted upon proper to soul, soul will be capable of separate existence; if there is none, its separate existence is impossible. (De Anima, 403a)

Aristotle’s wrestling with the enigma of the relationship between body and soul may appear to anticipate in some ways the views of Descartes and the post-Cartesians who attempt to explain the union of body and soul in the human being, or, in more contemporary terms, the lived interdependence of body and mind, consciousness and brain; but it is important to bear in mind that his frame of reference is indisputably the attempt to understand the soul as the principle of life rather than as subjective or intentional consciousness.11 Indeed there is no term in Ancient Greek truly corresponding to ‘consciousness’,12 even though Aristotle does occasionally reflect on the question (or aporia) of self-awareness, or of how precisely we are (reflectively) aware that we see, hear or think, suggesting that all our senses ‘are accompanied by a common power, in virtue whereof a person perceives that he sees or hears’:13

If he who sees perceives that he sees … and in the case of all other activities similarly there is something which perceives that we are active, so that if we perceive, we perceive that we perceive, and if we think, that we think. (Nichomachean Ethics, 1170a)14

As I have indicated, however, his preoccupation with the principle of life, and with questions such as the mortality and the necessary and intimate embodiment of the individual soul,15 bring him far closer to recent attempts by philosophers such as Jean-Luc Nancy to bypass Cartesianism and natural dualism than to the philosophers of mind or of consciousness who currently dominate the intellectual arena, at least in analytic philosophy. And if Aristotle has been variously assimilated to the contemporary camps of Dualists, Physicalists, and Functionalists, this very variety must surely warn us that any such appropriation inevitably involves a degree of violence to the spirit as well as the letter of Aristotle’s work.16

This is perhaps a good moment for a brief note on terminology. Not only do we need to try to understand the Ancient terminology of Soul and so on in modern terms, and Psuche is of course far broader than the Christian ‘soul’ not least because it is to be found in all living beings; but there is also a more contemporary problem: ‘Mind’ does not have a real equivalent in French. ‘Ame’ (soul) is too spiritual, but ‘Esprit’ (Spirit) is not much better, and has other meanings such as wit. ‘Conscience’ is fine as a French translation for ‘consciousness’ (despite the fact that in French it cannot be distinguished from conscience) but will not do for Mind either. Some contemporary French philosophers have opted to force the issue and declared that Philosophy of Mind will be termed ‘philosophie de l’esprit’, despite the violence this does to ordinary usage. Derrida entitled one of his collections of essays Psyche, and he spends many pages exploring a multiplicity of different meanings for the term. In any case, this fundamental lack of equivalence between epochs and between languages means that this book will not be able to maintain a consistent terminology throughout: my solution will be to use the terms of the philosopher in question, and to invite the reader to bear in mind the terminological pitfalls. The alternative would seem to be to abandon the whole enterprise, or else to force old wine into new bottles (or vice versa), at considerable cost.

Questions of terminology should not then deter us from attempting to situate contemporary French thought with respect to Ancient and Classical philosophy, nor from seeking the common beliefs that underlie the different vocabularies of Ancient Greek, Latin, Modern French, and English. The desire to explore the interconnection between body and soul, or mind, seems perennial, and arguably even more urgent in the modern age, as advances in science enable progressively greater understanding of the relationship between mind and brain. Descartes is of course a vital figure in this history for, although the exact nature of his metaphysical dualism is a contentious issue, his conception of man as made up of two substances, res cogitans (the rational soul, or mind) and res extensa (corporeal substance), and his attempts to explain their interaction still remain a common philosophical reference point. If we are seeking similarities beneath the differences, we will note that Aristotle considered the heart to be the centre of the soul, whereas Descartes located the central link between body and soul in the pineal gland in the brain, and we nowadays consider the brain to be the physical origin of mind. But, despite these attempts at precise location, both Descartes and Aristotle connect the soul with the body as a whole as well as recognizing its special relationship to a central organ. Indeed, Descartes makes clear that the soul cannot be located ‘in one bodily part to the exclusion of the others’, though its principal seat in the centre of the brain is the only ‘part of the body in which the soul exercises its functions immediately’.17

But Descartes and Aristotle none the less have quite different views of the role the soul plays with respect to the body, since for Aristotle it is the source of life, whereas Descartes explicitly refuses such a notion and insists, in a reversal of scholastic natural philosophy, that the life of the body is entirely self-sufficient, arising from the heat in our heart, so that death does not occur when the soul leaves the body, but rather the soul leaves the body because death has occurred (naturally) and the body has become cold and corruptible.18 Soul then, for Descartes, is the principle not of life but of thought.

