ABSTRACT
This book begins by questioning the conditions of possibility and impossibility of the neurosciences and the humanities: “How far does the legitimacy of the neurosciences extend? How is the relation of the neurosciences to the humanities to be thought”? Yet, as I have been delving into the contributors’ ideas, the power of the claims of neuroscience has never seemed more weak and fragile. For all of the increasing repetition of ‘brain talk’ in policy, business, medicine, education and everyday speech, the connection between this brain talk and power seems less and less persuasive. Foucault once said, “critique is the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its effects of power and question power on its discourses of truth” (Foucault, ([1978]1997, p. 47). The first step in a critique of neuroscience, then, might be to question the apparently ubiquitous claims about the legitimacy of neuroscience (the Decade of the Brain, the Human Brain Project, and the BRAIN Initiative) and equally to interrogate the power that so easily speaks in the name of neuroscience. In other words, what if the operative nexus of power-knowledge is not the brain (in the hands of neuroscience), but neuroscience in the hands of other discourses? Then perhaps these papers point to neuroscience coming to occupy a position similar to psychiatry at the beginning the twentieth century: “the weaker it is epistemologically, the better it functions” (Foucault, 1999, p. 33).
