ABSTRACT
The Marxist tradition is highly relevant apropos the topic of the empirical life sciences in relation to theoretical materialism. Although Slavoj Zizek himself does not spend much time highlighting this, a good number of Marxists, grappled with the implications of biology and its branches for historical/dialectical materialism. Their pioneering efforts to interface historical/dialectical materialism with the natural sciences find echoes in Zizek's explorations of contemporary cognitive science and neurobiology. One of Zizek's earliest ventures onto the territories covered by cognitive science is his 1998 essay "The Cartesian Subject versus the Cartesian Theater". In his 2006 book The Parallax View, Zizek wrestles directly with the neurosciences through readings of Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux in particular, in addition to addressing once again a number of analytic philosophers, cognitive scientists and evolutionary theorists, which are addressed by him in previous texts. Damasio's and LeDoux's research in "affective neuroscience" is critically evaluated on the basis of Lacan's metapsychology of affect.