Furthermore, Aristotle and Descartes react in very different ways to the ancient, physical conceptions of the soul as fire, water, blood, sperm etc., whose substantialism Aristotle mocks in the first section of De Anima, before making explicit his own view of soul as the animating form of the body. Descartes on the other hand confesses to having himself previously imagined the soul as ‘something tenuous, like a wind or fire or ether’,19 and he is considered by many to have retained a substantialist view of the soul, albeit as a non-material thinking substance. What is certain, in any case, is that Descartes identifies his self primarily with his soul rather than with his body, as the Sixth Meditation makes clear: ‘It is certain that I [that is my soul, by which I am what I am] am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it’,20 though he does also refer to himself as ‘a being composed of mind and body’ or of ‘body and soul’, and maintains that he forms a single unity with his body:

Nature also teaches me by these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst and so on, that I am not only present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship,21 but that I am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit… . For these sensations of hunger, thirst, pain and so on are nothing but confused modes of thinking which arise from the union and, as it were, intermingling of the mind with the body.22

We notice here the shifts between ‘soul’ (âme, anima) and ‘mind’ (esprit, mens) and the apparent interchangeability of the two terms, which is made explicit later in the same Meditation when, speaking of the divisibility of the body and the indivisibility of the mind, Descartes concludes: ‘This would be enough to show me that the mind [esprit] or soul [âme] of man is entirely different from the body, if I had not already learned it from other sources’.23 Such an identification through apposition of course coheres fully with Descartes’s repeated description of the soul as ‘nothing but a thing which thinks’.24 None the less, Descartes is very willing to discuss the consequences of the embodiment of the soul:

I do not see any difficulty in allowing on the one hand that the faculties of imagination and sensation belong to the soul, because they are species of thoughts, and on the other hand that they belong to the soul only as joined to the body, because they are the kinds of thoughts without which one can conceive the soul entirely pure.25

Descartes’s contention that the ‘esprits animaux’ (‘vital spirits’ – tiny, rarified corpuscles carried by nerves and blood) mediate between body and soul via the brain26 may seem to some commentators27 to anticipate contemporary neurological theories of psychosomatic interaction, as for example when he argues that ‘when a mind joined to a body thinks of a corporeal thing, certain particles in the brain are set in motion’,28 or that ‘there is no doubt that the soul has great power over the body, as is shown by the great bodily changes produced by anger, fear, and the other passions’.29 Indeed, he recognizes that the process is a two-way affair:

In man the brain is also acted on by the soul which has some power to change cerebral impressions just as those impressions in their turn have the power to arouse thoughts which do not depend on the will.30

Or again:

The principal seat of the passions in so far as they are corporeal, is the heart, since that is principally affected by them; but in so far as they affect also the mind, their seat is in the brain, since only the brain can act directly upon the mind.31

And Descartes is even willing to speak of the soul itself as material or corporeal in so far as it is united to the body32 But more interesting for our purposes is the role played by love in the mysterious union of body and soul, for Descartes considers joy and love to have been the soul’s first passionate reactions to its own embodiment.33 And of course passionate love itself necessarily depends on body as much as on soul, for soul on its own would be capable only of intellectual or rational love whereas the sensuous element arises from the fact that the soul is joined to the body.34 And if Descartes is inclined at times to belittle such passion as ‘nothing but a confused thought, aroused in the soul by some motion of the nerves’, his rhetoric betrays his own attraction to, and perhaps knowledge of, such an experience:

So, in love, a mysterious heat is felt around the heart, and a great abundance of blood in the lungs, which makes us open our arms as if to embrace something, and this makes the soul join to itself in volition the object presented to it.35

Usually, Descartes maintains, rational and sensuous love combine in human passion, though they can of course be separated:

Commonly, however, these two loves occur together; because the two are so linked that when the soul judges an object to be worthy of it, this immediately disposes the heart to the motions which excite the passion of love; and when the heart is similarly disposed by other causes, that makes the soul imagine loveable qualities in objects in which, at another time, it would see nothing but faults.36

