Neuroscientific discoveries have failed to transform identity or living practice

Evidence

About Antonioni’s cinematic work, Deleuze declares: ”Antonioni does not criticize the modern world, in whose possibility he profoundly ‘believes’: he criticizes the coexistence in the world of a modern brain and an exhausted body.” We could say in the same way that today we live the ”coexistence of a modern brain and an exhausted identity.” All the fascinating discoveries of the neurosciences remain a dead letter for us, never managing to destroy our old representations of the brain (for example, that of the machine brain), because they are incapable of unleashing possibilities, of unleashing new ways of living and—why be afraid of the word?—new ways to be happy. It must be acknowledged that neuronal liberation has not liberated us. Long-term potentiation and depression cannot be the first and last words on the plasticity of a self, in other words, on its modification by experience. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 221

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘modern brain and exhausted identity’ dichotomy parallels the reader’s interest in plasticity vs flexibility: neuro-science offers a flexible body but no plastic self.
• DEFINE: ‘Modification by experience’ is offered as defining plasticity of the self — relevant to distinguishing plasticity (self-transformation) from mere flexibility.