AND SO: here is a post bordering on New-Age claptrap, I still hope it can give some sense For some of us starting new things, changing direction, entertaining new ideas – stirs fear: As children most of us are encouraged to believe that our life should somehow fulfill the expectations of others, that we will (or…
Tag: Anxiety
The dizziness of freedom
Further musings on Fear & Anxiety The Concept of Anxiety according to Kierkegaard: anxiety/dread/angst is unfocused fear Kierkegaard uses the example of a man standing on the edge of a tall building or cliff. When the man looks over the edge, he experiences a focused fear of falling, but at the same time, the man feels a terrifying…
More or less profound feelings
or: who am I to talk about Anxiety …? further notes on anxiety and fear Notes based on Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings From chapter 5. Anxiety Anxiety has gradually replaced melancholia as the intellectual’s signature sensibility, indeed becoming the distinctive “feeling-tone” of intellectual inquiry itself. Moreover, anxiety has a history of being gendered, not least through the influence of psychoanalysis, where the centrality of…
A note to Harold:
Harold asks: Do you read that as Beckett saying that he is writing not from “nothingness” in an existential sense but from “a place without intellect or the observation that could declare something to be ‘nothing’ or ‘something’”? That latter seems likely. I’m not sure if I quite understand your question (and this uncertainty of…
Maelstrom
I ended my last post by claiming that the nothingness of anxiety echoes the nothingness at the center of Beckett’s writing – but (how) can nothing function as a source, as the origin of creative production? Beckett offers two different ‘nothings’ as interpretative keys to his writing: If I were in the unenviable position of having to study…
Grating along at a lower level …
Further musings on Fear & Anxiety The Canadian professor of psychology, Stanley Rachman, differentiates between anxiety and fear in the following way: Anxiety and Fear are usually distinguished on the basis that, whereas fear is brief and intense, an emotional reaction to a specific, perceived danger, anxiety is diffuse, objectless, unpleasant and persistent [. . .]…
Better to be afraid of something than of nothing …
Further musings on Edmund de Waal’s exhibition During the Night at Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna Edmund de Waal, Albrecht Dürer, Samuel Beckett & the concept of Angst A man (Albrecht Dürer) awakes from a nightmare in the depths of the night. He writes down his fears and illustrates them with a painting. 500 years later, another man (Edmund de Waal) is inspired…
sub rosa 