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Why So Anxious?: Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Lacan on Anxiety

“That anxiety makes its appearance is the pivot upon which everything turns.” — Søren Kierkegaard | The Concept of Anxiety

Why has the number of anxiety disorders skyrocketed within the last 50 to 60 years? A good question. Based on prescription drug sales the Anxiety Disorders Association of America (ADAA) estimates that more than 40 million people suffer from anxiety disorders in this country. But what is the cause of our anxiety? Human beings have long been acquainted with this affect, but at no other point in history has it had such a strong hold on humanity at large. It seems as though there’s a systemic problem here. Could it be that late capitalism itself has a intrinsic element that provokes anxiety in us? There certainly seems to be a correlation between the two, since this era of capitalism began around 1945. Let us see if we can gain an idea of the cause of the social ubiquity of this phenomenon.

In pursuing the cause of anxiety and of its increase, we should look to the insights of the great thinkers of anxiety: Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Lacan. In my opinion, Lacan is the greatest thinker of anxiety since Heidegger. Lacan’s brilliance in relation to this affect is largely due to the fact that he was able to formulate a psychoanalytic mechanism for the assault of anxiety, that is, of the anxiety attack. Lacan’s most concentrated inquiry on this subject is found in his 1962��1963 seminar entitled Anxiety and it is this work that will be one of our main guides on the journey to the why of our anxiety. But first we must place ourselves in the proper context.

Kierkegaard on Anxiety

“Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.” — Søren Kierkegaard | The Concept of Anxiety

Kierkegaard was the first philosopher to examine anxiety in great depth. The Concept of Anxiety was, to my knowledge, the first book to ever focus exclusively on this phenomenon. In it Kierkegaard (writing under the pseudonym, Vigilius Haufniensis), formulated a concept of anxiety that would influence all of the thinkers who came after him that wrestled with existentialist motifs. For Kierkegaard, anxiety is without a determinate object, that is, it’s unintentional or unfocused. Of anxiety he wrote, “it is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite” (The Concept of Anxiety, 42). He went on to say, “anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility” (The Concept of Anxiety, 42). What anxiety is about is human freedom, but this is certainly no object, that is, it is no-thing. Anxiety turns out to be the condition of freedom and this is precisely why Kierkegaard claimed that ambiguity resides at the core of this affect; as he put, “Anxiety is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy” (The Concept of Anxiety, p. 42). In other words, anxiety is paradoxically something unpleasant from which we derive enjoyment and pleasure as well as something enjoyable that causes us pain and discomfort.

Heidegger would also claim that there’s something pleasurable in this discomforting mood: “Along with the sober anxiety which brings us face to face with our individualized potentiality-for-Being, there goes an unshakable joy in this possibility” (Being and Time, p. 358). Anxiety’s strange tension, i.e., pleasure in pain, also brings to mind the Lacanian concept of jouissance. But why is it that anxiety creates this tension? We find it enjoyable because it reveals to us our freedom, at the same time, we also find it unenjoyable precisely because it reveals to us our freedom. On the one hand, we love freedom for freedom’s sake, and on the other hand, the thought of being completely responsible for our actions and their unforeseen consequences is terrifying. Kierkegaard famously expressed this tension or “dizziness” in the following way:

“Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself.” (The Concept of Anxiety, p. 61)

The image of a person standing at the edge of a skyscraper or a cliff really captures the temptation of anxiety. In this moment a person can surely be struck by the fear of falling, which is determinate and intentional in structure, but one can simultaneously be assailed by anxiety. In that moment of staring over the edge and down into the abyss, a frightful impulse suddenly rises up in the individual — the impulse to purposely throw oneself into the abyss. This experience provokes anxiety because we are confronted with the radical freedom we possess. Thus, for Kierkegaard, the point at which the individual becomes anxious (what Lacan referred to as the “anxiety-point”, that is, the mechanism through which the subject becomes anxious at a specific moment in time) is when he or she is confronted by the possibility of freedom. However, normally and usually, we simply make choices without having any anxiety, which is why Kierkegaard went on to qualify the relation between anxiety and freedom: “Anxiety is neither a category of necessity nor a category of freedom; it is entangled freedom, where freedom is not free in itself but entangled, not by necessity, but in itself” (The Concept of Anxiety, p. 49).

Kierkegaard centered his investigation of anxiety around what he believed to be the very first instance of the affect in human history, that is, the anxiety Adam experienced when God forbade him to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil: “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Genesis 2:17). Kierkegaard argued that Adam, in his state of innocence, couldn’t have truly understood what “good”, “evil” or “die” actually meant. But what Adam was able to understand was that he had been forbidden to eat of the tree’s fruit, i.e., that he was free and that his freedom had just been restricted. But as any parent knows, prohibiting a child from doing x only creates the desire for x in the child. Lacan wrote, “But what does experience teach us here about anxiety in its relation to the object of desire, if not simply that prohibition is temptation?” (Anxiety, p. 54). According to Kierkegaard, it was anxiety that led Adam to sin.

“What passed by innocence as the nothing of anxiety has now entered into Adam, and here again it is a nothing — the anxious possibility of being able. He has no conception of what he is able to do; otherwise — and this is what usually happens — that which comes late, the difference between good and evil, would have to be presupposed. Only the possibility of being able is present as a higher form of ignorance, as a higher expression of anxiety, because in a higher sense it both is and is not, because in a higher sense he both loves it and flees from it. After the word of prohibition follows the word of judgment: “You shall certainly die.” Naturally, Adam does not know what it means to die. On the other hand, there is nothing to prevent him from having acquired a notion of the terrifying, for even animals can understand the mimic expression and movement in the voice of a speaker without understanding the word. If the prohibition is regarded as awakening the desire, the punishment must also be regarded as awakening the notion of the deterrent. This, however, will only confuse things. In this case, the terror is simply anxiety. Because Adam has not understood what was spoken, there is nothing but the ambiguity of anxiety. The infinite possibility of being able that was awakened by the prohibition now draws closer, because this possibility points to a possibility as its sequence. In this way, innocence is brought to its uttermost. In anxiety it is related to the forbidden and to the punishment. Innocence is not guilty, yet there is anxiety as though it were lost.” (The Concept of Anxiety, pp. 44–45)

However, it’s only fitting, given the Janus-faced nature of anxiety, Kierkegaard also believed that this affect, while being capable of bringing about our downfall into sin, can also lead us to salvation. This is why he held that “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate” (The Concept of Anxiety, p. 155). Anxiety awakens us to the responsibility we have for our actions, which, in turn, can awaken us to our guilt and sin before God. Anxiety, thus, precedes self-consciousness and self-examination. It is the condition for the pursuit of authentic selfhood and true identity, which, for Kierkegaard, always involves having a passionate faith in God through Christ. The words of Hölderlin resound: “But where danger is, grows the saving power also.”

Early Heidegger on Anxiety

“Anxiety is anxious about naked Dasein as something that has been thrown into uncanniness.” — Martin Heidegger | Being and Time

As we have seen, it was Kierkegaard who first argued that anxiety is objectless. This concept of anxiety obviously had a big influence on Heidegger’s own thinking in Being and Time. For Kierkegaard, the mechanism of anxiety or the “anxiety-point” is the presencing of one’s own radical freedom and possibility, or, in the specific case of Adam, the moment of the prohibition — this recognition is the trigger of anxiety. In what follows, I’ll discuss Heidegger’s relation to the anxiety-point. But, first, we need to understand the early Heidegger’s phenomenological description of anxiety.

“That in the face of which one has anxiety is Being-in-the-world as such. What is the difference phenomenally between that in the face of which anxiety is anxious and that in the face of which fear is afraid? That in the face of which one has anxiety is not an entity within-the-world. Thus it is essentially incapable of having an involvement. This threatening does not have the character of a definite detrimentality which reaches what is threatened, and which reaches it with definite regard to a special factical potentiality-for-Being. That in the face of which one is anxious is completely indefinite. Not only does this indefiniteness leave factically undecided which entity within-the-world is threatening us, but it also tells us that entities within-the-world are not ‘relevant’ at all. Nothing which is ready-to-hand or present-at-hand within the world functions as that in the face of which anxiety is anxious. Here the totality of involvements of the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand discovered within-the-world, is, as such, of no consequence; it collapses into itself; the world has the character of completely lacking significance. In anxiety one does not encounter this thing or that thing which, as something threatening, must have an involvement.” (Being and Time, pp. 230–231)

So the “object” of anxiety, for the early Heidegger, is no object or entity at all, rather it is Being-in-the-world or existence (Existenz), i.e., Dasein’s mode of Being, and, remember, “The Being of entities ‘is’ not itself an entity” (Being and Time, p. 26). So, for Heidegger, anxiety is objectless, but, yet, it still has some-”thing” positive about it, which to say the world itself. Heidegger put it like this:

“Accordingly, when something threatening brings itself close, anxiety does not ‘see’ any definite ‘here’ or ‘yonder’ from which it comes. That in the face of which one has anxiety is characterized by the fact that what threatens is nowhere. Anxiety ‘does not know’ what that in the face of which it is anxious is. ‘Nowhere’, however, does not signify nothing: this is where any region lies, and there too lies any disclosedness of the world for essentially spatial Being-in. Therefore that which threatens cannot bring itself close from a definite direction within what is close by; it is already ‘there’, and yet nowhere; it is so close that it is oppressive and stifles one’s breath, and yet it is nowhere. In that in the face of which one has anxiety, the ‘It is nothing and nowhere’ becomes manifest. The obstinacy of the “nothing and nowhere within-the-world” means as a phenomenon that the world as such is that in the face of which one has anxiety. The utter insignificance which makes itself known in the “nothing and nowhere”, does not signify that the world is absent, but tells us that entities within-the-world are of so little importance in themselves that on the basis of this insignificance of what is within-the-world, the world in its worldhood is all that still obtrudes itself.” (Being and Time, p. 231)

“Being-in-the-world itself is that in the face of which anxiety is anxious.” (Being and Time, p. 232)

“That about which anxiety is anxious reveals itself as that in the face of which it is anxious — namely, Being-in-the-world.” (Being and Time, p. 233)

This amounts to saying that Dasein cares about nothing while overcome with anxiety. Nothing whatsoever matters to it because the world has momentarily ceased to be meaningful, i.e., ceased to signify. We must remember here the crucial distinction Heidegger made between the world and the ‘world’. The former being the totality of all referential totalities (systems of meanings, assignments, involvements, in-order-tos, toward-whichs and for-the-sake-of-whichs), whereas the latter would simply be the universe or the totality of objects (objects in the standard sense). Let’s filter this phenomenon of anxiety through Lacanian terms. This would mean that in anxiety the subject ceases to desire for a period of time, since the Symbolic order (reality) as such has ceased to have anything worth desiring in it. Of course, this would have to relate in some way to the subject’s relation to the objet a (the object-cause of desire). In anxiety something cuts off the desirability of the object at the core of the fundamental fantasy. If the formula of fantasy is $◊a, then in anxiety the lozenge itself gets barred. Desire presupposes a lack, but when desire itself is “castrated” we are faced with the uncanny lack of a lack. When meaning and significance are drained from the world all that is left for the senses is the full-on buzzing of beings in their alienating positivity (perhaps this is a glimpse of the Real?). It would seem as if desire itself gets castrated through the objet a vanishing momentarily from reality. Perhaps this is why anxiety can be such an ambivalent mood.

So, for the early Heidegger, we are anxious about Being-in-the-world (Symbolic order) as such, but what he has to say about anxiety isn’t exhausted in this one statement alone. He goes on to say that in anxiety Dasein essentially comes to see that it has a whole range of possibilities that das Man (the One, the They, or, in Lacanese, “the big Other”) conceals from it, and this realization enables Dasein to establish an authentic relation to itself. “The “They” does not permit us the courage for the anxiety in the face of death” (Being and Time, p. 298). So Heidegger says that anxiety is about both the world and death, but we can easily synthesize the two and say that anxiety is about Being-in-the-world-as-a-finitude. Authenticity (a relation to oneself and the world) always involves a resolute confrontation with death (Being-toward-death). One’s death is one’s “ownmost possibility” in Heidegger’s eyes, since one must face death absolutely alone, that is, no one can die your death for you or with you. In facing this possibility, Dasein begins to realize that it is finite, that its possibility of having possibilities has a indefinite expiration date, which means that it must stop wasting its time in gossip, inauthentic curiosity, superficiality, mindless consumerism, etc., and start existing for itself.

“Anxiety individualizes Dasein for its ownmost Being-in-the-world, which as something that understands, projects itself essentially upon possibilities.” (Being and Time, p. 232)

“Anxiety liberates him from possibilities which ‘count for nothing’, and lets him become free for those which are authentic.” (Being and Time, p. 395)

“Anxiety makes manifest in Dasein its Being towards its ownmost potentiality-for-Being — that is, its Being-free for the freedom of choosing itself and taking hold of itself.” (Being and Time, p. 232)

Here we can see Kierkegaard’s influence on Heidegger’s description of anxiety. For Heidegger, it “individualizes Dasein” and enables it to “become free” for its possibilities “which are authentic”. His concept of authenticity is basically an atheistic reconceptualization of Kierkegaard’s concept of Christian salvation (individualization via a faithful relation to God). Heidegger was also following in Kierkegaard’s footsteps in claiming anxiety reveals an individual’s freedom to his or her self, that is, the individual’s “Being-free for the freedom of choosing itself and taking hold of itself”.

The early Heidegger also perceived that anxiety has an essential connection to uncanniness, in fact, he seemed to identify the two, or, at the very least, seemed to make each one a side of the same coin. Whenever anxiety occurs we find that the world is suddenly alienated and unfamiliar. We’re abruptly no longer at home in the world — our tacit familiarity completely breaks down.

“Again everyday discourse and the everyday interpretation of Dasein furnish our most unbiased evidence that anxiety as a basic state-of-mind is disclosive in the manner we have shown. As we have said earlier, a state-of-mind makes manifest ‘how one is’. In anxiety one feels ‘uncanny’. Here the peculiar indefiniteness of that which Dasein finds itself alongside in anxiety, comes proximally to expression: the “nothing and nowhere”. But here “uncanniness” also means “not-being-at-home”. In our first indication of the phenomenal character of Dasein’s basic state and in our clarification of the existential meaning of “Being-in” as distinguished from the categorial signification of ‘insideness’, Being-in was defined as “residing alongside . . .”, “Being-familiar with . . .” This character of Being-in was then brought to view more concretely through the everyday publicness of the “they”, which brings tranquillized self-assurance — ‘Being-at-home’, with all its obviousness — into the average everydayness of Dasein. On the other hand, as Dasein falls, anxiety brings it back from its absorption in the ‘world’. Everyday familiarity collapses. Dasein has been individualized, but individualized as Being-in-the-world. Being-in enters into the existential ‘mode’ of the “not-at-home”. Nothing else is meant by our talk about ‘uncanniness’. (Being and Time, p. 233)

The last factor we must understand in Heidegger’s description of anxiety, which is of the utmost importance to grasp, is its relation to Dasein’s Being-towards-death. Heidegger wrote, “Anxiety arises out of Being-in-the-world as thrown Being-towards-death” (Being and Time, p. 395). Being-towards-death is an existential structure of Dasein’s existence, i.e., Being-in-the-world: “The ‘end’ of Being-in-the-world is death” (Being and Time, pp. 276–277). What is meant by “death” here isn’t the actual demise or physical death of a biological organism, but, rather, the existential death, or the possible death of Dasein. Existential death is something one “has” only as long as one is alive in the biological sense, so oddly enough, actual death is the negation of existential death — this latter form of death is a possibility, and a very special one at that. “Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein” (Being and Time, p. 294). Death, then, turns out to be “Dasein’s ownmost possibility” (Being and Time, p. 307).

