The Political Brain: The Brain as a Political Invention

Abstract

In this concluding chapter I interrogate William C. Connolly’s neuropolitics and Brian Massumi’s politics of affect, in particular their claims to have finally transcended a politics grounded in rationalist and subjectivist rationales. Through recourse to Robert Pfaller’s and Slavoj Žižek’s concept of interpassivity, it is first argued that the brain might be the ultimate expression of interpassivity (we outsource our being to our brains). Then, from rereading Benjamin Libet’s famous experiments on how an intention becomes conscious, in conjunction with Daniel Dennett’s critique of Libet, the chapter reinterprets the old slogan “the personal is political”. Finally, concluding that the interpassive brain is an explicitly political issue, it is subsequently claimed that both Connolly and Massumi risk reproducing the rationale of today’s neuropsycho-politics and neuropsycho-economy.