This understanding of passion creates an intriguing dilemma for Descartes where love of God is concerned, because, logically, love of God can only be rational or intellectual, since in Descartes’s view ‘nothing about God can be visualized by the imagination’37 which would be necessary for love to be sensuous or passionate. However, he claims to understand those philosophers who consider that it is only through the Christian religion and the mystery of the Incarnation that we can truly love God. Furthermore, he even suggests that the only possible way for us to love God passionately is via imagination, not of God because that is impossible, but, indirectly (and one might even say deviously) through imagination of love itself and of the union it affords, since ‘the idea of such a union by itself is sufficient to produce heat around the heart and cause a violent passion’.38 We may perhaps think in this context of the sheer sensuality and mystical lyricism of the biblical Song of Solomon to which we will return later in the context of Kristeva’s analyses of religious love.

It is clear from the convoluted nature of Descartes’s argument that he finds himself with a logical conclusion from which he is attempting strenuously to escape, even at the cost of partial self-contradiction. For even if the soul is the highest part of the human being it might still seem an impoverishment if love of God were to be restricted to the purely rational realm, whereas love of other men and women could be passionate, that is both rational and sensuous. Descartes’s contention that the source of life is purely bodily, and independent of the soul, also creates potential problems where the death of a loved one is concerned; for the body may be a mere machine, functioning through the heat of the heart and blood, and the self may, as we have seen, be identified primarily with the mind, but where does this leave the passions of the soul which arise from the interaction of body and mind and which give human love its sensuous, bodily aspect? If love for another is passionate, that is to say sensuous as well as rational, where does this leave it at the moment of death, when the separation of body and soul is definitive? Its rational aspect can of course continue, in a love for the eternal soul that survives death, but its sensuous dimension is doomed to mourn a mere machine or corrupt corpse. A less radical separation of body and soul is needed if mourning is to avoid abjection.

Socrates, we remember, forbade his friends to mourn him at his death, since he would not himself be dying – only his body would decay. Such dualistic Platonism is hard for the bereaved, and inimical to the human experience of love. What is more, and necessarily more speculative, what does this separation mean for the soul which experienced, Descartes suggested, joy and love at the moment of its embodiment? Disembodied, it can no longer experience passion in the full sense, but a form of intellectual sadness at its loss might perhaps be expected at the dissolution of a union necessarily more powerful and intimate than that between any human couple.39

Since Descartes, philosophical attempts to understand the mind–body relationship have almost all started from Cartesian dualism, whether to deepen its foundations or attempt to contradict it. Descartes’s own view is that the senses and ‘the ordinary course of life’ and experience lead us to view ourselves as a single unity of soul and body, and that only abstract metaphysical reflection can make us question this and query just how ‘the soul moves the body and the body acts on the soul’.40 Be this as it may, much post-Cartesian philosophy and thought seems, on the contrary, to take the separation rather than the unity of body and mind for granted and to expend a great deal of its effort in trying, like Descartes himself, to understand their apparent interaction.

There are however some notable exceptions to this. Already in the immediate wake of Descartes, Spinoza rejects out of hand all attempts to explain mind–body interaction, maintaining the very notion to be unintelligible, and proposing rather a theory of a single substance (Deus sive natura) expressed as two attributes: ‘mind and body are one and the same thing, conceived now under the attribute of Thought, now under the attribute of Extension’,41 both of which are subject to causality rather than freely self-determining.42 In this way, Spinoza attempts to refute Descartes’s substance dualism and, a fortiori, his contention that reason can control passion, or mind direct the body. In Part V of the Ethics, he takes ‘this illustrious person’ directly to task for what he describes as his ‘occult’ theory of mind–body union passing through the pineal gland, and argues that the Cartesian conception involves such a radical initial distinction as to render any subsequent interaction incomprehensible. The power of the mind, in Spinoza’s view, lies not in the will but rather in the understanding and, since mind and body are two ways of envisaging the same substance, all understanding, be it ostensibly of mind or body, is necessarily a form of self-understanding and not therefore in need of a third element to explain it. Indeed, Spinoza defines a ‘passion’ precisely as an emotion that has not been adequately understood, and before which we are therefore passive and reactive. It is self-knowledge, not the will, that enables us to be agents, and thus self-knowledge that makes us free, or at least relatively free.