“The full existential-ontological conception of death may now be defined as follows: death, as the end of Dasein, is Dasein’s ownmost possibility — non-relational, certain and as such indefinite, not to be outstripped. Death is, as Dasein’s end, in the Being of this entity towards its end.” (Being and Time, p. 303)

“We may now summarize our characterization of authentic Being-towards-death as we have projected it existentially: anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather, in an impassioned freedom towards death — a freedom which has been released from the Illusions of the “they”, and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious.” (Being and Time, p. 311)

Heidegger went on to say, “No one can take the Other’s dying away from him” (Being and Time, p. 284), i.e., only I can die my death and no one can die my death for me. What he was attempting to reveal was that no one can cease to project his or her self onto the possibilities established and opened up by my facticity (the individuality of thrownness) except for me. If existence is essentially projection, and if projection is grounded by individual facticity, then the possibility of the complete cessation of taking a stand on my existence is a possibility that is mine alone — it is a possibility only I have, thus making it my ownmost possibility. This must be viewed from the perspective of facticity-as-a-whole and not merely aspects of facticity. People may have in common the factical conditions necessary for both of them to do or be x, for example, many people have aspects of their facticity which allow them to become professional basketball players. This possibility is not something most Daseins’ facticities allow them to be. However, while Daseins may have certain aspects of their facticities in common, no two Daseins have their facticities-as-a-whole in common. The unity of a facticity always belongs to one Dasein and only one Dasein. Facticity-as-a-whole is the key to understanding Heidegger’s statements regarding death. The possibility of taking a stand on my facticity-as-a-whole is a possibility only I have, therefore, the possibility of the impossibility of the possibility of taking a stand on my factiticity-as-a-whole is a possibility which belongs only to me. This statement could be modified for the sake of clarity in the following way: The possibility of taking a stand on my facticity-as-a-whole is a possibility only I have, therefore, the possibility of losing this possibility is a possibility which belongs only to me.

Death (the possibility of the impossibility of having anymore possibilities) can be said to individuate Dasein in the sense that the confrontation with it leads Dasein to choose for itself. A situation can be responded to in many ways but most of the time Dasein responds to it as One does, that is, as das Man does. Take, for example, the lives of Jesus, Buddha, etc. They disclosed and established new worlds by responding to situations in ways that broke with the One. Living in total submission to das Man can make life easier and very comfortable, but it’s also unfulfilling in the long run. Dasein usually lives in quiet desperation, always desiring to own itself and take control of its destiny. But the banality of everydayness and the pressure to conform put on it by das Man tends to suppress the desire for authenticity. An experience or event is needed to give Dasein a push in the right direction. Facing the possibility and inevitability of death head on can cause a massive disruption in the dictatorship of das Man, and it is anxiety that serves as the condition of this resolute confrontation with death. “Anxiety brings Dasein face to face with its ownmost Being-thrown and reveals the uncanniness of everyday familiar Being-in-the-world” (Being and Time, p. 393).

When Dasein, through the disclosure of anxiety, realizes that the annihilation of the possibility of being its self could fall upon it at any moment, and that it has not truly been exploring all of the possibilities it has, then it can take control of itself in a vibrantly authentic way. When Dasein realizes that its death is just that — its death, it realizes that it is not absolutely identical with the One, since the One will continue to exist after Dasein’s death. Anxiety’s unconcealment and presencing of the possibility of death has the unique power to disclose to Dasein that it has possibilities open to it that were not given to it by the One. And seeing how Dasein is its possibilities, it has come into a fuller relation with itself and its existence. It can then resolutely make decisions for itself, which is a way of being individuated and unchained from the generalities of the They-self.

We can come at this function of anxiety in another way. In this mood the world suddenly becomes meaningless. Dasein momentarily ceases to skillfully cope in the world, that is, abruptly experiences the equipment it uses to take a stand on its existence to be utterly insignificant, which means that anxiety brings about a breakdown of selfhood, since Dasein is what it does with equipment. But the good thing about this is that it can serve as an existentiell reboot so to speak. Dasein is forced to face itself in its ontological nakedness, and this can allow it to see just how inauthentically it has been living. Anxiety is the path to authentic selfhood.

Now let’s discuss if Heidegger posited an anxiety-point. It’s true that authentically facing death can make one anxious, but people are anxious all the time without standing in the shadow of death. It seems to me that while death is certainly a sufficient condition for the emergence of anxiety, it isn’t a necessary one. Heidegger (both early and later), never really posited an absolute anxiety-point. His descriptions of the phenomenon of anxiety are brilliant, but it’s true that they leave us wanting more, namely, the cause of the onset of anxiety in all cases. There’s something arbitrary about holding that we simply become anxious at certain times. However, he most likely avoided pursuing the anxiety-point due to his phenomenological description of moods or attunements (Stimmungs) in general. He said, “A mood assails us” (Being and Time, p. 176). By this he means moods arbitrarily fall upon us or take us over, which, from a purely phenomenological perspective, appears completely accurate. In some sense, we’re at the complete disposal of moods. Of course, we can attempt to put ourselves in new situations that change our moods, but nothing can absolutely guarantee that this will in fact change them. Sometimes it can actually intensify the mood. Anxiety overtakes us at moments that seem to have nothing in common. Just for clarification, the early Heidegger believed that anxiety is without an object while still being about some-”thing”, which turned out to be Dasein’s Being-in-the-world-towards-death as such. This means that, for the early Heidegger, anxiety is about a mode of Being, but not about Being itself. At this point, we are ready to consider what the later Heidegger thought of anxiety.

Later Heidegger on Anxiety

“Being held out into the nothing — as Dasein is — on the ground of concealed anxiety is its surpassing of beings as a whole. It is transcendence.” — Martin Heidegger | What Is Metaphysics?

Heidegger reexamined the phenomenon of anxiety in ‘What is Metaphysics?’. “Anxiety reveals the nothing” (Basic Writings, ‘What Is Metaphysics?’, p. 101). Simply put, the later Heidegger believed that anxiety is about the nothing: “Does such an attunement, in which man is brought before the nothing itself, occur in human existence? This can and does occur, although rarely enough and only for a moment, in the fundamental mood of anxiety” (Basic Writings, ‘What Is Metaphysics?’, p. 100). He goes on to say:

“That anxiety reveals the nothing man himself immediately demonstrates when anxiety has dissolved. In the lucid vision sustained by fresh remembrance we must say that that in the face of which and for which we were anxious was “properly” — nothing. Indeed: the nothing itself — as such — was there. With the fundamental mood of anxiety we have arrived at that occurrence in human existence is which the nothing is revealed and from which it must be interrogated.” (Basic Writings, ‘What Is Metaphysics?’, p. 101)

The nothing actually turns out to be Being — more accurately an aspect, function or activity that belongs to Being. He said, “The nothing does not remain the indeterminate opposite of beings but reveals itself as belonging to the Being of beings” (Basic Writings, ‘What Is Metaphysics?’, p. 108). It’s important to note that this “nothing” isn’t the nothing of Dasein’s existence that Heidegger discussed in Being and Time — this nothing is not the nothing at the core of Dasein, but, rather, something unto itself. The nothing is the nihiliation or the slipping away of beings into meaninglessness within the clearing, which persists in its presence as the nihilation of beings occurs. But when all that stands before Dasein is the clearing itself, then all that is present is the nothing of Being insofar as the presencing or there-ing of what is normally present and there (beings) is not a thing at all. This is the ontological difference: “The Being of entities ‘is’ not itself an entity” (Being and Time, p. 26). The two most important concepts for Heidegger throughout the entirety of his career were Being (Sein) and truth (aletheia/ἀλήϑεα). Being and truth are really the two essential structures of presencing as such, and the nothing of Being turns out to have an essential relation to truth:

“In the clear night of the nothing of anxiety the original openness of beings as such arises: that they are beings — and not nothing. But this “and not nothing” we add in our talk is not some kind of appended clarification. Rather, it makes possible in advance the revelation of beings in general. The essence of the originally nihilating nothing lies in this, that it brings Da-sein for the first time before beings as such.” (Basic Writings, ‘What Is Metaphysics?’, p. 103)

With this in mind, the later Heidegger reemphasized that the “object” of anxiety is indeterminate, i.e., not a being, and that meaninglessness or indifference always accompanies anxiety:

“The nothing reveals itself in anxiety — but not as a being. Just as little is it given as an object. Anxiety is no kind of grasping of the nothing. All the same, the nothing reveals itself in and through anxiety, although, to repeat, not in such a way that the nothing becomes manifest in our malaise quite apart from beings as a whole. Rather, we said that in anxiety the nothing is encountered at one with beings as a whole.” (Basic Writings, ‘What Is Metaphysics?’, p. 102)

“By this anxiety we do not mean the quite common anxiousness, ultimately reducible to fearfulness, which all too readily comes over us. Anxiety is basically different from fear. We become afraid in the face of this or that particular being that threatens us in this or that particular respect. Fear in the face of something is also in each case a fear for something in particular. Because fear possesses this trait of being “fear in the face of” and “fear for,” he who fears and is afraid is captive to the mood in which he finds himself. Striving to rescue himself from this particular thing, he becomes unsure of everything else and completely “loses his head.” Anxiety does not let such confusion arise. Much to the contrary, a peculiar calm pervades it. Anxiety is indeed anxiety in the face of . . ., but not in the face of this or that thing. Anxiety in the face of . . . is always anxiety for . . ., but not for this or that. The indeterminateness of that in the face of which and for which we become anxious is no mere lack of determination but rather the essential impossibility of determining it. In a familiar phrase this indeterminateness comes to the fore. In anxiety, we say, “one feels ill at ease.” What is “it” that makes “one” feel ill at ease? We cannot say what it is before which one feels ill at ease. As a whole it is so for one. All things and we ourselves sink into indifference. This, however, not in the sense of mere disappearance. Rather, in this very receding things turn toward us. The receding of beings as a whole that closes in on us in anxiety oppresses us. We can get no hold on things. In the slipping away of beings only this “no hold on things” comes over us and remains.” (Basic Writings, ‘What Is Metaphysics?’, pp. 100–101)

“In anxiety beings as a whole become superfluous. In what sense does this happen? Beings are not annihilated by anxiety, so that nothing is left. How could they be, when anxiety finds itself precisely in utter impotence with regard to beings as a whole? Rather, the nothing makes itself known with beings and in beings expressly as a slipping away of the whole.” (Basic Writings, ‘What Is Metaphysics?’, p. 102)

Heidegger goes on to give us a strikingly powerful description of the moment of anxiety and the breakdown of selfhood it causes; on other words, we lose the concrete content of ourselves — anxiety strips Dasein naked. Here Heidegger is basically saying that anxiety alienates us from our everyday identities that are grounded in the social positions or roles the world offers us to exist in. We, therefore, become uncanny to ourselves. In Lacanian terms, this would be both a breakdown in the ego with its secondary identifications in the Imaginary and in the chains of signifiers within the Symbolic the subject uses to represent itself.

We “hover” in anxiety. More precisely, anxiety leaves us hanging because it induces the slipping away of beings as a whole. This implies that we ourselves — we humans who are in being — in the midst of beings slip away from ourselves. At bottom therefore it is not as though “you” or “I” feel ill at ease; rather it is this way for some “one”. In the altogether unsettling experience of this hovering where there is nothing to hold onto, pure Da-sein is all that is still there. (Basic Writings, ‘What Is Metaphysics?’, p. 101)

Another strange feature of anxiety is that it lurks around us with a “repressed” or latent ubiquity: “The original anxiety in existence is usually repressed. Anxiety is there. It is only sleeping” (Basic Writings, ‘What Is Metaphysics?’, p. 106). The later Heidegger thought that Dasein is always in a perpetual state of anxiety, but on random occasions it explicitly makes itself known.

Original anxiety can awaken in existence at any moment. It needs no unusual event to rouse it. Its sway is as thoroughgoing as its possible occasionings are trivial. It is always ready, though it only seldom springs, and we are snatched away and left hanging. (Basic Writings, What Is Metaphysics?, p. 106)

To summarize, for the later Heidegger, anxiety is about the nothing, which is essentially Being itself (the difference between Being and beings). Now that we’ve clarified both Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s concepts of anxiety, we are ready to move on to a discussion of Lacan’s radically different concept of the affect.

Lacan on Anxiety

“The most striking manifestation of this object a, the signal that it is intervening, is anxiety.” — Jacques Lacan | Anxiety

Unlike Kierkegaard and Heidegger, Lacan believed anxiety has an object, or, as he put it “it is not without an object” (Anxiety, p. 89). But this object isn’t an ordinary kind of object — it’s the objet petit a (also referred to as “objet a”, “the Lacanian object”, “the lost object”, “the remainder” and simply “a”. This object is closely related to three of Lacan’s other concepts: 1. fantasy, 2. jouissance, 3. the Real. The concept of this object is arguably the most difficult to understand out of all of the Lacanian concepts, but it’s absolutely necessary to get at least a preliminary understanding of it in order to follow Lacan’s thinking on anxiety, since the two (objet a and anxiety) are essentially connected: “This year, the object a is taking centre stage in our topic. It has been set into the framework of a Seminar that I’ve titled Anxiety because it is essentially from this angle that it’s possible to speak about it, which means moreover that anxiety is the sole subjective translation of this object” (Anxiety, p. 100).

Lacan also said of the objet a that “it only steps in, it only functions, in correlation with anxiety” (Anxiety, p. 86). Throughout the course of this seminar, Lacan gives us different definitions of anxiety and it’s not immediately apparent that these are all compatible with each other. This seminar was given at the point in Lacan’s career when he was rethinking many of his essential concepts, so it has a very exploratory feel to it. One gets the impression that Lacan was thinking out loud while giving this series of lectures. But before we consider the different definitions, we must answer, to some degree, the question what is the Lacanian object? Žižek offers us a helpful analogy in the pursuit of this answer.

To mention the final example: the famous MacGuffin, the Hitchcockian object, the pure pretext whose sole role is to set the story in motion but which is in itself ‘nothing at all’ — the only significance of the MacGuffin lies in the fact that it has some significance for the characters — that it must seem to be of vital importance to them. The original anecdote is well known: two men are sitting in a train; one of them asks: ‘What’s that package up there in the luggage rack?’ ‘Oh, that’s a MacGuffin.’ ‘What’s a MacGuffin?’ ‘Well, it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ ‘Well, then, that’s not a MacGuffin.’ There is another version which is much more to the point: it is the same as the other, with the exception of the last answer: ‘Well, you see how efficient it is!’ — that’s a MacGuffin, a pure nothing which is none the less efficient. Needless to add, the MacGuffin is the purest case of what Lacan calls objet petit a: a pure void which functions as the object-cause of desire. (The Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 183–184)

What we must first understand about the Lacanian object is that it’s not an object in the standard sense of the word. Put another way, this object is not the object of the metaphysical tradition — paradoxically, it is a “substantial” lack. This “object” is not a present-at-hand entity. It does not consist of atoms and it cannot be weighed, or measured, or experimented on, i.e., by its very nature it is beyond the reach of science. This virtual object also eludes the traditional phenomenologist, since one can only catch a glimpse of it at work while being situated within the psychoanalytic horizon. In other word’s, this object only makes itself known in the clinical setting, and this is precisely why it’s of the utmost importance to always connect Lacan’s concepts back to actual analysis. It was only because of the symbolic position Lacan occupied as an analyst that he was able to sense such an evasive “phenomenon” as the objet a.

Simply put, the objet petit a is the “object” that causes desire: “To set our target, I shall say that the object a — which is not to be situated in anything analogous to the intentionality of a noesis, which is not the intentionality of desire — is to be conceived as the cause of desire. To take up an earlier metaphor, the object lies behind desire” (Anxiety, p. 101). The objet a is the “object” we lost upon entering the Symbolic order, that is, the register of language, custom, social necessities, the Law, etc. Lacan says, “The objet a is something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ. This serves as a symbol of lack, that is to say, of the phallus, not as such, but in so far as it is lacking. It must, therefore, be an object that is, firstly, separable and, secondly, that has some relation to the lack” (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 101).

