You have a morbid phobia of standing in queues. In the supermarket checkout, you feel oppressed from every angle by the facticity of other people. You experience the flesh loosening its grip on the bone beneath the skin, with every pore of the human body a recipient of the world’s uncertainty, danger, and chaos. At times, you are frozen by the anxiety of being “spotted” in public, as though your human body were a magnet inviting the eyes of the world to gaze at it. In the shopping mall, the materiality of the floors and the solidity of the walls becomes amorphous, its density gives way to an uneven, jagged surface. You cling to the walls, your heart is beating rapidly and your throat is dry. Fearing imminent collapse, very often you will suddenly leave the place you are currently in, so that you may find a safe place to faint. You hold your palm to the side of your face in order to ensure your head is still a thing of the world. No words can reassure you that you are a thing of this world, no place dark enough to shield you from the anxiety of your everyday life.
Anxiety is narcissism and narcissism is anxiety. Far from being dispersed, the anxious, ontologically insecure self not only persists but is amplified in the world. This is the strange logic of anxiety: it simultaneously fragments the unity of the self while also placing that fragmentation at the centre of things. Indeed, anxiety’s “threat” to self is at the same time a vindication of the self as a centre, a fundamental commitment to the narcissism of selfhood. Because of this fragmented centre, the world of the anxious subject takes as its point of departure an exaggerated, hyper-real view of things, in which perception and attention are drawn back to the anxious subject. R.D. Laing approaches this double-bind in terms of master-slave dialectic with no resolution. For him, the anxious subject must become an object in the world in order to vouchsafe his own reality. At the same time, “since his world is unreal, he must be an object in the world of someone else.” Only through being depersonalised does he lose his visibility and so find his place in the world. To this end, the anxious subject’s striving toward a state of annihilating invisibility entails a flight into their own non-being, a deliberately forestalled dialectic in which self-consciousness remains mute and a primitive consciousness takes over.
*(Photo from Gerald Kargl’s "Angst," 1983)*
Anxiety is narcissism and narcissism is anxiety. Far from being dispersed, the anxious, ontologically insecure self not only persists but is amplified in the world. This is the strange logic of anxiety: it simultaneously fragments the unity of the self while also placing that fragmentation at the centre of things. Indeed, anxiety’s “threat” to self is at the same time a vindication of the self as a centre, a fundamental commitment to the narcissism of selfhood. Because of this fragmented centre, the world of the anxious subject takes as its point of departure an exaggerated, hyper-real view of things, in which perception and attention are drawn back to the anxious subject. R.D. Laing approaches this double-bind in terms of master-slave dialectic with no resolution. For him, the anxious subject must become an object in the world in order to vouchsafe his own reality. At the same time, “since his world is unreal, he must be an object in the world of someone else.” Only through being depersonalised does he lose his visibility and so find his place in the world. To this end, the anxious subject’s striving toward a state of annihilating invisibility entails a flight into their own non-being, a deliberately forestalled dialectic in which self-consciousness remains mute and a primitive consciousness takes over.
*(Photo from Gerald Kargl’s "Angst," 1983)*
1 comments:
I stumbled into your post on a seemingly idyllic Sunday morning. I say 'seemingly' because my old friend anxiety was also present, not overwhelming as in your opening passage, but more like a worm curled up and slowly moving within the heart of a sunny, bright day.
And this is why the description of anxiety as narcissism was spot on. Surrounding me were rays of sunshine, atmospheric sonic waves, and here I was focusing on a worm that had me worrying about what some people think of me; people who probably do not spend even one thousandth of the time I think about what they think of me, actually thinking about me!
I believe that the description of anxiety as narcissism is incompatible with the description of it as the phenomenon where the body is 'all too present', given that the body is the fundamental link between 'my being' and 'the world' - but this is up for a longer debate.
Excellent blog!
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