General Information
Course Description
9504 - Anxiety - The most immediate, and most anxious, concern of this course will be to question the source and meaning of anxiety. Yet how to begin to pose such a question when anxiety would seem, at least, precisely to put every such attempt into question, ungrounding the very notion of origins, rendering the concept of meaning itself meaningless? How, then, how to look the terror of anxiety in the face without being overwhelmed by it, making all questioning impossible, on the one hand, or remaining closed to its claims, on the other?
If anxiety poses such a problem, it is not least because it cannot be "reduced" to an affect. Thus, while we will read psychoanalytic and related work on feeling, emotion, affect, and so forth, while we will try, in a sense, to "feel" the anxious work of anxiety, we will equally explore how both in this work and in the philosophical tradition anxiety emerges as a fundamental disposition of the subject, what makes subjectivity itself possible, perhaps, in the first instance. Even more, anxiety could be the very condition of existence, even being: to be is to be anxious; better, I am anxious about the very fact that I am.
What else is there to be anxious about, in the end? What else, if not about anxiety itself?
Readings from Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, May, Lacan, Freud, and others.