For Lacan, “symbolic castration” or “alienation” — basically socialization — involves the traumatic and liberatory loss of the maternal body, i.e., preoedipal jouissance. This blissful tension is the child’s whole world prior to the onset of the Oedipus complex. But this process eventually leads to the signifier (the Name-of-the-Father) “cutting” the child away from the full presence of its own jouissance and goading it to repress the signifier of the mother’s desire (the imaginary phallus), which brings about the inscription of the subject of the unconscious — of course, this is only how the Oedipus complex unfolds for “healthy” and “normal” neurotics. In the simplest terms, for most people what life is all about, unbeknownst to them, is their relation to objet a: “Effectively, everything turns around the subject’s relation to a” (Anxiety, p. 112). Yet it should be said that this object is not like an ordinary lost object. Sean Homer clarified this for us:

The objet a is not, therefore, an object we have lost, because then we would be able to find it and satisfy our desire. It is rather the constant sense we have, as subjects, that something is lacking or missing from our lives. We are always searching for fulfilment, for knowledge, for possessions, for love, and whenever we achieve these goals there is always something more we desire; we cannot quite pinpoint it but we know that it is there. This is one sense in which we can understand the Lacanian real as the void or abyss at the core of our being that we constantly try to fill out. The objet a is both the void, the gap, and whatever object momentarily comes to fill that gap in our symbolic reality. What is important to keep in mind here is that the objet a is not the object itself but the function of masking the lack. (Jacques Lacan, pp. 87–88)

What, at bottom, we desire, without consciously knowing it, is a sense of wholeness and completion that we once had with our mothers (or primary caregivers). The loss of the mother establishes a fundamental fantasy within the subject of the unconscious, and this fantasy will go on to shape all of the ego’s conscious pursuits. Of course, the ego isn’t aware that what it desires isn’t the cause of desire in and of itself. The structure of fantasy, at least for the average person, is $◊a, which means the barred (lacking) subject of the unconscious ($) desires (◊) the objet petit a (a). Bruce Fink explains all this well:

[M]an’s desire to be desired by the Other, exposes the Other’s desire as object a. The child would like to be the sole object of its mother’s affections, but her desire almost always goes beyond the child: there is something about her desire which escapes the child, which is beyond its control. A strict identity between the child’s desire and hers cannot be maintained; her desire’s independence from her child’s creates a rift between them, a gap in which her desire, unfathomable to the child, functions in a unique way. This approximate gloss on separation posits that a rift is induced in the hypothetical mother-child unity due to the very nature of desire and that this rift leads to the advent of object a. Object a can be understood here as the remainder produced when that hypothetical unity breaks down, as a last trace of that unity, a last reminder thereof. By cleaving to that rem(a)inder, the split subject, though expulsed from the Other, can sustain the illusion of wholeness; by clinging to object a, the subject is able to ignore his or her division. That is precisely what Lacan means by fantasy, and he formalizes it with the matheme $◊a, which is to be read: the divided subject in relation to object a. It is in the subject’s complex relation to object a (Lacan describes this relation as one of “envelopment-development-conjunction-disjunction” [Écrits, p. 280]) that he or she achieves a phantasmatic sense of wholeness, completeness, fulfillment, and well-being. When analysands recount fantasies to their analyst, they are informing the analyst about the way in which they want to be related to object a, in other words, the way they would like to be positioned with respect to the Other’s desire. Object a, as it enters into their fantasies, is an instrument or plaything with which subjects do as they like, manipulating it as it pleases them, orchestrating things in the fantasy scenario in such a way as to derive a maximum of excitement therefrom. (The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance, pp. 59–60)

Fantasy isn’t merely a falsification of realty — it is our window or portal to reality. Žižek wrote,”With regard to the basic opposition between reality and imagination, fantasy is not simply on the side of imagination; fantasy is, rather, the little piece of imagination by which we gain access to reality — the frame that guarantees our access to reality, our ‘sense of reality’ (when our fundamental fantasy is shattered, we experience the ‘loss of reality’)” (The Žižek Reader, p. 122). To put this in Heideggerian terms, for Žižek, fantasy is the individual aspect of the clearing, fantasy is the mineness of disclosure as such. What makes the shared and social clearing mine is the fantasy through which I comport myself towards it. For Heidegger, authentic-Being-towards-death is that on the basis of which Dasein could be truly individuated, but Žižek thinks we’re always already individuated in relation to das Man (the big Other, the Symbolic Order) before we ever have a resolute confrontation with death, since fantasy is the individualizing existentiale of Dasein’s existence. Fantasy is thus the pre-authentic individuality of Dasein. With fantasy (individuality) and das Man (generality) as both existentialia, Dasein is ontologically a paradoxical being. However, and here’s the problem, our social identities, as we experience them everyday, are conditioned by the signifier (the differential nature of language), which means that to get what we want would be to lose it, since it would be the destruction of our selves. Thus, the “lost” object, this excess, this left-over of the Real, is a surplus of enjoyment (jouissance) we must remain separated from, even though it is us in strange sense. But what does it mean to speak of the objet petit a as a “surplus jouissance”? Once again we turn to Bruce Fink for clarification:

In Seminar XVI, Lacan equates object (a) with Marx’s concept of surplus value. As that which is most highly prized or valued by the subject, object (a) is related to the former gold standard, the value against which all other values (e.g., currencies, precious metals, gems, etc.) were measured. For the subject, it is that value he or she is seeking in all of his or her activities and relations. Surplus value corresponds in quantity to what, in capitalism, is called “interest” or “profit”: it is that which the capitalist skims off the top for him or herself, instead of paying it to the employees. (It also goes by the name of “reinvestment capital,” and by many other euphemisms as well.) It is, loosely speaking, the fruit of the employees’ labor. When, in legal documents written in American English, someone is said to have the right to the fruit or “usufruct” of a particular piece of property or sum of money held in trust, it means that that person has a right to the profit generated by it, though not necessarily to the property or money itself. In other words, it is a right, not of ownership, but rather of “enjoyment.” In everyday French, you could say that that person has la jouissance of said property or money. In the more precise terms of French finance, that would mean that he or she enjoys, not the land, buildings, or capital itself (la nue-pmpriété; literally, “naked property”), but merely its excess fruits, its product above and beyond that required to reimburse its upkeep, cultivation, and so on — in a word, its operating expenses. (Note that in French legal jargon, jouissance is more closely related to possession.) The employee never enjoys that surplus product: he or she “loses” it. The work process produces him or her as an “alienated” subject (S), simultaneously producing a loss, (a). The capitalist, as Other, enjoys that excess product, and thus the subject finds him or herself in the unenviable situation of working for the Other’s enjoyment, sacrificing him or herself for the Other’s jouissance — precisely what the neurotic most abhors! Like surplus value, this surplus jouissance may be viewed as circulating “outside” of the subject in the Other, It is a part of the libido that circulates hors corps.” (The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance, p. 96)

But what is the essential relation between objet a and anxiety? Considering that Anxiety is about 340 pages long, Lacan obviously said a great many things about the affect that we cannot discuss here, but there are three essential aspects of anxiety Lacan pointed out that we must understand. First, anxiety is about the lack of a lack. Second, anxiety is a signal from the Real. Third, anxiety is about not knowing what the Other wants from you. We’ll discuss each one and, then, see if we can form a unified concept of the three of them.

Anxiety is about the lack of a lack — a presence of something that was and/or is supposed to be absent. Anxiety is about some overbearing presence that threatens to consume the subject. Lacan, controversially I might add, argues that the concept of separation anxiety is misguided to some degree. It’s not the absence of the mother that brings forth anxiety in the child, but, rather, her presence:

Don’t you know that it’s not longing for the maternal breast that provokes anxiety, but its imminence? What provokes anxiety is everything that announces to us, that lets us glimpse, that we’re going to be taken back up onto the lap. It is not, contrary to what is said, the rhythm of the mother’s alternating presence and absence. The proof of this is that the infant revels in repeating this game of presence and absence. The security of presence is the possibility of absence. The most anguishing thing for the infant is precisely the moment when the relationship upon which he’s established himself, of the lack that turns him into desire, is disrupted, and this relationship is most disrupted when there’s no possibility of any lack, when the mother is on his back all the while, and especially when she’s wiping his backside. (Anxiety, pp. 53–54)

To truly understand this passage, we must state that for Lacan there really isn’t one objet a, that is, we shouldn’t always speak of the Lacanian object. Strictly speaking, there are four types of objet a — there’s an objet a that corresponds to each of the drives, or, more accurately, around which each drive circles. Thus, in relation to the oral drive there is breast-as-objet-a; the anal drive circles around feces-as-objet-a; to the scopic drive corresponds gaze-as-objet-a; and to the invocatory drive there is voice-as-objet-a. Of course, these drive-objects are always susceptible to the substitutive (metaphoric/metonymic) function of desire and drive, e.g., money can take on and fulfill the function that shit had as the anal object. Lacan said in the above passage that “it’s not longing for the maternal breast that provokes anxiety, but its imminence”. What he’s getting at here is that it’s the presence of objet a, in this case breast-as-objet-a, that causes anxiety. But why should this be so? The reason why is because the presence and proximity of objet a is the presence of the desiring subject’s potential satisfaction and completion, which, in turn, is the annihilation of the subject ($) qua lack-of-being. This is precisely why Lacan held that “desire is a defense, a defense against going beyond a limit in jouissance” (Écrits, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire”, p. 699).

The subject only exists as a desiring lack, so the presence of objet a, the Real of jouissance, is the presence of imaginary-symbolic death. For fantasy to function, objet a must remain off its stage or out of its frame — that is, it must remain something absent that we’re unconsciously searching for (◊) in order to work. In Heideggerian terms, for the objet a to enter the scene of fantasy is for it to become unready-to-hand (remember that Heidegger argued in Being and Time that usually equipment only becomes present to us when it cease to work). For fantasy to function, objet a must withdraw like equipment: “The a, desire’s support in the fantasy, isn’t visible in what constitutes for man the image of his desire” (Anxiety, p. 35). On this theme, Lacan also wrote: “The base of the function of desire is, in a style and in a form that have to be specified each and every time, the pivotal object a insomuch as it stands, not only separated, but always eluded, somewhere other than where it sustains desire, and yet in a profound relation to it” (Anxiety, p. 252). Of course, it goes without saying that the objet a is not a piece of standard equipment, but that doesn’t negate the fact that it is like equipment in some respects.

So when Lacan claims that anxiety is a signal from the Real, we can now understand that what anxiety is warning us of is our imminent demise (Symbolic death). Here “signal” basically means what Peirce meant by “index”. An index or an indexical sign is a sign that “points” to its referent, e.g., smoke points to fire, a scab points to a past injury, and, for Lacan, anxiety points to objet a. Anxiety qua signal, then, turns out to be an ontological warning mechanism; it alerts us to the proximity of the lack of a lack that can shatter our identities.

Now that we see how the first two aspects of anxiety relate to each other, let’s consider the third one: anxiety is about not knowing what the Other wants from you. To illustrate this Lacan presented a very memorable image, though one that isn’t immediately clear.

For those who weren’t there, I’ll recall the fable, the apologue, the amusing image I briefly set out before you. Myself donning the animal mask with which the sorcerer in the Cave of the Three Brothers is covered, I pictured myself faced with another animal, a real one this time, taken to be gigantic for the sake of the story, a praying mantis. Since I didn’t which mask I was wearing, you can easily imagine that I had some reason not to feel reassured in the event that, by chance, this mask might have been just what it took to lead my partner into some error as to my identity. The whole thing was well underscored by the fact that, as I confessed, I couldn’t see my own image in the enigmatic mirror of the insect’s ocular globe. (Anxiety, p. 6)

What Lacan has in mind is the hypothetical experience of standing before a giant praying mantis while wearing a mantis mask without knowing what type it is. In other words, you don’t know if the mask you’re wearing is the mask of a female mantis, a male mantis or even a baby mantis. In this moment, you would be completely anxious about what the giant insect desires of you, since you have no way to unconceal the specific nature of its desire. Lacan said that this image of being present in the presence of the giant praying mantis “bore a relation to the desire of the Other” (Anxiety, p. 22). What, then, makes us anxious is not knowing what the Other wants from us (Che vuoi?). But why should this be? It most certainly can be a frightening thing to find yourself as the object of the Other’s desire, or to be connected in some way to one of the Other’s objet a(s) as the organ of surplus jouissance. “The nightmare’s anxiety is felt, properly speaking, as that of the Other’s jouissance” (Anxiety, p. 61). But how can we reconcile this aspect of anxiety with the other two? Desire (◊) is one of three structures of fantasy, therefore, no desire = no fantasy. Desire arises from the cut of the signifier — the “scalpel” of the big Other. Lacan said, “Desire is always what is inscribed as a repercussion of the articulation of language at the level of the Other” (My Teaching, p.38).

But as Lacan loved to emphasize, “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other” (Anxiety, p. 22). This can be understand in three different ways: 1. desire is the desire for what the Other desires (I want what the Other wants), 2. desire desires the Other’s desire (as Cheap Trick put it, “I want you to want me”), 3. desire itself emerges out of the Other’s desire (for example, the reason why parents have children, i.e., babies that will become desiring subjects, is because they themselves desire to be happy). However, owing to the fact that desire is always related to the Other’s desire, the Other’s desire can actually block us from the object of our desire. The melodies of desire are far from harmonious. Thus, the Other’s desire can actually break apart our fantasies — the desire of the Other is always potentially a threat. Now, insofar as desire always has a metaphoric and metonymic relation to its object, desire itself can always “slide” away, therefore, making it beyond epistemological mastery. Yet in getting to know a person, you come to have a relative familiarity with his or her desire, and this brings about a sense of security in connection to your own desire, since the radical Otherness of his or her desire has diminished. Nevertheless, the Other’s desire can always, to put it bluntly, fuck up our own desire. While Lacan focused on how the proximity or nearness of the presence of objet a is what provokes anxiety, we must also remember that a entity can become conspicuous by its very remoteness. Just as equipment can become present to us as unready-to-hand (nonfunctional or inoperative) in its proximity, so, too, can it become unready-to-hand by missing.

Similarly, when something ready-to-hand is found missing, though its everyday presence has been so obvious that we have never taken any notice of it, this makes a break in those referential contexts which circumspection discovers. Our circumspection comes up against emptiness, and now sees for the first time what the missing article was ready-to-hand with, and what it was ready-to-hand for. The environment announces itself afresh. (Being and Time, p. 105)

Whenever a person is faced with the possibility of her fantasy never coming true, she is suddenly overwhelmed with anxiety. And seeing how the Other has it’s own fantasy that often is in conflict with her own, it’s no wonder why not knowing what the Other desires from her can also make her anxious. To find oneself connected to the Other’s objet a is to have your own fantasy threatened, since, in your fantasy you are not the objet a, but, rather, the barred subject in pursuit of it (unless you happen to be a pervert and not an obsessive). So here’s the final formulation of the Lacanian concept of anxiety: anxiety is the affect that functions as a signal from the Real that alerts us to the lack of a lack, the presencing of the proximity of the objet a on the stage of fantasy, which is always a stage on which the Other’s desire is positioned as a threat to the subject’s desire, that is, positioned to drive away the subject’s objet a into remoteness. For objet a to be operative it must not be too close or too far away. It can’t be on stage nor can it be in the lobby — it must be in the audience.

We have arrived at the end of our summaries of the concepts of anxiety formulated by Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Lacan. We can now see the precise similarities and differences between them. From a Heideggerian perspective, we can say that Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety is ontico-ontological (more specifically existentiell-existential), i.e., it’s “object” is the Being of Dasein, i.e., freedom or transcendence. Freedom isn’t an object in the present-at-hand sense, but it is related to the Being of a being. For Kierkegaard, anxiety is about human freedom which is the possibility of having possibilities, thus, anxiety is anxious about a possibility. The early Heidegger’s concept of anxiety is also ontico-ontological (existentiell-existential), since it pertains to the totality of Dasein’s existential structures (existentialia). What anxiety is anxious about is Dasein’s Being-in-the-world — especially Being-toward-death, which is a possibility, and in recognizing the “object” of anxiety as a possibility, the early Heidegger was once again thinking along similar lines as Kierkegaard. The later Heidegger’s concept of anxiety is ontological insofar as the “object” of anxiety is the nothing (Being), which is to say anxiety has absolutely no object at all, since, unlike Kierkegaard and the early Heidegger, it’s “object” isn’t even a possibility belonging to a being. Lacan’s concept is ontic, since anxiety is about an object (though a virtual one) — the object is the objet petit a.

Oedipus in Eden

Since Lacan’s concept of anxiety is arguably the most difficult to understand, let us take a moment and see how it applies to the “first” instance of anxiety — that of Adam’s. Let’s read the story of the Fall from a Lacanian perspective. As we saw, Adam couldn’t understand the prohibition of the tree. But why? Because the Garden of Eden as a whole was Adam for Adam: Eden was the Mother without any Otherness (Mother-as-I). From his perspective, there was no mediation between himself and Eden-as-Mother. The prohibition of the signifier didn’t function because there was no Other for Adam. The “Other” is here the fundamental Heim (home), thus, not the Other at all. Prohibition and the signifier presuppose the Other. God’s prohibition of Eden as such was the instance of the function of the Name-of-the-Father.

