Affect, Cognition and the Neurosciences

Like many academic disciplines in the twenty first century the humanities have been deeply affected by developments in the brain sciences. Conceptually this has meant that some of the major preoccupations of the previous century, like those adhering to a Cartesian division between mind and body or the psychoanalytical conscious/unconscious duality, have been supplanted by a new kind of neurological relation; that is to say, the relation established between a diminished mental faculty and the imperceptible governing power of the nonconsciousthis. What is presented here is focused on a theoretically contested notion of the neurological nonconscious that has produced two differently orientated strands in the posthumanities. The discussion focuses on attempts to assimilate a contested understanding of the nonconscious in a remodelled cognitive theoretical framework, on one hand, and a new materialist rendering of affect theory, on the other.