Like Descartes, Spinoza makes special room for love in his epistemology and ethics: he conceives it as an affect or emotion that involves knowledge, for love is defined as ‘joy accompanied by an idea of its cause’, and he contends that it involves contentment in the presence of its object.43 And again like Descartes, Spinoza envisages the union of body and mind in human embodiment as a source of joy, grounded in love, (‘What a union! What a love!’),44 but since, in his conception, the body and mind that are ‘united’ are also already one, their union is inextricable. None the less, Spinoza does seem, perhaps unwittingly, to allow for an implicit separation between body and mind in so far as he argues that the mind is subject to passive emotions ‘only while the body endures’, and that therefore only intellectual love is eternal. All this leads ultimately to a position where God’s self-love is perfect and infinite, and the mind’s (intellectual) love is subsumed within God’s love (218–19). Once again, it is unclear where this leaves the very human – and cherished – aspect of physical love, which appears, in the last analysis, to be dispensable. But apart from this enduring problem, what we might call Spinoza’s early compatibilism arguably constitutes a convincing early attempt to resolve some of the thornier aspects of the mind–body problem raised by the Cartesian position.

Later in the century, Malebranche’s contribution to the mind–body debate radicalizes the dualist position, as he proposes a form of parallelism, or occasionalism, according to which we are composed of two substances which work together but with no causal or necessary relationship between them.45 Leibniz’s alternative to this occasionalism is that of a pre-established harmony, probably most familiar through the memorable image of two clocks keeping time with each other with no need for any mutual interaction46 which he uses to express his hypothesis of ‘the perfect agreement of all the substances’.47 Indeed, Leibniz argues against Descartes that it is ‘inconceivable’ that the soul and body should have any influence on one another and that such an interaction would be incompatible with the laws of nature.48

Furthermore, unlike Descartes and Malebranche, Leibniz considers that the true reality is in fact mind, and that matter is merely phenomenal, the visible face of an invisible reality. And against Spinoza, Leibniz maintains that rather than being ‘free only in appearance’, we are, on the contrary, ‘determined in appearance only … and are perfectly independent’.49 These various and complex interpretations of mind and body mean that human self-understanding is bound to be problematic, to say the least, and Malebranche for example reverses Descartes’s contention that our minds are necessarily much easier to understand than our bodies,50 claiming repeatedly that we are mere shadows for ourselves.51 Indeed, Descartes’s optimism about the possibility of self-understanding seems to have been the aspect of his philosophy that found least favour with his successors. Hume famously goes so far as to contest the very idea of a self-identical ‘me’, arguing that the mind is no more than a bundle or collection of different perceptions in constant flux, though he still maintains that experience shows that the mind can voluntarily influence the body despite the fact that we do not understand how it does so.52

Later in the eighteenth century, Kant argues powerfully that the Cartesian proofs of the simplicity and unity of the soul are untenable because they depend on paralogisms of reason: it is not possible, he insists, to move from the cogito to the res cogitans, that is, from my awareness of thinking to the assertion that ‘I am a thinking thing.’ Ultimately, Kant argues, in his defence of transcendental idealism, I can have no possible knowledge of my self or my soul, only of their phenomenal appearances; nor, a fortiori, can I have any knowledge of how ‘communion between thinking beings and extended beings’ is possible, nor any knowledge of how or whether ‘the soul after the cessation of all communion with the corporeal world could still continue to think’.53

Dualism has not, of course, had total dominance in the human attempt at self-understanding, as is evidenced by the early materialism of philosophers such as Democritus and Epicurus who maintained that the soul was a body composed of very fine particles. And, following Spinoza, materialism was further explored by eighteenth-century sensualist (or ‘sensationalist’) philosophers such as Hobbes, D’Holbach, and La Mettrie, who saw matter as active and sensitive, not inert, and by ideologues such as Cabanis in the nineteenth century whose radical materialism led him to compare the brain’s production of thought to the liver’s secretion of bile, and to argue that ‘all moral affections and intellectual faculties reside in the nerves’.54 La Mettrie is a particularly interesting case in the context of a discussion of passion, as he focused particularly on sensual pleasure, and considered love a test-case in so far as ‘all the passions are eclipsed by the passion of loving’.55 In his version of materialism, erotic love involves what we usually refer to as body and soul, sensory feeling, and imaginative anticipation, and recollection, so that the highest form of pleasure produces a kind of (psychosomatic) ecstasy, or volupté, of the heart as much as of the body.56 Indeed, in ‘L’Art de Jouir’ [‘The Art of Enjoyment’] he writes, ‘It is not the jouissance of bodies but rather that of souls that I need.’57 Passion may ultimately be a matter of nervous excitation, tension, and disturbance of the blood, but our experience of it is in no way diminished by its corporeal underpinning.