God’s first prohibition is actually the first flicker of Otherness — Adam can neither assimilate it nor reject it. It means that, strictly speaking, signification presupposes Otherness, but the signifier itself is the Other in a larval form. The signifier has not yet cut the child away from the Mother, making the Mother the (m)Other. After God issued the prohibition of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam started to experience lack for the first time. This prohibition (Name-of-the-Father) set the process of Adam’s symbolic castration or alienation in motion, thus, transforming him as a proto-subject into a proto-barred subject. I say that he was a “proto-barred” subject here because he couldn’t have fully repressed the phallus (the signifier of the mother’s desire) under the Name-of-the-Father at this point and thereby become a “healthy” neurotic. But why is this so? The paternal metaphor couldn’t fully function here insofar as Adam didn’t really understand the prohibition. While Adam had a relation with the real father, that is, God, at this point, he still didn’t have a full relation to the symbolic father. Of course, here the real father will be the instance of the symbolic father or the Law.

Now, it’s only with this first prohibition that the preoedipal triangle (Adam-Eden-phallus) begins to take shape. The first prohibition disrupted Adam’s “preoedipal” unity or jouissance with his Mother (Eden); it drove a wedge between him and his enjoyment of the “breast” (the fruits of Eden’s trees), which, in turn, transforms the Mother into the (m)Other. This separation led him to desire the blissful unity he once knew and initiated his desire. It also initiated his first hypothesis: the phallus. Eden would be the symbolic mother and God would be the real mother (as well as the real father). On some level the two had to have coincided. Eden fulfilled the function of the mother, i.e., it met all of Adam’s physical needs — it was his caretaker. Yet Eden had no desire of its own — but God did. And contained within the first prohibition is the desire of the (m)Other. And just like the giant praying mantis, God’s (the Other’s) unknown desire threw Adam into anxiety, thus, giving rise to Adam’s own freedom. Freedom is born from anxiety before the Other’s desire (God’s desire in the case of Adam).

There is no freedom outside the traumatic encounter with the opacity of the Other’s desire: freedom does not mean that I simply get rid of the Other’s desire — I am, as it were, thrown into my freedom when I confront this opacity as such, deprived of the fantasmatic cover that tells me what the Other wants from me. In this difficult predicament, full of anxiety, when I know that the Other wants something from me, without knowing what this desire is, I am thrown back into myself, compelled to assume the risk of freely determining the coordinates of my desire. (The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 129)

Thanks to Žižek, we can see how to connect Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety to Lacan’s. Now, insofar as the prohibition cut Adam away from a part of himself, his jouissance, it will come as no surprise what role Eve plays in this reading. Obviously, she’s Adam’s objet a, the lost object of jouissance. Eve was made out of Adam’s rib, i.e., a lost part of him, and remember that the objet a is the remainder of the subject — the subject Otherized and externalized. Adam’s anatomical incompleteness fittingly symbolizes his ontological incompleteness. So just as the objet a functions as the substitute for the phallus and the mother, Eve was the substitute for the maternal body of Eden. But how are we to think about Adam’s choice to eat of the fruit? How are we to conceive of his passage to the act (passage à l’acte), his exit from the Symbolic Order?

We must look to Lacan’s interpretation of one of Freud’s patients: the young homosexual girl. The young women, Freud reported, was spotted by her father while walking on the street with the woman she loved. At this moment he cast an angry and disapproving look at his daughter. After receiving this glance, she immediately hurried off and threw herself over a bridge, yet she didn’t die, since it was actually the side of a cutting onto a railway line, that is, she landed on some kind of platform. We must understand that her father’s gaze was the objet a; it was the cause of her desire for her beloved and determined everything she was doing at the time. Lacan argues in Anxiety that this suicide attempt was the young woman’s passage to the act; it was not an instance of acting out, since it was not a message addressed to anyone. Symbolization had become impossible for the young woman in this situation. Confronted with her father’s desire (desire like that of the giant praying mantis), she was suddenly consumed with an uncontrollable anxiety and reacted in an impulsive way by totally identifying herself with her father’s gaze (gaze-as-objet-a). Thus she “fell down” like the objet a, the leftover of the signifier.

God’s prohibition was what caused Adam’s desire to come into existence and led to Adam’s lack-of-being. The objet a has been lost, yet is embodied in Eve. When Eve tempts Adam with the fruit, it is the temptation of ontological wholeness. Adam had been fantasizing about this ever since the prohibition. In eating the fruit he sought to break free from the Symbolic identity bestowed on him by the Name-of-the-Father by merging with both Eden and Eve. Here Adam is made anxious by the presence of Eve’s voice-as-objet-a and gaze-as-objet-a while also being made anxious by not knowing what the Other (God) desires of him. Adam eats so as to escape into the Real of jouissance, thus, negating the possibility of his own freedom. We can easily connect this to Kierkegaard’s Adam. The fruit and Eve are both objet a/jouissance, thereby, both are self-destruction. Here Adam is faced with the possibility of Lacanian self-destruction (passage to the act/return to the Real) and with the possibility of Christian self-destruction (sin). The point is that Lacanian anxiety and Kierkegaardian anxiety are both about freedom to some degree. Well, Adam ate the fruit and the rest is “history”. We can now ask ourselves the question concerning why our era is so anxious.

Enframing and Capital

For Heidegger, the real problem our epoch is facing isn’t an ontic one, for example, the problems concerning new advancements in technology, revitalizing the middle class, terrorism, income inequality, or how people will live in society with the decline in the quality and quantity of job opportunities. Of course, these are serious problems, but the biggest problem of all that we’re facing is ontological, which also happens to be the most invisible and subtle one. This problem is our epochal understanding of Being: enframing (Gestell). We’re in a very dangerous place in the history of Beyng, since it is Beyng itself that is the danger. Heidegger wrote, “Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. Enframing means that way of revealing which holds sway in the essence of modern technology and which is itself nothing technological” (Basic Writings, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, p. 325). This basically means that our technological understanding of Beyng or background familiarity “teaches” us that to be a being is to be usable-then-disposable. By “standing-reserve”, Heidegger means waiting to be used up. Enframing most fundamentally means extracting more out of x than is directly given by x and, then, storing up this “more” while discarding x itself. This is precisely the structure and movement of capital, i.e., surplus value. Capitalism is, then, the economization of enframing. The Event of enframing was and is ground of the capitalist world. And just as Christianity was a marginal practice operating in the background of the Roman world, so, too, was usury a marginal practice in the Christian world. Usury (M→M’) was capital in its larval form.

For Heidegger, we don’t fundamentally relate to entities as the Greeks did. For the Greeks, to be was to be phusis: a wondrous rising up and presencing for a little while before falling back into unconcealment.

In the age of the first and definitive unfolding of Western philosophy among the Greeks, when questioning about beings as such and as a whole received its true inception, beings were called phusis. This fundamental Greek word for beings is usually translated “nature.” We use the Latin translation natura which really means “to be born,” “birth.” But with this Latin translation, the originary content of the Greek word phusis is already thrust aside, the authentic philosophical naming force of the Greek word is destroyed . . . Now, what does the word phusis say? It says what emerges from itself (for example, the emergence, the blossoming, of a rose), the unfolding that opens itself up, the coming-into-appearance in such unfolding and holding itself and persisting in appearance — in short, the emerging-abiding sway . . . phuein means to grow, to make grow. (Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 14–15)

In both of this books, Richard Capobianco does a masterful job of explaining what Heidegger is getting whenever he talks of phusis or the “Ur-phenomenon” of the Greek world:

The Ur-phenomenon that he always had in view, that he understood ancient Greek thinking to have originarily brought into view, albeit glancingly, with the word eon, Being, is the temporal-spatial, finite and negatived, appearing of beings in their beingness, which calls forth and even compels from the human being (Dasein) a cor-respondence in language that allows both what appears — and appearing itself — to be made manifest meaningfully. (Engaging Heidegger, p. 4)

Yet it was, after all, the proper character of Nature-physis, as well as the proper relation of Dasein to Nature-physis, that most concerned him. With respect to this core matter, his view was perfectly clear . . . Nature-physis is the temporal manifestation of beings in their beingness, and Dasein dwells in the midst of this manifestness. The “Greek experience” is the counter, the foil, to our modern philosophical and psychological preoccupation with grounding everything in the “subject” — and it is the remedy as well. To recover the “Greek experience” is for us to recover the joyful wonder and astonishment at the inexhaustible giving-showing-shining-forth of all things and to accept with humility the limit of all our saying, language, meaning concerning what is. To the contrary of certain recent readings of Heidegger, the core matter of his thinking is not our meaning-making, as important as this is, but rather what calls for and calls forth meaning, namely, Nature-physis-Being. No matter the breadth and depth of our words and meanings, we do not — we cannot — exhaust the manifestation of Nature. (Heidegger’s Way of Being, p. 47)

Phusis is like a blossoming, so, to the Greeks, to be meant to “blossom”. The Christian understanding of Being was different. For them, Being was ens creatum: to be is to be a creation of God. Both phusis and ens creatum instill in a person a certain reverence for beings. They lead us to value beings just the way they are, qualitatively speaking. By contrast, enframing does not. It leads us to ignore the natural qualities of beings and find ways to quantitatively exploit and transform them for our own purposes. The technological understanding of Being has us existing as if all of reality (the totality of entities) is there simply to meet human needs, i.e., it’s nothing more than a means to an end — our end (perhaps in more ways than one). In enframing, it’s as if Beyng, instead of God, said to us, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28). This is incredibly dangerous! It’s obviously the main reason why we are now living in what John David Ebert calls “the Age of Catastrophe” (the age of living with one climate change related disaster after another).

There seems to be no escaping it. With record tornados and floods in the Midwest; a massive drought from California to Florida; a gigantic earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident in Japan; anomalous floods in Vermont and New Jersey unleashed by Hurricane Irene; more flooding in Australia; an earthquake in New Zealand; devastating fires in Texas; and another earthquake in Turkey, the year 2011 has gone down as the most expensive for “natural” disasters ever. Catastrophe, it seems, is becoming something of a way of life for us. Indeed, it has become the new norm of civilization. But, of course, the word “catastrophe” means a “reversal of what is expected.” It is a Greek word, a compound of “kata,” meaning “down,” and “strophe,” meaning “turn” or “reversal,” as in “a reversal of fortune.” Catastrophes, then, are supposed to be exceptions to the normal run of things. They are disruptions of the banal world of seriality and repetition, of days carbon copied from one another, in which the hell of the same unfolds with single-minded and relentless monotony. Catastrophes are singularities which irrupt into such sequences with bizarre and atrocious anomalies of human suffering. But on a planet in which catastrophes are becoming a daily occurrence, the classical understanding of the world no longer seems to fit. It has to be revised — along with everything else — and modified to fit the changed circumstances of an upside down world in which catastrophes are now the norm and banality is increasingly becoming the exception. Catastrophe has become our new environment, a total surround, inside which we exist, but without noticing the strangeness of it, precisely because of its very ubiquity. (The Age of Catastrophe, p. 1)

What humankind needs now more than anything is an Ereignis (an Event, an ap-propriation, or a coming-into-view) that sends to us a new understanding of Being. A fundamental change in our basic comportment toward beings must happen if we are to survive on this planet.

Elsewhere Heidegger wrote, “The world now appears as an object open to the attacks of calculative thought, attacks that nothing is believed able any longer to resist. Nature becomes a gigantic gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry” (Discourse on Thinking, “Memorial Address”, p. 50). Part of our problem is reducing the qualitative to the quantitative, which is exactly what techno-science and techno-capitalism both have a tendency to do. As Guy Debord wrote, “The loss of quality so obvious at every level of the language of the spectacle, from the objects it lauds to the behavior it regulates, merely echoes the basic traits of a real production process that shuns reality. The commodity form is characterized exclusively by self-equivalence — it is exclusively quantitative in nature: the quantitative is what it develops, and it can only develop within the quantitative” (The Society of the Spectacle, pp. 26–7). Enframing and hyperquantification go hand in hand. The problems with capitalism we’re seeing are rooted in Beyng. Capital is the worldly “incarnation” of enframing. Think about the two different circulation processes Marx described in Capital: Volume One: M-C-M’ (money to commodity to money + profit) as opposed to C-M-C (commodity to money to commodity). Profit contains the seeds of hyperquantification, social unrest and division. Besides, this form of circulation is unnatural. Marx put it better than I can:

The path C-M-C proceeds from the extreme constituted by one commodity, and ends with the extreme constituted by another, which falls out of circulation and into consumption. Consumption, the satisfaction of needs, in short use-value, is therefore its final goal. The path M-C-M, however, proceeds from the extreme of money and finally returns to that same extreme. Its driving and motivating force, its determining purpose, is therefore exchange-value . . . The simple circulation of commodities — selling in order to buy — is a means to a final goal which lies outside circulation, namely the appropriation of use-values, the satisfaction of needs. As against this, the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself, for the valorization of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The movement of capital is therefore limitless. (Capital: Volume One, Chapter 4, pp. 250–253)

This limitless movement of capital is the true greed of capitalism. Capitalism (M-C-M’) deworlds human beings by failing to take account of their qualitative facticity (capitalism has always presupposed some version of the leveled, atomistic, Cartesian self). It, then, builds its concept of freedom on this concept of the self. But if freedom means either starving or selling the only commodity I have (labour power) to a capitalist, then freedom, factically speaking, is merely post-feudal serfdom. M-C-M’ is ultimately a destructive and deworlding force due to the fact that it only sees through the neutral lens of the quantitative. It is blind to nature, suffering, inequality, beauty, love, facticity, etc. And, again, M-C-M’ is rooted in the technological understanding of Beyng, which unconceals beings as nothing more than resources to be consumed or stored up. So, indeed, our problem is primarily ontological rather than economic (ontic).

One of Žižek’s most famous refrains is: “It’s much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.” A Heideggerian could restate it like this: It’s easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more radical event in our technological understanding of Beyng. There is certainly a pessimistic bent to all this. Despite Heidegger’s negative comments on both pessimism and optimism, his work on enframing seems to be much more intrinsically pessimistic than even Žižek’s thinking on our epochal situation is, since the former believed we can’t just up and radically change Beyng, which by extension, means that we really can’t do it with capitalism either. We can’t unthink Beyng-as-enframing, since it wasn’t thought out in the first place. Beyng is our background familiarity in the world that is pre-linguistic, pre-conceptual, pre-theoretical, etc. We didn’t learn it in any cognitive sense. We appropriated it in our social practices and in simply existing in the world with others. We can’t fundamentally reorient ourselves in our primordial dealings with reality. Something must change us! Yes, we can become aware of the problem, but what that entails is really just being open to the possible Ereignis of a new understanding of Being.

The Circuit of Anxiety

Now, let’s bring Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Lacan into discussion with each other on the topic of anxiety. If all human beings ceased to exist, then so would human freedom, worldhood, Being-toward-death as well as the objet a. In saying that anxiety is without an object, Kierkegaard and Heidegger meant that it is without a substance or a present-at-hand entity, and Lacan would have to agree with them in this regard. What these thinkers have in common is that anxiety is about some x dependent on humans, or Daseins, or subjects. All of their nonobjective “objects” (freedom, the world, death, object petit a) are unintentional, i.e., we can’t directly fix their position in the phenomenological field or pinpoint their location in physical space — this is their commonality.

However, all of them, while not being substances, are in fact real in some sense of the word. To use Locke’s old distinction, none of them can be said to be the bearers of primary and secondary qualities, but, as Heidegger showed, substances do not exclusively comprise the economy of Being. In Being and Time, for example, he established three different modes of Being: 1.existence, 2. readiness-to-hand, 3. presence-at-hand. And he went on in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ to show that artworks also have their very own mode of Being. Now, freedom (transcendence or projection) and Being-towards-death are structures of Dasein’s Being, so we can understand them through their relation to the other existentialia. We understand Being as the clearing, presencing or unconcealment of beings as such. To ask about the Being of Beyng is obviously far too difficult a question to consider here; suffice it to say that Beyng is Ereignis, or the epochal presencing that holds sway while differentiating itself from what it brings to presence.

