Descartes claimed for the two fundamentally different substances that compose the Universe, res cogitance and res extensa as : res extensa is a substance to think and res extensa is one to extend in space, including the body and the brain. He had supposed the abyss between the two substances and modern philosophy and science have loyally sticked to his dualism. Refusing the dualist idea—further the philosophical tradition of dualism since Descartes—with the term “Descartes’s error,” the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio maintains that the sophisticated process of mind is not separated from the organization and function of a biological organism. Yet, the French philosopher Catherine Malabou, paying attention to Descartes’s reference to the pineal gland located in the center of the brain, holds that the interactivity between the material and the spiritual is assumed even in Descartes: Descartes assumed the pineal gland as the place that res cogitance and res extensa interact, implying the interactivity between the material and the mind and the function of the brain for it. Along with this claim, she proposes a new materialism grounded on the interactive relationship between the biological and the conscious. As neuroscientists like Damasio and new materialists including Malabou and N. Katherine Hayles have claimed by exploring neuronal processes for constructing emotion and feeling, human consciousness and reality are primitively material. The new wounded, Malabou’s term for the patients with brain damage experience the complete transformation of consciousness only to be a totally new person. The new wounded have become the good example to show the function of nonconscious process within the body—particularly the brain—as a fundamental ingredient in constructing a self; thusly, it is called nonconscious cognition. The new materialists, such as Hayles and Malabou, assert that the understanding of the nonconscious cognition helps us reconfigure human consciousness and reality. Hayles points out as an example of the new materialism Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005), which deals with a new wounded protagonist’s obsession to the authenticity of reality. Its protagonist after the brain damage desires to have authentic feelings about reality and for the feelings he re-enacts some selected situations in a large scale. His desire for the authenticity and re-enactment of reality appears immoral, unempathetic, and anti-social. The paper discusses how the novel’s description of the new wounded’s non-normality reveals what conscious cognition-based discourses have not told about the human and reality.