Mind and body: some twentieth-century attempts

Twentieth-century philosophers too have found a wide variety of ways of opposing or bypassing dualism. Before we turn to our central concern with French philosophy, we will look finally, and briefly, at a few of the alternative strands of thought, focusing in particular on those where questions of passion or death are primary issues. Wittgenstein famously criticized dualism as a deeply damaging way of imagining the human; however, he is arguably not the anti-mentalist he has sometimes been seen as, but rather, like many of his predecessors, someone who is interested in ‘soul’ and ‘body’ as different ways of referring to the human being; indeed he frequently refers to the ‘soul’, describing for example the face as ‘the soul of the body’, or discussing the look of enchantment exchanged between lovers. Indeed, he claimed in a memorable phrase that ‘the human body is the best picture of the human soul’.58

Gilbert Ryle also dismissed what he called the ‘official doctrine’ of the mind–body relationship as absurd, describing it as ‘the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine’ and arguing that it results from the Cartesian ‘category mistake’ of conceiving mind and matter as similar kinds of entity, whereas in fact there are no distinct mental and physical worlds, but rather mental processes are intelligent acts and are not distinguishable from them.59 In a sense, Ryle, like Spinoza, ‘solves’ the mind–body problem at a stroke by denying that it exists.

None the less, the human need to understand what, at the very least, seems to be a dualism between mind and body at the heart of experience never really disappears, though it changes in nature in accordance, at least in part, with the progress of science and in particular biology. Many twentieth-century philosophers including Quine60 subscribe to the views of neuroscientists such as J-P Changeux61 that emotions, for example, simply are microphysical changes in the brain. There are, of course, more or less subtle versions of this view, ranging from Identity Theory which considers mental states to be identical to brain processes, through Epiphenomenalism which maintains that mental states are passive effects of brain activity and that there is a causal link between them, to the Eliminative Materialism propounded by Paul and Patricia Churchland62 who dismiss all psychological descriptions and explanations as quite simply false and misleading. The drawback of these reductionist theories is perhaps self-evident: they take no real account of human experience and seek to deny, often dogmatically, what seems transparently obvious in the natural attitude (Descartes’s ‘ordinary course of life’).

And objections to contemporary reductionism come from a variety of eminent sources such as Paul Ricœur in his dialogues with Changeux, for example;63 or Popper,64 who is prepared to accept parallelism between body and mind, and perhaps even identity, but who considers that cause and interaction between them occurs sometimes in one direction, sometimes in another (which was, we remember, Descartes’s view also); or indeed David Chalmers, an anti-materialist philosopher of Mind who conceives consciousness as an irreducible dimension of nature, like gravity or electromagnetism.65 A further possible position is represented by John Searle who, like Ryle, considers the mind–body problem to be a false one, and who attempts to achieve a non-reductionist materialism. Searle maintains an unusual position as a biological naturalist who insists on the irreducibility of consciousness, and on subjectivity as one of its fundamental characteristics. He accepts that conscious states are caused by low-level neurobiological processes in the brain, but insists that neither behaviourism nor the computationalism of cognitive science can adequately account for them and that consciousness, subjectivity, and intentionality all need further extensive philosophical and scientific investigation.66 Given the state of neuro-science today and its ability to recognize the brain activity and patterns which accompany mental states and activities but not to read from the brain to the mind, there is probably no compelling reason to accept more than a very limited materialism which recognizes the necessary connection between mind and brain but eschews a premature and perhaps ultimately unwarranted reduction of the former to the latter.67