But what is the Being of objet a? Where does it fit into Heidegger’s taxonomy of modes of Being? Well, there’s a number of beings that don’t seem to fit into any of these modes, e.g., mathematical entities, abstracts concepts and the images of the imagination. But as far as I can see, the objet a is not merely some ontic relation or a projection of the imagination. An example of the former is the image I just projected onto my kitchen table of a dancing leprechaun — whatever objet a is, it is not like this image. It seems to me that it is, far from being a mere psychological, psychoanalytic or existentiell “property”, an ontological structure, i.e., one of Dasein’s existentialia, which means that it ek-sists (here we need to work out the relation between care and desire, or Dasein and the subject of the unconscious, but this is far too complicated to sort through at the moment). Once the subject undergoes symbolic castration in the Oedipus complex and the imaginary phallus (the signifier of desire) is repressed under the Name-of-the-Father, the objet a, as the symbolic substitute of the phallus, is lodged in the space between the clearing and the beings cleared within it. This is why the objet a is never directly perceivable — it occupies the rift where in Beyng is cut away from beings, i.e., the in-between of the ontological difference.

Here we must recognize the fundamental role Beyng plays in our lives. Desires, fundamental fantasies, signifiers, specular images, the Names-of-the-Father, etc., all rest on the foundation of Beyng. These functions must all be there in some sense in order to be operative — even in the case of an operative lack like the objet petit a, there must first be the presencing of what is present in order for there to be a lack somewhere. The objet petit a can only stand out in the clearing as an “object” or “being” against the backdrop of Beyng. To be anxious of the objet a presupposes the ontological difference. However, the Lacanian object isn’t just another being among beings. Proximally and for the most part, objet a is in the background of the background — it’s withdrawn to the second power.

Lacan said that anxiety, following Freud, is a signal. But where does this signal come from if considered from a Heideggerian perspective? It’s a signal from Beyng itself that serves to warn us of itself. Beyng, in the virtual sense, is a multiplicity, meaning that there is a plenitude of singularities of Beyng in the background during anyone one epoch of Beyng. Beyng is never fully drained of singularities — not even in the in-between. What Heidegger failed to emphasize is the ontic’s role in the relation to a new destining of Beyng. Can we really imagine that Beyng would send itself to Dasein as ens creatum without the actuality of the Gospels, Paul’s epistles, Paul’s evangelism, the Church fathers, the vision of Constantine, the Counsel of Nicaea, etc.? Can we imagine the Christian understanding of Beyng coming to hold sway in the clearing without these ontic factors along with many more of them? Of course not! What we must recognize is that the Christian ontic-constellation, it’s onticonstellation, was not sufficient in and of itself to cause the Ereignis of ens creatum — however, it was still necessary. (What’s radically strange and mystifying about the Event is that it’s essentially causeless — it would even be a mistake to consider it as being “overdetermined”. While an Event obviously has ontic-necessary conditions, we could never actually formulate its sufficient condition(s), since it simply just happens. On some level this inability to formulate a mechanism of the Event is unsatisfying, but, on the other hand, it also can generate wonder in the primordial Greek sense and that’s an achievement in and of itself.)

While there is no dialectical determinism or necessity between the various epochal sendings of Beyng, i.e, a new destining of Beyng isn’t the synthetic child of historico-dialectical antagonisms, and while no onticonstellation necessarily “transmits” itself to Beyng, Beyng nevertheless requires an ontic support in its Ereignis. Beyng never pivots in an ontic void. The Event of Beyng events-forth from out of the background. Early on, Christianity was a mere marginal practice in the background of the Roman world and there was nothing that insured that the Christianizing of Beyng would ever happen — it simply happened. But just as ens creatum had its own onticonstellation, so, too, did enframing. But what ontic factors comprised it? While the organization of this specific onticonstellation was extremely overdetermined, it’s fair to reduce this formation to three main ontic-factors: 1. the emergence of capitalism, 2. the technologico-scientific revolution, 3. subject-oriented philosophy. Why would Beyng send out the signal of anxiety into the clearing? What is Beyng itself anxious of? Beyng is anxious about itself. But why? Because it is set to collapse itself in on itself — it is set to kill itself. This isn’t just the abandonment by Beyng of Dasein we’re talking about. This is something far more dangerous — the absolute threat is the implosion of the clearing itself. It turns out that capitalism in particular is the manifestation of Beyng’s own death drive.

The objet a is the object of our fantasy even if not the conscious object of our desire. Nothing means more to a person than his or her fundamental fantasy. This is what structures a person’s entire life and gives it meaning and purpose. Whatever the object of someone’s desire turns out to be it is always something particular to that person. Even if x is the object of more than one person’s desire, each person’s fantasy will be unique in a number of ways, thus, given the individuality of the fantasy x will turn out to be different in some sense as well. Now, Lacan has shown that anxiety is always about the objet a (the fantasmatic object), but the signal of anxiety actually runs according to a circuit. This triangular circuit is comprised of objet a, the self (ego/subject/Dasein) and Beyng. This circuit has taken form in the clearing due to Beyng’s status as enframing — Beyng threatens fantasy. Beyond the objet petit a looms the danger. Enframing is not just a danger — it is the danger. As of right now it’s positioned to be the demise of human civilization, which means that our fantasies are on the line, which in turn means objet a is on the line. This is where we must recognize the paradox at the heart of our type of anxiety, namely, that anxiety both has and has not an object.

Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Lacan were all correct, or at least half correct. What is essentially meant by my term the circuit of anxiety is the structure of anxiety, which, like Being-in-the-world, is a “unitary phenomenon”. Just has Heidegger focused in on specific structures (existentialia) throughout the course of his analytic of Dasein in Being and Time, it, too, is possible to turn one’s attention to a specific structure of anxiety for the sake of analysis and this is precisely what Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Lacan have done in their respective investigations on the affect. However, thanks to our indebtedness to their investigations, we are now able to stand back far enough to see anxiety’s circuit as a whole. The signal of anxiety runs according to the circuit to signify to us that objet a and our fundamental fantasies are in danger to Beyng itself and to our own freedom. The threat to our fundamental fantasy is no longer simply the Real or the actual attainment of objet a and our lost jouissance, which must always be off stage or in the background to be operative in the functioning of fantasy, now the ground of our Symbolic matrix itself, that is, the “principle” upon which our particular world was established, is the danger — anxiety is now a signal from the Real and the Symbolic. Prior to the destining of enframing, anxiety was a type of signifying relation between a human being and itself (its freedom, its death, its objet a, its not knowing what it is for the desire of the Other), but now there’s a third element to this phenomenon — Beyng.

When we put all this in the context of capitalism, it becomes easy to see why people are so anxious nowadays. On a tacit level or in relation to the background, we know that the way the world currently operates will not endure and cannot sustain itself forever, but, oddly enough, what provokes anxiety from out of the background is the background itself. Yet our background familiarity is constantly trying to inform us of this. Capitalism is certainly resilient, and I remember Žižek predicted that it would bounce back from the economic crisis of 2008, but nevertheless there are certain things that capital itself cannot defeat and Nature is one of them. Capital cannot master the Real. So the reason why those of us living in the era of late capitalism are so anxious, and the reason why anxiety is on the rise, is because Beyng itself is anxious. This no doubt sounds strange, but it’s as if Beyng desires to be saved from itself and is afraid of its own death coming by way of its own hand. One is reminded here of the sequence from Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn in which Ash William’s (Bruce Campbell’s) right hand becomes possessed by an evil force. After battling his own hand for a while, Ash is finally driven with a crazed fortitude to sever his own hand with a chainsaw — unfortunately, for Beyng, enframing isn’t a hand.

Let’s now get a clearer picture of the circuit of anxiety. Our freedom can make us anxious insofar as we can choose to do something that might unintentionally bring us too close or too far to the realization of our fundamental fantasy as well as inadvertently actualize our ownmost possibility as Being-towards-death. Our free actions, proximally and for the most, also reinforce enframing, that is, how things appear and function. An authentic confrontation with Being-towards-death can provoke anxiety, since it discloses the possibility of the fundamental fantasy never coming true; it also reveals that we’ve been misusing our freedom insofar as we really haven’t attempted to save the earth and the world from enframing for future Daseins. The proximity of the objet a makes us anxious because it threatens to undermine our position in the world, and send us back to the Real of jouissance, which would be the collapse of the ontological difference, thus, the annihilation of Dasein and Beyng as such. Standing before enframing, the nothing of Beyng (Beyng-as-Other), sends us into anxiety as the result of not knowing what it wants from us (not knowing how to use our entangled freedom to save ourselves from enframing), and that this not knowing and the status of Beyng itself threatens the fundamental fantasy. We have now arrived at a preliminary idea of how all of the different aspects of anxiety, all of the various anxiety-points, form a circuit, that is, a rhizomatic circuit. One can become anxious simply by finding oneself located at a specific nodal-point in the rhizome of anxiety. This ends our discussion of why we are now so anxious. Much more could have been said and there’s most certainly much more that needs to be clarified about the circuit of anxiety, but we’ll have to return to this subject at another time.

Works Cited

Capobianco, Richard, Engaging Heidegger. Canada: University of Toronto Press. 2010.

Capobianco, Richard, Heidegger’s Way of Being. Canada: University of Toronto Press. 2014.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books. 2006

Ebert, John David, The Age of Catastrophe: Disaster and Humanity in Modern Times. McFarland. 2012.

Fink, Bruce, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1995.

Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. 1962.

Heidegger, Martin, Basic Writings. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. 1993.

Heidegger, Martin, Discourse on Thinking. San Francisco: Harper Torchbooks. 1966.

Heidegger, Martin, Introduction to Metaphysics. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2000.

Homer, Sean, Jacques Lacan (Routledge Critical Thinkers). Routledge. 2005

Kierkegaard, Søren, The Concept of Anxiety. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1980.

Lacan, Jacques, Anxiety. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2014.

Lacan, Jacques, Écrits. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2006.

Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 1998.

Lacan, Jacques, My Teaching. London: Verso. 2009.

Marx, Karl, Capital: Volume One. New York: Vintage Books. 1976.

Žižek, Slavoj, The Puppet and the Dwarf. The MIT Press. 2003.

Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. 2009.

Žižek, Slavoj, The Žižek Reader. Wiley-Blackwell. 1999.

The Dangerous Maybe

#Jacques Lacan #Søren Kierkegaard #Martin Heidegger

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theculturedmarxist · 6 years ago

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On 13 October 1806 a young German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, had an encounter with world history. En route to their annihilation of the Prussian forces 24 hours later, Napoleon and his army were marching through the East German university town of Jena. Hegel couldn’t disguise his terror that in the ensuing chaos the recently completed manuscript of The Phenomenology of Spirit might get lost in the mail. But neither could he resist the drama of the moment. As he wrote to his friend Friedrich Niethammer, ‘I saw the emperor – this world-soul (Weltseele) – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.’

Two hundred years later, in rather more sedate circumstances, the Berkeley historian Daniel J. Sargent, addressing the American Historical Association, also evoked the world spirit. But this time it came in the person of Donald Trump and he was riding not on horseback, but on a golf cart. Trump can be compared to Napoleon, according to Sargent, because they are both destroyers of international order. In the wake of the French Revolution, Napoleon wrecked what was left of the legitimate order of Europe. Trump, in turn, has apparently ended the American world order, or, as Sargent prefers to call it, Pax Americana.

Sargent’s is an extraordinary suggestion, even though overenthusiastic historic comparisons have now become commonplace. Early in 2017 I was among those who thought they were seeing the end of the American century. But, even then, in the early days of the Trump administration, it seemed crucial to draw a distinction between American power and American political authority. Two years on, that distinction seems more important than ever.

The idea that Trump is a wrecker of the American-led world order rests on three claims. First, he is manifestly unfit for high office. That such a man can be elected president of the United States reveals a deep degeneration of American political culture and permanently damages the country’s credibility. Second, his capricious and crude pursuit of ‘America first’ has weakened America’s alliances and instigated a departure from globalisation based on free trade. Finally, he has triggered this crisis at a moment when China poses an unprecedented challenge to Western-led globalisation. Each of these claims is hard to deny, but do they in fact add up to a historically significant shift in the foundations of America’s global power?

No question, Trump has done massive damage to the dignity of the American presidency. Even allowing for the personal and political failings of some previous incumbents, he marks a new low. What ought to be of no less concern is that he has received so little open criticism from the supposedly respectable ranks of the Republican leadership. Similarly, American big business leaders, though sceptical of Trump, have profited from his administration’s tax cuts and eagerly assisted in dismantling the apparatus of environmental and financial regulation. He has been applauded by the section of the US media that caters to the right. And a solid minority of the electorate continues to give him its wholehearted support. What is worrying, therefore, isn’t simply Trump himself, but the forces in America that enable him.

Of course, Trump isn’t the first Republican president to evoke a mixture of outrage, horror and derision both at home and abroad. Both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were accused, in their time, of endangering the legitimacy of the American world order. The cultural conservatism and overt nationalism of the American right is fiercely at odds with bien pensant global opinion. This culture clash has historical roots in America’s domestic struggles over civil rights, the women’s and gay liberation struggles, and in the worldwide protest movement against America’s brutal war in Vietnam. Since the days of Nixon and the ‘Southern strategy’, the Republicans have been progressively digging in, consolidating their grip on the white electorate in the South and Midwest. By the 1980s the Republican Party was an uneasy coalition between a free-market, pro-business elite and a xenophobic working and lower-middle-class base. This was always a fragile arrangement, held together by rampant nationalism and a suspicion of big government. It was able to govern in large part owing to the willingness of Democratic Party centrists to help with the heavy lifting. The Nafta free-trade agreement between the US, Mexico and Canada was initiated by George H.W. Bush, but carried over the line in 1993 by Bill Clinton, against the opposition of the American labour movement. It was Clinton’s administration that righted the fiscal ship after the deficit excesses of the Reagan era, only for the budget to be blown back into deficit by the wars and tax cuts of the George W. Bush administration.

Meanwhile, the broad church of the Republican Party began to radicalise. In the 1990s, with Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove setting the tone, the battle lines hardened. With the Iraq War going horribly, and the Democrats taking control of Congress in 2006, the right became ever more dominant within the Republican Party. In 2008, in the midst of the financial crisis, the Republicans in Congress abandoned the Bush administration. The financial crisis-fighting of Hank Paulson as Bush’s Treasury secretary and Ben Bernanke at the Fed relied on the Democrats for congressional support. Elite leadership of the Republican Party collapsed. John McCain chose the shockingly unqualified Sarah Palin as a running mate in the 2008 election because she was hugely popular with the Republican base, who revelled in the outrage she triggered among liberals. Barack Obama’s victory in that election only exacerbated the lurch to the right. The Republicans in Congress put up a wall of opposition and indulged the populist right in openly questioning his legitimacy as president. The defeat of the centrist Mitt Romney in 2012 caused a further, decisive slide to the right, opening the door for Trump. In 2016 no major corporation was willing to sponsor the convention that nominated Trump as the Republican presidential candidate: their brand advisers were too worried that Confederate flags would be waving in the convention hall. His is the voice of the right-wing base, energised by funding from a small group of highly ideological oligarchs, no longer constrained by the globalist business elite.

A cynic might say that Trump simply says out loud what many on the right have long thought in private. He is clearly a racist, but the mass incarceration of black men since the 1970s has been a bipartisan policy. His inflammatory remarks about immigration are appalling, but it isn’t as though liberal centrists would advocate a policy of open borders. The question – and it is a real question – is whether his disinhibited rhetoric announces a disastrous slide from the hypocrisies and compromises of the previous status quo into something even darker. The concern is that he will trigger an illiberal chain reaction both at home and abroad.

At G20, G7 and Nato summits, the mood is tense. The rumour that the US is planning to charge host governments ‘cost plus 50 per cent’ for the military bases it has planted all over the world is the latest instance of a stance that at times seems to reduce American power to a protection racket. But for all the indignation this causes, what matters is the effect Trump’s disruptive political style has on the global power balance and whether it indicates a historic rupture of the American world order. How much difference does the US being rude to European Nato members, refusing to co-operate with the WTO, or playing hardball on car imports really make?

This is not merely a debating point. It is the challenge being advanced by the Trump administration itself in its encounters with its allies and partners. Do America’s alliances – do international institutions – really matter? The administration is even testing the proposition that transnational technological and business linkages must be taken as given. Might it not be better for the US simply to ‘uncouple’? Where Trump’s critics argue that at a time when China’s power is increasing the US should strengthen its alliances abroad, the Trumpists take the opposite view. For them it is precisely in order to face down China that the US must shake up the Western alliance and redefine its terms so that it serves American interests more clearly. What we are witnessing isn’t just a process of dismantling and destruction, but a deliberate strategy of stress testing. It is a strategy Trump personifies, but it goes well beyond him.

