Mortal Subjects

Christina Howells

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745652757, 9780745652740
• eBook ISBN: 9780745636290
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

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.

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.⁴ Sic 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 m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Love and Death
• 2 Phenomenology of Emotion and Forgetfulness of Death
• 3 Religious Philosophy: Keeping Body and Soul Together
• 4 Psychoanalytic Thought: Eros and Thanatos, Psyche and Soma
• 5 The Deconstruction of Dualism: Death and the Subject
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index