Once again, passion and death seem to provide test cases for contemporary materialism. It is easy to see how philosophies inspired by current neuroscience may relegate love to being a mere by-product of the chemical changes in the brain caused by neuro-transmitters carrying endorphins, serotonin, oxytocin, and dopamine etc. which have undeniably been observed to accompany and perhaps even cause the experience commonly referred to as ‘falling in love’. Indeed, this is one of the aspects of neuroscience which has most captured the popular imagination, and is arguably most dangerous in its simplifications which leap from brain imagery to subjective representations in a move which is unsupported by current science.68

Death too may seem unproblematic if there is no room for mind, spirit or soul beyond the epiphenomenal effects of activity in the brain. Death of the brain will automatically entail death of all aspects of the person, including those we might usually consider to be mental, emotional or even spiritual. Radical materialism can certainly de-dramatize our experiences of passion and mortality. None the less, a desire for a more human and humane understanding of such fundamental experiences as love and death is often manifest between the lines of even the most apparently reductionist thinkers. Quine, for example, despite his espousal of the discoveries of neuroscience, always insisted on the irreducibility of the mental and claimed never to have denied the existence of consciousness, arguing rather that ‘consciousness is … a mystery, and not one to be dismissed’.69

Again, neurobiologist Francis Crick actively encourages work towards an explanation of consciousness in his collaborative work with Kristof Koch.70 And J-P Changeux himself shows in Raison et Plaisir (2002),71 as well as in his willingness to work with the Christian philosopher Paul Ricœur72 in a text which claims Spinoza as a conceptual precursor, that he wants to understand the origin of emotions such as love rather than simply dismiss them. This scientific humanism is also evident in his work as President of a French consultative committee on ethics and in his insistence on the need for further reflection on issues such as consciousness, truth, beauty, and goodness.73

Similarly, neurophysiologist Marc Jeannerod has collaborated with psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Hochman in a joint attempt to understand the nature of mind,74 as well as in his own explorations of human emotions, thought, consciousness, and memory in Le Cerveau intime75 and La Nature de l’esprit,76 Again, another contemporary biologist, Jean-Didier Vincent, has also worked closely in recent years with the philosopher Luc Ferry77 on the question of human freedom, as well as investigating the nature of passion in single-authored texts including Biologie des passions78 and Le Cœur des autres: une biologie de la compassion.79

Neuroscience and materialism are then often very far from evacuating human subjectivity and passion or dissolving them in the neurological tangle of synapses, neurons, and neurotransmitters. And indeed, some neurologists go even further and explore the interconnection and interdependence between subjectivity and emotion in a way that bears witness to the persistent deep complexity of the human, even in an age of radical demystification. Neurologist Antonio Damasio has made an exceptional contribution to this question in his integration of emotions into the mainstream explanatory schema of neuroscience.80 Damasio has developed a theory of the three-fold emergence of the conscious self from the body, involving first a ‘proto-self’ which regulates the homeostasis of the body; secondly the development of self-awareness in the ‘I’; and finally the ‘autobiographical self’ which recounts its own narrative history.

It is the second stage that is of most interest here, for it places emotion at the core of subjectivity. Consciousness is a physical/emotional reaction to a stimulus, it is self-generated and self-aware, it is the very act of relating; there is no ‘clever homunculus … You are the music while the music lasts’.81 Physical emotions do not manifest feelings, they generate them: ‘There is no central feeling state before the respective emotion occurs, that expression (emotion) precedes feeling’.82

Emotion is the body’s response to powerful stimuli that might harm or help us and, in Damasio’s terms, ‘feeling’ is our conscious awareness of (physical) emotion, and is the source of our sense of self and subjectivity. Not only can mind not exist or operate without body, so that ‘pure rational thought’ is impossible, but when we approximate to it – as in the case of patients who have suffered damage to the frontal regions of the brain and who are unable to respond emotionally to graphic images of sex and violence – we are, in Daniel Dennett’s terms, ‘pathetically ill-equipped … for the real world’.83 The ‘cool-headed, passionless thinkers philosophy has tended to encourage as the ideal’84 are in fact unable to respond appropriately or, indeed, make decisions under pressure, since they lack the necessary emotional responses to enable social cognition and decision-making. Damasio could not be further from reducing human reason, art, and morality to chemicals and neural pathways: on the contrary he is trying rather to understand the highest of human activities, which can never be ‘pure’ reason. As Dennett points out, such ideas are not entirely new: they are to be found in Aristotle, in Nietzsche, and more recently in psychologist Nicholas Humphrey85 who himself quotes Zarathustra’s comments ‘on the despisers of the body’: ‘Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage – whose name is self. In your body he dwells; he is your body. There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom’.86