In October 2018 the giant Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman unexpectedly pulled out of the Eastern Mediterranean, where its planes had been bombarding IS’s positions in Syria. It sailed into the Atlantic and then suddenly and without warning headed north. Aircraft carriers don’t do this: their itineraries are planned years ahead. This was different. The Truman and its escorts headed full steam to the Arctic, making it the first carrier group to deploy there for 27 years, backing up Nato’s war games in Norway. The consternation this caused delighted the Pentagon. Unpredictable ‘dynamic force employment’ is a key part of its new strategy to wrong-foot America’s challengers.

The Harry S. Truman is a controversial ship. The Pentagon would like to scrap it in favour of more modern vessels. Congress is pushing back. The White House wants more and bigger carrier groups; the navy says it wants 12 of them. The Nimitz-class behemoths commissioned between 1975 and 2009 are to be replaced by a new fleet of even more gigantic and complex Ford-class vessels. All have their priorities, but what everyone in Washington agrees on is the need for a huge military build-up.

The resignation of General James Mattis as defence secretary at the end of 2018 sparked yet another round of speculation about the politicking going on inside the Trump administration. But we would do better to pay more attention to his interim replacement, Patrick Shanahan, and the agenda he is pursuing. Shanahan, who spent thirty years at Boeing, is described by one insider as ‘a living, breathing product of the military-industrial complex’. Under Mattis he was the organisational muscle in a Defence Department with a new focus, not on counterinsurgency, but on future conflicts between great powers. Shanahan’s stock in trade is advanced technology: hypersonics, directed energy, space, cyber, quantum science and autonomous war-fighting by AI. And he has the budget to deliver. The Trump administration has asked for a staggering $750 billion for defence in 2020, more than the spending of the next seven countries in the world put together.

Declinists will point out that the US no longer has a monopoly on high-tech weaponry. But that is grist to the mill of the Trump-era strategists. They recognise the threat that great-power competition poses. Their plan is to compete and to win. In any case, most of the other substantial military spenders are American allies or protectorates, like Saudi Arabia or the European members of Nato. The only real challenges are presented by Russia and China. Russia is troublesome and the breakdown in nuclear arms control poses important and expensive questions for the future. But Russia is the old enemy. Shanahan’s mantra is ‘China, China, China’.

The ‘pivot’ in American strategy to face China was initiated not by Trump but by Obama in 2011, under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Even then, despite their far more tactful leadership, it caused some crashing of gears. The problem is that containing China is not what Washington’s system of alliances is designed to do. From the early 1970s, the days of Nixon and Kissinger, China was enrolled as a US partner in keeping the balance of power with the Soviet Union. Given half a chance, Trump would like to essay a reverse-Kissinger and recruit Russia as an ally against China. But Congress and the defence community will have none of that. Instead, the US is doubling down on its Cold War alliances in urging both South Korea and Japan to increase their defence efforts. This has the additional benefit that they will have to buy more American equipment. If the Vietnamese regime too were to veer America’s way, Washington would surely welcome it with open arms.

None of this is to say that Trump’s version of the pivot is coherent. If containment of China is the aim, America’s Asian partners must wonder why the president scrapped the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade and investment deal within days of taking office. That elaborate package was the foundation of Obama’s China-containment strategy. But for Trump and his cohorts that is muddled thinking. You cannot build American strength on the back of a giant trade deficit. Washington is no longer willing to pay for military co-operation with economic concessions: it wants both greater contributions and more balanced trade.

In Europe the Trump administration is proceeding on the same basis. Trump’s antipathy towards the EU and its political culture is disconcerting. But the problem of burden-sharing has haunted Nato since its inception, and until the 1980s, at least, the Europeans were significant contributors. Until 1989 Germany’s Bundeswehr was a heavily armoured and mechanised force of 500,000 men with a mobilisation strength of 1.5 million. Though its loyalty to the Federal Republic wasn’t in doubt, it was unmistakably a descendant of Germany’s military past. The break following the end of the Cold War was dramatic, not just in Germany but across Europe. Spending collapsed; conscription was abolished; Europe’s contribution to Nato’s effective strength dwindled. There were also deep disagreements between Germany, France and the US over strategic priorities, particularly on Iraq and the war on terror. But differences in threat-perception are no excuse for the dereliction of Europe’s security landscape. If Europe really feels as safe as it claims to, it should have the courage to push for even deeper cuts. Instead, it continues to maintain military establishments which, taken together, make it the world’s second or third largest military spender, depending on how you add up the Chinese budget. But given that it is spread across 28 poorly co-ordinated, undersized forces, Europe’s $270 billion in defence spending isn’t enough to buy an adequate deployable military capacity. Aside from its value as a work-creation measure, the only justification for this huge waste of resources is that it keeps the Americans on board.

The result is a balance of hard power that has for the last thirty years been extraordinarily lopsided. Never before in history has military power been as skewed as it is today. For better or worse, it is America’s preponderance that shapes whatever we call the international order. And given how freely that power has been used, to call it a Pax Americana seems inapposite. A generation of American soldiers has grown used to fighting wars on totally asymmetrical terms. That for them is what the American world order means. And far from abandoning or weakening it, the Trump administration is making urgent efforts to consolidate and reinforce that asymmetry.

How can the US afford its military, the Europeans ask. Is this just another instance of America’s unbalanced constitution? Isn’t there a risk of overstretch? That was certainly the worry at the end of the 1980s, and it recurred in the fears stoked during the Bush era by critics of the Iraq War and budget hawks in the Democratic Party. It doesn’t play much of a role in the current debate about American power, and for good reason. The fact is that for societies at the West’s current level of affluence, military spending is not shockingly disproportionate. The Nato target, which the Europeans huff and puff over, is 2 per cent of GDP; US spending is between 3 and 4 per cent of GDP. And to regard this straightforwardly as a cost is to think in cameralist terms. The overwhelming majority of the Pentagon’s budget is spent in the US or with close allies. The hundreds of billions flow into businesses and communities as profit, wages and tax revenue. What’s more, the Pentagon is responsible for America’s most future-oriented industrial policy. Defence R&D was one of the midwives of Silicon Valley, the greatest legitimating story of modern American capitalism.

If Congress chose, defence spending could easily be funded with taxation. That is what both the Clinton and Obama administrations attempted. The Republicans do things differently. Three of the last four Republican administrations – Reagan, George W. Bush and now Trump – combined enormous tax cuts for the better-off with a huge surge in defence spending. Why? Because they can. As Dick Cheney declared, to the horror of beltway centrists: ‘Reagan showed that deficits don’t matter.’ US Treasuries will be a liability for future American taxpayers, but by the same token they constitute by far the most important pool of safe assets for global investors. Foreign investors hold $6.2 trillion in US public debt, 39 per cent of the debt held by investors other than America’s own government agencies. US taxpayers will be making heavy repayments long into the future. But they will make those payments in a currency that the US itself prints. Foreigners are happy to lend in dollars because the dollar is the pre-eminent global reserve currency.

The hegemony of the dollar-Treasury nexus in global finance remains unchallenged. The dollar’s role in global finance didn’t just survive the crisis of 2008: it was reinforced by it. As the world’s banks gasped for dollar liquidity, the Federal Reserve transformed itself into a global lender of last resort. As part of his election campaign in 2016, Trump undertook an extraordinary vendetta against Janet Yellen, the Fed chair. But he was more restrained after he took office, and his appointment of Jerome Powell as her successor was arguably his most important concession to mainstream policy opinion. Needless to say, Trump is no respecter of the Fed’s ‘independence’. When it began tightening interest rates in 2018 he pushed back aggressively. (As a man who knows a thing or two about debts, he prefers borrowing costs to be low.) His bullying scandalised polite opinion. But rather than undermining the dollar as a global currency, his interventions were music to the ears of hard-pressed borrowers in emerging markets. The same applies to the giant fiscal stimulus that the Republicans launched with their tax cuts: despite rumblings of a trade war, it has kept the American demand for imports – a key element of its global leadership – at record levels.

The world economic order that America oversees was not built through consistent discipline on the part of Washington. Discipline is for crisis cases on the periphery, and dispensing it is the job of agencies like the IMF and the World Bank. Both have been through phases of weakness; in a world in which private funding is cheap and abundant even for some of the poorest countries in the world, the World Bank is struggling to define its role. But the IMF is in fine fettle, largely because the Obama administration pushed the G20 to add $1 trillion to its funding in 2009. So far the Trump administration has shown no interest in sabotaging Christine Lagarde. Over the latest bailout for Argentina, the Americans were notably co-operative. A key issue will be the rollover of the crisis-era emergency funding; from the point of view of international economic governance that may prove to be the most clear-cut test yet of the stance of the Trump presidency.

A stark illustration of the asymmetrical structure of American world order came in recent months in the use of the dollar-based system of invoicing for international trade to threaten sanctions against those tempted to do business with Iran. This outraged global opinion; the Europeans were even roused to talk about the need for ‘economic sovereignty’. What they are upset about isn’t the lack of order, but America’s use of it. To many, Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement is another indication of American unreliability and unilateralism. But why is anyone surprised? It took extraordinary political finesse on the part of the Obama administration to secure backing for the Iran deal in Washington. It was always more than likely that a Republican administration would repudiate it. That may be disagreeable but it can hardly be described as a rupture with the norms of American world order. The system is hierarchical. While others are bound, America retains the sovereign freedom to choose. And that includes the right to revert to the cold war it has been waging against the Iranian Revolution since 1979.

The same harsh logic applies when it comes to the Paris Agreement on climate change. Clearly, it is a disaster that the US has pulled out. But Congress and the George W. Bush administration did the same to the Kyoto Protocol at the beginning of the century. Moves like this should not be interpreted as a rejection of international order tout court, let alone as an abdication of American leadership. The Trump administration has a clear vision of an energy-based system of American leadership and influence. It is based on the transformative technological and business breakthrough of fracking, which has broken the grip of Russia and the Saudis on oil markets and is turning the US into a net exporter of hydrocarbons for the first time since the 1950s. Liquefied natural gas is the fuel of the future. Terminals are being built at full speed on the Texas shoreline. Fracking was originally a wildcat affair but big corporate money is now pouring in. The oil giant ExxonMobil is back (after a weak commercial patch and Rex Tillerson’s humiliating stint at the State Department), investing heavily in huge new discoveries in Latin America. All this will be horrifying to anyone convinced that the future of humanity depends urgently on decarbonisation. But again it is unhelpful, if the aim is to grasp the reality of international order, to conflate it with a specifically liberal interpretation of that idea.

If Republican policy is just Republican policy, American military power is waxing not waning, and the dollar remains at the hub of the global economy, what exactly is it that is broken? The clearest site of rupture is trade, and the associated geopolitical escalation with China. The US is engaged in a sustained and effective boycott of the WTO arbitration system. But the WTO has been ailing for a long time. Since the Doha round of negotiations became deadlocked in the early 2000s it has made little contribution to trade liberalisation. In any case, the idea that legal agreements such as those done at the WTO are what drives globalisation puts the cart before the horse. What really matter are technology and the raw economics of labour costs. The container and the microchip are far more important motors of globalisation than all the GATT rounds and WTO talks put together. If in the last ten years globalisation appears to have stalled, it has more to do with a plateau in the development of global supply chains than with backsliding into protectionism.

In this regard the Trump administration’s aggressive attack on America’s regional trade arrangements is more significant than its boycotting of the WTO. It is in regional integration agreements that the key supply chain networks are framed. The abrupt withdrawal of the US, in the first days of the Trump presidency, from TPP in the Asia-Pacific region and TTIP in the Atlantic, was a genuine shock. But it is far from clear that either arrangement would have been pursued with any energy by a Hillary Clinton administration. She would no doubt have shifted position more gracefully. But the political cost of pushing them through Congress might well have been too high.

In spring 2017 there was real concern that Trump might abruptly and unilaterally cancel Nafta – apparently the hundredth day of his presidency had been set as the occasion. But that threat was contained by a concerted mobilisation of business interests. Once the negotiations with Mexico and Canada started, the tone was rough. In Robert Lighthizer as his trade representative, Trump has found a bully after his own heart. But again, if you look back at the history of Nafta and WTO negotiations, tough talk is par for the course. In the end, a replacement for Nafta emerged, in the form of the United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA). Apart from minor concessions on dairy exports to Canada and intellectual property protection for American pharmaceuticals, its main provisions concerned the car industry, which dominates North American trade. To escape tariffs, 40 per cent of any vehicle produced in Mexico must have been manufactured by workers earning $16 an hour, well above the US minimum wage and seven times the average manufacturing wage in Mexico. Three-quarters of a vehicle’s value must originate inside the free-trade zone, restricting the use of cheap imported components from Asia. This will likely induce a modification but not a wholesale dismantling of the production networks established under Nafta. Though it was not endorsed by US trade unions, it wasn’t repudiated by them either. As the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations commented, the effect will depend on how it is implemented.

The auto industry was at the heart of the Nafta renegotiation and it is the critical element in simmering US-EU trade tensions too. Let there be no false equivalence, however: the incomprehension and disrespect shown by the White House towards the EU is unprecedented. It isn’t clear that Trump and his entourage actually grasped that America no longer maintains bilateral trade deals with individual members of the EU. Trump’s open advocacy for Brexit and encouragement of further challenges to the coherence of the EU has been extraordinary. The use of Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act to investigate car imports from Germany as a threat to American national security is absurd. Such things mark a bewildering break with previous experience. That said, Trump’s obsession with the prevalence of German limousines in swanky parts of New York does highlight another painful imbalance in transatlantic relations: the persistent European trade surplus. Of course America contributes to this imbalance with its disinhibited fiscal policy: the better off Americans feel, the more likely they are to buy German cars. But as the Obama administration repeatedly pointed out, Europe’s dogged refusal to stimulate faster growth is as bad for Europe as it is for the world economy. The scale of the Eurozone’s overall current account surplus is highly unusual by historical standards and is both a vulnerability for Europe, leaving its producers hostage to foreign demand, and a potential source of global shocks.

Europe’s freeriding may undermine the global order, but the EU does not mount a direct challenge to US authority. China is different, and that is what truly marks out the foreign relations of our current moment as a break with the decades since the end of the Cold War. No one, including the Chinese, anticipated how rapidly the Trump administration would escalate tensions over trade in 2018 or that this would evolve into a comprehensive challenge to China’s presence in the global tech sector. The US has been putting pressure on its allies to cut the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei out of their plans for 5G, the next generation of internet technology. But here the US – and its allies – are in reactive mode: the original shock was China’s unprecedented growth.

China alone was responsible for a doubling of global steel and aluminimum capacity in the first decade of the 21st century. Its huge investment in R&D transformed it from a ‘third world’ importer of Western technology into a leading global force in 5G. As the likes of Navarro and Lighthizer see it, it was the naivety of enthusiasts for an American-led world order in the 1990s that allowed China’s communist-run state capitalism into the WTO. What the globalists did not understand was the lesson of Tiananmen Square. China would integrate, but on its own terms. That could be ignored in 1989 when China’s economy accounted for only 4 per cent of global GDP: now that figure is close to 20 per cent. As far as the American trade hawks are concerned, competition within an agreed international order is to be welcomed only so long as the competitors agree to play by America’s rules, both economic and geopolitical. This was the lesson Europe was made to learn after the Second World War. It was the lesson that Japan was taught the hard way in the 1980s and early 1990s. If China refuses to learn that lesson, it must be contained.

America retains some huge advantages. But it would be dangerous, the argument goes, simply to count on those. Sometimes American preponderance has to be defended by a ‘war of manoeuvre’. The emerging American strategy is to use threats of trade policy sanctions and aggressive counter-espionage in the tech arena, combined with a ramping up of America’s military effort, to force Beijing to accept not just America’s global preponderance but also its terms for navigation of the South China Sea. In pursuing this course the Trump presidency has a clear precedent: the push against the Soviet Union in the early 1980s by the Reagan administration, which deployed economic and political pressure to break what was perceived to be a menacing phase of Soviet expansion in the 1970s. Despite all the risks involved, for American conservatives that episode stands as the benchmark of successful grand strategy.

