Between Spinoza and Kant: Catherine Malabou, Freud, Damasio and Žižek

As we have seen in the Introduction, the current crisis of climate change calls into doubt traditional oppositions between natural history and human history. Our contemporary environmental predicament has made us cognisant of our being a physical force of nature, far from residing in a disembodied, intellectual/spiritual realm. Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer's term ‘Anthropocene’ describes humanity's predominating presence in nature that derails homeostasis to the tipping point of planetary collapse.

Against this background, the following chapter introduces the problem of a traditional divide between nature and society, between science and ethics, which is premised on Descartes's prioritisation of the mind over the body. Our present condition of an Anthropocene planetary crisis in fact collapsed the still regnant philosophical proposition which assumes various divisions between the natural and the human, between nature and society, between natural and human history.

One striking proponent of the hold of this philosophical axiom which demotes the embodied world as inferior, if not delusory, is Slavoj Žižek, who argues that our experience in the world is purely a mental one and that all corporeal experiences are nothing but illusions. One target of Žižek's polemics against a Spinozan parallelism of mind and body is contemporary neuroscience. Žižek establishes his own Cartesian and Kantian position as progressive and labels Spinoza's notion of the mind as the idea of the body as regressive. Contemporary neuroscientific findings have backed up Spinoza's philosophical alternative to a Cartesian prioritisation of the cerebral over the corporeal, showing that the mind not so much controls as depends on bodily inputs.

Turning the tables on Žižek's self-proclaimed progressive stance, this chapter therefore analyses his dismissal of contemporary neuroscience as philosophical regression. What causes Žižek's unease with cognitive science is precisely a Spinozan conception of a parallelism of mind and body (rather than a controlling position of the former over the latter). In contrast to Catherine Malabou's recent account of the incompatibility of contemporary neuroscience and psychoanalysis, this chapter analyses the ways in which Freud's critique of both philosophical and theological prioritisations of the mind over the body anticipates neuroscientific findings of various contaminations between the cerebral and the corporeal. Freud locates the site of this interconnection between mind and body in the libido, the product of contamination. The libido is neither purely cerebral nor purely physical: it is both.