So, human passion is still clearly at the centre of even the most radically materialist philosophical theories, just as the nature of death necessarily continues to fascinate contemporary investigators of human life, such as biologists and neurologists, whatever their attitudes to the spiritual and metaphysical. None the less, passion and death are not usually discussed together in modern philosophy or science, despite their intimate proximity in psychoanalysis, any more than are mortality and subjectivity, despite their necessary alliance in the constitution of the human. Having explored very briefly some of the main strands of philosophical enquiry into the nature of the human – body and soul, heart and mind, brain and consciousness – we can now turn to the core of our discussion, that is to say, the intertwining themes of mortality and subjectivity, love and death, in (late) twentieth-century French philosophy.

Death and the subject in recent French philosophy

Despite their intimate imbrication, then, mortality and subjectivity are not often analysed in conjunction with one another. Modern philosophy has produced a vast range of theories of subjectivity, from the Cartesian cogito through Kant’s unity of apperception, Husserl’s transcendental ego, Sartre’s non-self-identical subject, to the fragmented and decentred subject of post-structuralism and deconstruction. But what is generally explored in the theorization of subjectivity is its genesis, its constitution, its essence (or lack of essence), its identity, and its relation to otherness, not its disintegration, weakness, and ultimate dissolution in the radical alterity of death. Critiques of the subject tend to assume its coherence, independence, and voluntarism: they set up the subject as a straw man whose overweening pretensions to unity and autonomy are all the easier to demolish; they rarely allow for conceptions of subjectivity which already manifest the vulnerability and fragility which they claim characterize the subject as it should be understood. But the link between subjectivity and mortality lies at the heart of this study: what happens to the subject in death? What does the embodiment of subjectivity mean for the subject at the point of death? And how do these fundamental questions relate to the ‘death of the subject’ as it was understood in the second half of the twentieth century?

When we reflect on human mortality, we are usually light years away from the so-called ‘death of the subject’, where death is used as a metaphor – and on this occasion I would wish to say a mere metaphor – to refer to a complex epistemological change in which one conception is gradually, or even suddenly, replaced by another. We have not been able, of course, really to think the death of the Subject, or the death of Man, or even the death of God. The Subject, Man, and God are still with us in diverse guises. And the phrases themselves imply on some level an aggression: the death of God, or the subject, is not something we are encouraged to mourn (though some may), it is rather held up before us as a kind of challenge, a challenge to assist in the declared demise, or at least to celebrate it. Here, of course, positions have changed over time.

Derrida’s appeal in ‘Structure, sign, and play’ of 1966 to the joyous Nietzschean affirmation of a ‘world of signs […] without truth or origin’87 perhaps needs to be compared to what he later calls the ‘jubilatory’ phase of mourning,88 and contrasts sharply with his rebuke to Jean-Luc Nancy in 1989 when the latter asks him to comment on the ‘liquidation’ of the subject.89 For, as he is quick to remind Nancy, he never spoke of the liquidation of the subject, any more than did Lacan, Foucault, Althusser or Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe among others. The very term ‘liquidate’, Derrida remarks, has no philosophical meaning: it comes rather from the register of finance, terrorism, and banditry. It implies something negative that calls out for redress. The post Freudian, post Marxian, post Nietzschean reinterpretation of a decentred subject is, Derrida argues, a very different matter. This is probably, perhaps certainly, true. But the tone of some of Derrida’s early writings is arguably less measured, and Foucault’s proclamation of the ‘disappearance of man’ may have been simplified and misrepresented, but its connotations are undeniably celebratory.90

But mortality itself is a very different matter. The term has not yet, to my knowledge, been hijacked by the anti-humanist lobby. Nor is it usually associated with a concept: the death of Man, the mortality of man, have a very different sense, the former describes the end of an outmoded notion, the latter an inevitable and inescapable part of the human condition. I want now to try to think about human mortality in the light of the death of Man. It is a task I have been drawn to by personal circumstances, but then, these are precisely the circumstances of us all: those we love most will die, we ourselves will die. What is singular for me is thereby also universal. Auden was wrong, as well as right, when he said ‘We must love one another or die’. We must love one another and die.91