The reason the attempt to apply this lesson to present-day China is so shocking is that US business is entangled with China to an immeasurably greater degree than it ever was with the Soviet Union. If you are seeking a component of the American world order that is really being tested at the present moment, look no further than Apple’s supply chain in East Asia. Unlike South Korea’s Samsung, the Californian tech giant made a one-way bet on manufacturing integration with China. Almost all its iPhones are assembled there. Apple is an extreme case. But it is not alone. GM currently sells more cars in China than it does in the US. America’s farmers converted their fields wholesale to grow soy beans for export to China, only to find themselves cut out of their biggest market by Brazilian competitors. And it isn’t just American firms that are caught up in the escalation of tension. Important European, South Korean, Taiwanese and Japanese businesses have staked huge wagers on China.

Given these investments, one might have expected more pushback against Trump’s China strategy from US business. So far there has been little. The radical decoupling of the Chinese and American economies may be so horrible a prospect that business leaders simply prefer not to discuss it in public. They may be lying low hoping the row blows over. Or it may be that American business itself buys the increasingly pessimistic diagnosis of the US intelligence and defence community, who argue China’s persistent protectionism and economic nationalism may mean that it presents more of a threat than an opportunity. Even top ‘China hands’ like Steve Schwarzman and Hank Paulson have warned of a chill in the air.

The hardening of attitudes towards China is not confined to America. It was the Anglo-American intelligence consortium known as ‘Five Eyes’ that raised the alarm about Huawei’s capability to build back doors into the West’s most sensitive telecommunications networks. Canada and Australia are deeply concerned about Chinese penetration. The new pessimism about Sinocentric globalisation isn’t confined to security policy hawks, but shared by many mainstream economists and political scientists in US academia, the think-tank world, and journalists and commentators on Chinese affairs. The liberal version of the American world order is deeply influenced by strands of modernisation theory, the up to date version of which is encapsulated in the doctrine of the middle-income trap. Very few large countries have managed to grow beyond China’s current level of income. Those that have done so have kitted themselves out with the full set of liberal institutions and the rule of law. On this reading, China is in a precarious position. Xi’s authoritarian turn is a decisive step in the wrong direction. Further frequently cited signs of Chinese weakness include ethnic tensions and the ageing of the population as a long-term effect of the one-child policy. There is a belief, held well beyond the administration, that the tide may be turning against Beijing and that now is the moment for the West to harden the front.

This would indeed constitute a break with the narrative of globalisation since the 1990s. But it would hardly be a break in the American-led world order. To imagine the American world order as fully global is after all a relatively recent development. After 1945, the postwar order that is generally seen as the non plus ultra of American hegemony was built on the hardened divisions of the Cold War. Where China is concerned, the issue is not so much America’s intention to lead as whether others are willing to follow. Building the Cold War order in Europe and East Asia was comparatively easy. Stalin’s Soviet Union used a lot of stick and very little carrot. The same is not true of modern-day China. Its economy is the thumping heart of a gigantic East Asian industrial complex. In the event of an escalation with China, particularly in East Asia, we may find ourselves facing not so much an end of the American-led order, as an inversion of its terms. Where the US previously offered soft-power inducements to offset the threat of communist military power, backed up by hard power as a last resort, in the next phase the US may become the provider of military security against the blandishments offered by China’s growth machine.

But this is premature. As of today, two years into the Trump presidency, it is a gross exaggeration to talk of an end to the American world order. The two pillars of its global power – military and financial – are still firmly in place. What has ended is any claim on the part of American democracy to provide a political model. This is certainly a historic break. Trump closes the chapter begun by Woodrow Wilson in the First World War, with his claim that American democracy articulated the deepest feelings of liberal humanity. A hundred years later, Trump has for ever personified the sleaziness, cynicism and sheer stupidity that dominates much of American political life. What we are facing is a radical disjunction between the continuity of basic structures of power and their political legitimation.

If America’s president mounted on a golf buggy is a suitably ludicrous emblem of our current moment, the danger is that it suggests far too pastoral a scenario: American power trundling to retirement across manicured lawns. That is not our reality. Imagine instead the president and his buggy careening around the five-acre flight deck of a $13 billion, Ford-class, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier engaged in ‘dynamic force deployment’ to the South China Sea. That better captures the surreal revival of great-power politics that hangs over the present. Whether this turns out to be a violent and futile rearguard action, or a new chapter in the age of American world power, remains to be seen.

#hegel #pax americana #imperialism #american century #politics #21st century #book reviews

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annemariewrites · 6 years ago

Text

Walt Whitman

Research Paper

Walt Whitman, considered to be one of America’s greatest poets, was born in New York on May 31, 1819. He was self-taught and became a printer at twelve years old and this helped him understand the written word and be familiar with the works of Shakespeare, Dante, and the Bible. Whitman wrote many prose and poems, though he is most known for Song of Myself from Leaves of Grass.

The first copy of Leaves of Grass was published in 1855 and he continued to revise it for the rest of his life. This book had many renditions with numerous poems ranging from 12 in the first publication and over 400 in the last. His poems are often characterized as having long lines, little to no rhyme scheme, reflection on nature, and repeating first words. Whitman used a number of poetic forms in his writings. In the essay, "Poetic Form as Meaning in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass," written by Nigel Fabb, the poetic forms used by Walt Whitman are observed. Fabb uses an excerpt from a poem in Leaves of Grass. He states, “… the following five lines which form a stanza of one of the component poems of the book, reproduced here as closely as possible to copy the layout (e.g., line-breaks) on page 67 of the first (1855) edition.

‘The sky continues beautiful…. the pleasure of men with women shall never be

sated.. nor the pleasure of women with men... nor the pleasure from poems;

The domestic joys, the daily housework or business, the building of houses - they

are not phantasms.. they have weight and form and location;

The farms and profits and crops.. the markets and wages and government…. they

also are not phantasms;

The difference between sin and goodness is no apparition;

The earth is not an echo... man and his life and all the things of his life are well-considered.’

Here we see various poetic forms. The most obvious is the line. Next, it has been argued that the poem is divided into ‘rhetorical groups.’ Third, there is parallelism between the parts. Fourth, there are small rhythmic sequences. In this section of the paper, I consider each of these in turn and argue that they are attributed rather than inherent. I conclude by commenting on the unusual line-internal punctuation, in particular two dots, four dots and a dash, which have relevance for the form of the text.” (Fabb 107-108) He goes on to use another example, “…most of Whitman’s lineation is attributed, though there are occasional examples of inherent lineation, as in the following example of lines written in iambic pentameter (Whitman 1881: 296):

‘Out from behind this bending rough-cut mask.

These lights and shades, this drama of the whole.’

Like all iambic pentameter lines, these lines are subject to subtle generalizations, which can loosely be summarized by saying that there are ten syllables in each line, and a stressed syllable within a polysyllabic word must be even-numbered.” (Fabb 109) This shows the numerous poetic devices that Walt Whitman used in his poems. These techniques were used by many poets that inspired and were inspired by Whitman.

Whitman was a part of the transcendentalism movement which was a literary movement that occurred in the early nineteenth century. Ralph Waldo Emerson was also hugely involved with this movement and the two poets are compared by Kelly Scott Franklin in the essay, “’Without Being Walt Whitman’: Vicente Huidobro, Whitman, And the Poetics of Sight.” Franklin writes, “Ralph Waldo Emerson (1836) described feeling ‘uplifted into infinite space’, which allowed him to see everything at once, and he described becoming a ‘transparent eyeball’ (Emerson, [1836] 1996: 10). Whitman himself would write in 1855, in what would later become ‘Song of Myself’:

My ties and ballasts leave me [. . .] I travel [. . .] I sail [. . .]

I skirt sierras [. . .] my palms cover continents,

I am afoot with my vision. (Whitman, 1855c: 36) (Franklin 285)

Franklin then goes on to compare Walt Whitman to Vicente Huidobro, who was a creationist poet, stating, “…both Whitman’s and Huidobro’s speakers can also see the ongoing exploration and travel of the globe. Whitman celebrates this exploration in a lengthy passage:

I behold the sail and steamships of the world, some in clusters in port, some on their

voyages,

Some double the cape of Storms, some cape Verde, others capes Guardafui, Bon, or

Bajadore,

Others Dondra head, others pass the straits of Sunda, others cape Lopatka, others

Behring’s straits [. . .]. (Whitman, 1982b: 290)

‘Others,’ Whitman’s speaker continues, ‘sternly push their way through the northern winter packs, / Others descend or ascend the Obi or the Lena, / Others the Niger or the Congo [. . .]’ (Whitman, 1982b: 290). But if the expansionist Whitman celebrates those who ‘sternly push their way’ into other lands, Huidobro’s speaker sees that same exploration in terms of the multiform violence of imperialism (Whitman, 1982b: 290):

“The bravest captains Captain Cook

On an iceberg went to the Poles Hunts the Northern Lights

To leave his pipe in the lips In the South Pole

Of Eskimos

Others stab fresh lances in the Congo

The heart of sunny Africa

Opens like pecked figs.” (Huidobro, 2003e: 494.69–75) (Franklin 287)

This quote shows the inspiration that Vincent Huidobro gained from Walt Whitman, despite the former being a creationist and the latter being a transcendentalist.

One of the most notable trends in Leaves of Grassis that of spirituality. In Ernest Smith’s essay, “’Restless Explorations’: Whitman’s Evolving Spiritual Vision in Leaves of Grass,” Smith explains the change in Walt Whitman’s spiritual image. He states, “In an uncollected manuscript fragment, Whitman terms spirituality “the unknown” (Leaves 612), and despite various pronouncements of certitude, especially in the 1855 and 1856 editions, as the poet more deeply engages his personal contradictions and his envisioned democracy’s various failures and compromises, his poetry comes to challenge its readers to conceive of spirituality more broadly, but less conclusively.” (Smith 229) This quote show that Whitman had a change in his thoughts of spirituality in Leaves of Grass. This is entirely understandable seeing as how he continued to add to and revise this great work for many decades until his death. It would only be natural to change his feelings and beliefs in some way. Smith continues by pointing out what Whitman’s earlier writings showed about the spirit by saying, “The personal pull of Whitman’s early poetry is undeniably powerful, a proclamation of the agency of the individual that at the same time invites us to “follow” the poet toward enlightenment, claiming deep insight into the nature of the soul.” (Smith 229) He then describes Whitman’s last poems, “While the major works of Whitman’s final productive decade demonstrate what Erkkila terms “a more traditional religious faith,” by the final arrangement of poems for the 1881 edition, the reader of Leaveswill move through poems supremely confident of immortality and a mystical oneness of humanity, other poems where the spiritual core of the text seems more based in phenomenology, Civil War poems that recognize the ability of death’s sheer physical carnage to at least momentarily eclipse spiritual hope, and the later meditative mode of poems such as those in the “Whispers of Heavenly Death” cluster.” (Smith 229-239) This accurately demonstrates the shift that occurred all throughout Whitman’s life to change the various aspects of how he reflected on spirituality in his poetry.

In addition to the use of religion and spirituality, Whitman also implemented numerous social issues into his poetry. This is outlined in the essay, “’Song of Myself’ and the Class Struggle in Language,” by Andrew Lawson. In this essay, Lawson notes, “Charles Hliot Norton, an early reviewer for Putnam's Monthly Magazine in September 1855, found Whitman's poetry monstrous in its ‘self-conceit,” its contempt for ‘all usual propriety of diction.’ For Norton, Whitman’s impropriety stemmed from his continual crossing of linguistic boundaries, by joining of the ‘gross’ with the ‘elevated,’ the ‘superficial’ with the ‘profound.’ An example would be the single line in which Whitman describes himself as both ‘one of the roughs,’ meaning, according to Webster, ‘rugged, disordered in appearance, coarse,’ and ‘a kosmos,’ an apparent invention of Whitman’s, meaning ‘a person who[se] scope of mind, or whose range in a particular science, includes all, the whole known universe.’” (Lawson 377) This shows one man’s view of Whitman’s poetry. Another is, “R O. Matthiessen, in American Renaissance (1941)… deplores Whitman’s ‘curious amalgamation of homely and simple usage with half-remembered terms he read once somewhere, and with casual inventions of the moment.’ Whitman's mixed diction is particularly irksome to Matthiessen because it smacks of the inauthentic; rather than using a ‘folk-speech,’ the language of the people. Whitman exhibits only the ‘happy pride of the half-educated in the learned term’ - he is using a language ‘not quite his own.’” (Lawson 377) Lawson then goes on to explain how opinions such as these about the poetry may also be influenced by social norms. He states, “For Norton, Whitman’s language is an unaccountable compound of class accents; for Matthiessen, Whitman is all too recognizably a lower-middle-class aspirant to the title litterateur, his choice of words marked by petit bourgeois pretension.” (Lawson 377-378) These quotes show the way some people felt about social classes in regards to literature and language.

Closely related to poetry, the use of music can be found in many of Walt Whitman’s poems, especially with Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, a free verse, 32 stanza poem.An article that shows this is, “The Idea of Music in 'Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,'” by William F. Mayhan. The article states, “By linking his poem so closely and specifically to music, Whitman offers a vital clue not only to the poem's unorthodox structure, but also to its meaning.” (Mayhan 113) The themes of this poem include the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. The poem itself is about a young boy who stands by the ocean and watches a couple of birds sing to each other. One day the female of the couple goes missing and the male tries to find her. He searches for his mate but can never find her and accepts that she has died. The symbolism of the musical structure of the poem highlights the song of the birds when they are together and the male singing alone. Mayhan explains this by saying, “…music plays not only a structural role, but also a symbolic one. …Whitman blends his experience of music (as heard) with his philosophical conceptions of the nature and meaning of music in a marriage of matter and form that is itself the essence of music.” (Mayhan 113) Understanding the musical form of the poem can help understand the meaning of it as well. It is important to note just how important music was to Whitman and is noted further in Mayhan’s article. He quotes, “He admits as much in his conversations with Horace Traubel, recorded later in his life:

‘My younger life was so saturated with the emotions, raptures, up-lifts, of such musical experiences that it would be surprising if all my future work had not been colored by them. A real musician running through Leaves of Grass-a philosopher musician-could put his finger on this and that anywhere in the text no doubt as indicating the activity and influences I have spoken of.’” (Mayhan 115)

This quote shows the importance that music held in his life and how it shaped his poetry. Again, the idea of music helps one to know and understand the meaning of the poem. This is further stated, “Layer upon layer of meaning begins to accumulate until, at the end, as we shall see, the effects of infinite interrelatedness (harmony) will affect not only the poem's structure, but will be, in itself, an embodiment of its meaning.” (Mayhan 122)

One of the many things that influenced Walt Whitman’s writing was the Civil War. This is discussed in the article, "Union and Disunion in 'Song of Myself'," by Herbert J.Levine. The article states, “One recent study has argued that the escalating crisis of the Union allowed Whitman to discover the healing role so central to "Song of Myself." Another has argued that the economic downturn of 1854, which put Whitman out of the housebuilding business, allowed him to discover his role as celebrator of the artisan…” (Levine 570). This shows the different thoughts others had about how the buildup of the Civil War may have influenced Whitman. Levine goes on to determine why Whitman wanted to unify the country, perhaps with his poetry. He states, “Where political rhetoric was failing to preserve the Union, poetry, Whitman saw, could attempt an alternative discourse of union based on the unity of a representative American self. With respect to such a unified self, the experience of his own body and soul, his land, its animals, people, occupations and history, the earth, its evolutionary past and cosmic future—all was to be portrayed as a vast seamless web, within which differences could be accommodated without dismembering the whole.” (Levine 576) This shows that Whitman wanted to keep the country whole and attempted to do so by writing poetry.

In conclusion, Walt Whitman is considered to be one of America’s great poets for a number of reasons, ranging from his use of poetic devices to how he wanted his poetry to shape the people and the world in which they lived.

Works Cited

Fabb, Nigel. "Poetic Form as Meaning in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass." Journal of Literary Semantics 41.2 (2012): 105-119.

Franklin, Kelly Scott. "'Without Being Walt Whitman': Vicente Huidobro, Whitman, And The Poetics Of Sight." Comparative American Studies: An International Journal 12.4 (2014): 282-300.

Lawson, Andrew. "'Song of Myself'and the Class Struggle in Language." Textual Practice 18.3 (2004): 377-394.

Levine, Herbert J. "Union and Disunion in 'Song of Myself'." American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 59.4 (1987): 570-589.

Mayhan, William F. "The Idea of Music in 'Out Of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking'." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review13.3 (1996): 113-128.

