Anxiety

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Abstract

This is a study of the unlikely “career” of anxiety in nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy. Anxiety is an affect, something more subtle, sometimes more persistent, than an emotion or a passion. It lies at the intersection of embodiment and cognition, sensation and emotion. But anxiety also runs like a red thread through European thought, beginning from receptions of Kant’s transcendental project. Like a symptom of the quest to situate and give life to the philosophical subject, like a symptom of an interrogation that strove to take form in European intellectual culture, angst (from anxiety to anguish) passed through Schelling’s Romanticism into Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, until it was approached existentially by Kierkegaard. Nietzsche situates it in the long history of producing an animal able to promise. Its returns in the twentieth century allow us to grasp the connection between phenomenology’s exploration of passivity, followed by interpretations of the human reality in a world and open to a call that it can hardly assume. The study thus begins with Kant; it probes late idealism and Romanticism, the metaphysical vitalism that flickered with Schopenhauer, the aesthetics and religious senses of angst in Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. It turns to three avatars of anxiety in the evolving psychoanalysis before exploring the return to rationalism and formalism in twentieth-century phenomenology, followed again by efforts to resituate human beings in world and body as well as, significantly, before the anxiogenic “other.”