the new wounded by catherine malabou - bookforum.com / daily review: In the 1600s, French philosopher René Descartes split the world into two kinds of stuff: material stuff subject to the laws of physics and immaterial stuff that operates according to some other set of rules. He argued that the human body is material but the mind is immaterial, relegating it to what the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle famously called "a ghost in the machine." But even Descartes, years after articulating his theory of the mind-body divide, amended it to suggest that the physical brain might act as an intermediary between the two. In his revised theory, the "spirits" of the mind worked on the tiny, almond-shaped pineal gland, sending messages through the brain, which issued commands to the rest of the body. Modern neuroscience has shown this amendment to be false (we now know the pineal as an endocrine gland that secretes hormones), but Descartes' dualism is still deeply, some would say perniciously, embedded in the language we use to talk about brain and mind.