Repository | Book | Chapter
(2016) The metamorphoses of the brain, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
With the neuroturn sexuality has lost the determining status it had within classical Freudian theory; today, when it comes to causality, the brain has usurped it. Does such a shift not produce a paradoxical desexualisation, which can be traced back to cultural phenomena such as Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response? To understand this I engage with the work of Cathérine Malabou, who, through her reworking of the Hegelian notion of plasticity rejects any Kantian transcendentality to the brain. Hereto, Malabou, firstly, inevitably has to reproduce a heavily anti-psychoanalytic discourse (rejecting its understandings of sexuality and trauma), and, secondly, is forced to buttress her strong ontological claim with psychology, which is where, I claim, she is subsumed by the very transcendental spectres she attempted to ward off.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-50557-6_5
Full citation:
De Vos, J. (2016). The sexual brain: against neuro-plasticity, in The metamorphoses of the brain, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 129-167.
This document is unfortunately not available for download at the moment.