This article explores Catherine Malabou’s philosophical foray into neuroscience, especially her continuing work on the topics of brain plasticity and epigenesis. I lay the groundwork for a productive intersection of Malabou’s philosophy with Lacanian psychoanalytic film theory, despite Malabou’s tendency to treat the brain’s plasticity as an issue beyond the scope of the Freudian-Lacanian conception of the unconscious. Through consideration of Todd McGowan’s development of a Lacanian ontology, and by reference to the structure of derivative finance in late capitalism, especially (...) as depicted in The Big Short (Adam McKay, 2015), the article argues in favor of an epigenesis of desire, in which attentiveness to the sedimented layers and conflicted temporalities of the brain’s synaptic connections may prove illuminating for philosophical studies of films that adopt a pedagogical stance toward recent historical or political events. (shrink)

This article draws on Lacanian theory in order to analyse the role of technology in the constitution of posthuman subjects. It does so by focussing firstly on those aspects of Lacan's teachings that engage with science and technology, particularly the concept of the ‘alethosphere’ developed in Seminar XVII, which refers to an environment of gadgets that plug directly into human desire. The article then goes on to apply this notion of the ‘alethosphere’ to a key technological, cultural and also political (...) example: the interactive, touch-screen electoral maps made popular during the 2008 American election. Through a close analysis of one use of such maps during a CNN broadcast, the author demonstrates both the essential meaninglessness of this technology, and the support it nonetheless provides to the search for meaning, in the form of a unified American national subject emerging consensually from the spectacle of the process of democracy. (shrink)