Smith, Ernest. "'Restless Explorations': Whitman's Evolving Spiritual Vision in Leaves of Grass." Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 43.3 (2007): 227-263

#walt whitman #research essay #american literature #transcendentalism #american poet #I wrote this for my american lit class my sophomore year in college

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codswallopia · 9 days ago

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271 (more) days in America

TRAMLEY GOOGLE WITH THE GOO GOO GOOGLEY EYES

#my stuff #the phenomenology of the spirit of america #mbta #green line

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disturbingbookclub · 6 years ago

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Introducing Hegel: A Graphic Guide - https://bit.ly/2FDPp6L - free delivery worldwide (right-click & open)

INTRODUCING guide to the hugely influential German thinker. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is one of the greatest thinkers of all time. No other philosopher has had such a profound impact on the ideas and political events of the 20th century. Hegel’s influential writings on philosophy, politics, history and art are parts of a larger systematic whole. They are also among the most difficult in the entire literature of philosophy. Introducing Hegel guides us through a spectacular system of thought which aimed to make sense of history. The book also provides new perspectives on contemporary postmodern debates about ‘metanarratives’ (Lyotard) and the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama). It is an ideal introduction to this crucial figure in the history of philosophy, and is indispensable for anyone trying to understand such key modern thinkers as Marx, Lacan, Satre and Adorno.

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codswallopia · 2 months ago

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319 (more) days in America

there is absolutely nothing straightforward about the material that I am currently digging through

#my stuff #the phenomenology of the spirit of america #boston

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nickolasarmstrong · 3 years ago

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Shrooms & Seeds

Throughout the ages many societies have attempted to be closer to their gods/deities, some achieve this by meditating for hours on end and others they achieved this by ingesting hallucinogens. No place is as experienced with hallucinogens however than those of mesoamerica, for instance many different types of hallucinogens have been used in mesoamerica. Including Pulque, Balche, Tobacco, “Magic” Mushrooms, Toad-licking, Peyote, and Seeds of the Sophora secundiflora plant. While all of these are intriguing ways of viewing the heavens I would like to specifically point out only two of these, the mushrooms and seeds of sophora to be exact.

Firstly, “Magic” Mushrooms are a type of mushroom that contain psilocybin and psilocin, these chemicals when ingested cause hallucinations and in large doses can cause a reality altering trip for users. Similarly the Seeds of the Sophora secundiflora otherwise known as “Mescalbeans” cause an altered state of reality however have little evidence to support their use as a complete hallucinogen. Simply put, Mescal Beans may cause sensations and an altered perception of time but may not have a trip comparable to that of Mushrooms.

With reference to Mesoamerica and the use in religious rituals many hallucinogens where used in order to obtain enlightenment and each are ingested in their own ways. Mushrooms are commonly dried and eaten however in some instances they may have been ground and mixed with other foods, Mescal Beans on the other hand where soaked in water and eaten whole. Many rituals included ceremonies such as the ones observed by Bernardino de Sahagun in the later years of the sixteenth century. Bernardino described various religious ceremonies in Mexico centered around ingesting magic mushrooms. Various other ceremonies can be found in other historical sources throughout the americas. This suggests that a clear culture was formed around the usage of these hallucinogens.

Mushrooms in particular have been known to help with pain and dull the senses of a person who is undergoing a trip. Many times mushrooms would be ingested by those about to commit self sacrifice in order to dull their pain and see their gods in their final moments. Commonly as previously mentioned both Mescal beans and magic mushrooms have been used for much less dangerous ceremonies in order to commune with or view the heavens.

Culturally the significance of these hallucinogens seems to have grasped many in the pottery field as sculptures of mushroom shaped clay and stone figures can be found widely distributed throughout mesoamerica. These figures known as mushroom stones range in size and shape and their purpose is seemingly unknown. Similarly masks with half human half jaguar faces can be found at Olmec sites possibly hinting at the usage of hallucinogens to view the afterlife.

To conclude, many ancient societies used hallucinogens in order to dull pain in sacrifice, commune with their gods or spirits, or even in order to get a glimpse of the world beyond our own. Through this experimentation of hallucinogens we can see a culture and art form rising seemingly all over mesoamerica in the form of masks and stone figurines.

References

Kôhler. (1976). Mushrooms, Drugs, and Potters: A New Approach to the Function of Precolumbian Mesoamerican Mushroom Stones. American Antiquity, 41(2), 145–153. https://doi.org/10.2307/279165

de Borhegyi, & de Borhegyi-Forrest, S. (2015). Chapter 11 - Mushroom Intoxication in Mesoamerica. In History of Toxicology and Environmental Health (pp. 104–115). Elsevier Inc. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-801506-3.00011-X

Guerra-Doce. (2015). Psychoactive Substances in Prehistoric Times: Examining the Archaeological Evidence. Time and Mind, 8(1), 91–112. https://doi.org/10.1080/1751696X.2014.993244

Diaz. (2010). Sacred plants and visionary consciousness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 9(2), 159–170. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9157-z

Dowshen, S. (Ed.). (2018, May). Mushrooms (for teens) - nemours kidshealth. KidsHealth. Retrieved March 7, 2022, from https://kidshealth.org/en/teens/mushrooms.html

#anthropology #archeology #Shrooms #high on drugs #Mesoamerica #religion

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davidjjohnston3 · 3 years ago

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Might be last 'typing for a while... I f--king hate myself for not taking that job; the principal was sincere; they called my former employer. The landscape was beautiful like 'The Place Promised in Our Early Days' with the dark pines. Paju is a center of the publishing industry although books / fiction and the whole 'condition of fiction' by which people think their own children, neighbors, selves etc. are anime characters is pozzed from here to Eternity along with personality-politics. There is a poem or 'hymn' or 'psalm' or 'cry of the heart' I wish I could write spurred partially by Servants of Christ's video with the river in Korea and 'I Need Thee Ev'ry Hour. I don't know why I took myself for a failure for so long or put down roots in this poisoned Babylon when in retrospect people were sending me little 'Evangelical Satanism' messages in the form of brand-slogans et cetera for like 5 years instead of reasoning honestly. That's why I sincerely say nuke Milwaukee - that's not pedagogy, neighborliness, love, family, friendship. It's nothing but a swap-meet. I got sad today looking at a picture of a celebrity from a famous rigged girl-group that I always defended the rigging of due to aesthetic opinions about 'composition' and realizing something that my college girlfriend's roommate realized about her back in the day but then I felt, 'The condition of prostitution in some respects is preferable to the condition of Germanic / Teutonic purism, which leads to pedophilia and homosexuality on the one hand and mass-murder on the other.' Moreover you can just look at a f-cking hostess-bar and talk and it prepares one for love IMO better than Western movies although I don't know anymore. I wanted to cancel all my projects like 'Stepfather' (about a teacher getting sick of his colleagues for innuendos, careerism, negativity in the lounge, everything that ppl KNOW is bad but no one ever fixes)... just 'cause I don't know if I can even live and moreover I started to intuit the different endings idle vain people would want to see. I keep saying again and again a key component of the 'Covid culture wars' is 'anti-belief' as well as people's wanting to duel one another to the death over past grievances micro or macro. At day's end and at bottom 'anti-belief' - or attempting to convince people that truth is a lie; ex. that Koreans are unreal - compels people to pare themselves down to their ultimate solipsism or, I realize, inability to distinguish Flesh from Spirit in any fruitful and abiding way. I was reflecting on how talking about 'The Meaning of Marriage' led someone to cohabitate which totally failed for me as well as wondering whether my gifting this book was interpreted as a 'magic sign' rather than simple no-hidden-message offering. One thing I loved about Koreans at least at my first job was there were no hidden messages at least from the senior administration. I drove to Bethlehem College and Seminary and felt a power radiating from the church but am in no position to assist them or join their Global Studies program which I'd wanted to intellectually. I haven't really done anything with my life but study EAS, K-Studies, languages, etc. I had visions and dreams of stealth-bombers honestly, Russian drills planting nuclear devices deep in the Earth to destabilize the orbital axis - Putin could kill any or all of us at any time, I am convinced. I wondered if the Russians or 'Varangians' were the 'last people.' They decide. In Milwaukee, in Germany people joke about things like Hitler's dog, racism, homosexuals and amuse themselves waiting for people to get hoist by their own petard.I also remembered how for years I thought about Cordelia in 'King Lear' but despite reading this play like 30 times I still don't understand completely how a 'Christology of Cordelia' could be articulated to make people understand their blindness to Charity.Also related to Mary HK Choi's 'Yolk,' a novel which disappointed me but which I felt could be one of those 'ultima novels; last words.' I keep remembering despite whoever wants to make me forget that Covid is or was an opportunity to pursue better international relations / build connections and relations not dependent on blind policies like IMO American NK policy or other official diplomacy. I had big dreams about avoiding war as well as people holding goods more in common by my attempts to donate a few laptops and some money stripped me of my net worth and were not proportionately matched. Everyone seems so determined to live their own story and cling to things when they could be dead in 24hrs from Delta variant Covid 19 and everyone knows it. Tornadoes, hailstorms. Man spent the last hundred years of more building trillions of dollars of weapons of war while schooling problems are the same as they were back in 1881 - as are the problems faced by graduates particularly orphans and minorities and, also, any intellectual in a society which still despises these three categories. Maybe I just gave people dreams in the past and maybe I was too free in the past or stopped wearing the right clothes too soon. I gave up on the future long ago - I reflected recently as I had always felt but not articulated - that as Koreans say the favored child is favored outside the home so too the hated child is hated - but I kept getting chances even without understanding others' points of view to be a part of their past. But I don't even know if Education is the point or Build Back Better or anything like that when 4 million people died and the '3rd world' variants from India as well as South America are basically destined to come to the 1st world. I tried to convince people that there could be a beautiful future in which everyone lived more lovingly, courageously et cetera and rediscovered God. I also felt, however, from a long time ago that when it comes to US Korea policy and perhaps to the salvation or deliverance of America's domestic population from a worse Covid variant the most caring organization literally is the military and not any philanthropy; I don't know if anyone else could step in, though by that same token, I was thinking about IXK / anti-racism which I embrace as an alternative to Obamaism, and couldn't help feeling like the 'Grand Alliance' of this day has something to do with abortion-culture (which [Chancellor] John Piper summarizes as men playing God the Father and the strong preying on the weak; and for which I formulated the term 'unconditional evil' or the attitude that powerful men possess a lifelong veto over the lives and wellbeing of anyone else), though coefficient with race-relations or rather 'recognition' of other people as beautiful, beloved, perhaps chosen. I was telling someone 'Language is a phenomenological...' My favorite songs other than 'I Need Thee,' 'This Is My Father's House,' some older stuff, have been 'Make Me Love You' by Kim Taeyeon which is a song about the 'shared gaze' and 'Clover' by Fromis which embodied my desire to help kids 'get life right the first time' through teachers and structures that would 'save people from themselves.' But then my mind traveled to Japan, swords, halberds, maidens, all kinds of new birth-defects and problems in the new age, and I couldn't help feeling that some things will be very much the same and in a way it is my fault for losing my fire. I'm dreaming in dark red and am incredibly frustrated reading Eric Feigl-Ding on Twitter that the West - Canada, America, UK - is perpetrating this corporatist mass-sacrifice.. I want to just fly away to KR where at least they count the bodies honestly but wish Americans would go home, get married, go to Church more often. Everyone seems so unwilling to put their stories on hold or discard their fetishes / idols (Healthcare, Money / Mammon, Science, The Past, Ultimate Communist Utopian Social Justice, Almighty Meritocracy...). Some ambrosial(?) explosion, the Face of Jesus, with or without me may the 'Grand Alliance' prevail.

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jonescrysstal · 4 years ago

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Lupine Publishers | Antidialectics: Vodou and The Haitian Revolution in Opposition to The African American Civil Rights Movement

Lupine Publishers | Journal of Anthropological and Archaeological Sciences

Introduction

The dialectical integration of black Americans into the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism of the West via slavery, the African American civil rights movement, and globalization marks the end of black American history as a distinct African worldview manifesting itself onto the world. A black/African practical consciousness as represented in Haitian Vodou and Kreyol, for example, manifesting itself in praxis and the annals of history via the nation-state of Ayiti/ Haiti is slowly being supplanted by a universal Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism phenotypically dressed in multiethnic, multiracial, and multisexual skins speaking for the world. This latter worldview has not only erased a distinct African practical consciousness among black Americans, but via the African- Americanization of the black diaspora in globalization through the hip-hop culture of the black American underclass, on the one hand, and the prosperity gospel of the black American church and bourgeoisie on the other is seeking to do the same among blacks globally in the diaspora while simultaneously destroying all life on earth [1]. This work focuses on how and why the purposiverationality, antidialectics, of the originating moments of the Haitian Revolution and Vodou diametrically opposes that of the African American Civil Rights movement. The author concludes that the intent of the originating moments of the Haitian Revolution at Bwa Kayiman (Bois Caiman) was not for equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition with whites by reproducing their norms and structure, as in the case of the African American civil rights movement under the purposive-rationality of liberal bourgeois black Protestant men, but for the reconstitution of a new world order or structuring structure (libertarian communism) “enframed” by an African linguistic and spiritual community, Vodou and kreyol, respectively, grounded in, and “enframing,” liberty and fraternity among blacks or death. In fact, the author posits that it is the infusion of the former worldview, liberal bourgeois Protestantism via the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism, on the island by the mulatto elites and petit-bourgeois free persons of color, Affranchis, looking to Canada, France, and America for equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition that not only threatens Haiti and its practical consciousnesses, Vodou and Kreyol, contemporarily, but all life and civilizations on earth because of its dialectical economic growth and accumulative logic within the finite space and resources of the earth.

Background of the problem

Traditional interpretations of the Haitian Revolution and the black American Civil Rights movement of the 1960s attempt to understand the two sociohistorical phenomena within the dialectical logic of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic [2-4]. Concluding that both events represent a dialectical struggle by the enslaved Africans, who have internalized the rules of their masters, for equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution within and using the metaphysical discourse of their former white masters to convict them of not identifying with their norms, rules, and values as recursively organized and reproduced by blacks. This traditional liberal bourgeois interpretation of the Haitian revolution attempts to understand its denouement through the sociopolitical effects of the French Revolution when the National Constituent Assembly (Assemblée Nationale Constituante) of France passed la Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen or the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in August of 1789. The understanding from this perspective is that the slaves, many of whom could not read or write French, understood the principles, philosophical and political principles of the Age of Enlightenment, set forth in the declaration and therefore yearned to be like their white masters, i.e., freemen seeking liberty, equality, and fraternity, the rallying cry of the French Revolution [4-16].

Although, historically this understanding holds true for the mulattoes and free petit-bourgeois blacks or Affranchis who used the language of the declaration to push forth their efforts to gain liberty, equality, fraternity with their white counterparts as slaveholders and masters as brilliantly highlighted by Laurent Du Bois [3]. This position, I posit here, is not an accurate representation for the Africans who met at Bois Caïman, the originating moments of the Haitian Revolution. The Affranchis, embodied in the person of Toussaint Louverture, for example, like their black American middle class counterparts, dialectically pushed for liberty, equality, and fraternity with their white counterparts at the expense of the Vodou discourse and Kreyol language of the pep, the majority of the enslaved Africans who were not only discriminated against by whites but by the mulattoes and free blacks as well who sought to reproduce the French language, culture, religion, and laws of their former slavemasters on the island [5]. Toussaint believed that the technical and governing skills of the Blancs (whites) and Affranchis would be sorely needed to rebuild the country, along the lines of white civilization, after the revolution and the end of white rule on the island. In fact, Toussaint was not seeking to make Haiti an independent country; but sought to have the island remain a French plantation colony, like Martinique and Guadeloupe, without slavery [3]. Although Dessalines’s nationalistic position, which was similar to Toussaint’s, would become dominant after the capture of Toussaint in 1802, his (Dessalines’s) assassination by a plot between the mulatto, Alexandre Pétion, and Henri Christophe, would see to it that the Affranchis’s purposive-rationality would come to historically represent the ideals of the Haitian quest for independence. This purposive-rationality of the Affranchis, to adopt the ontological and epistemological positions of whites by recursively organizing and reproducing their language and ways of being-in-the-world is, however, a Western liberal dialectical understanding of the events and their desire to be like their white counterparts, which stands against the anti-dialectical purposive rationality, which emerged out of the African/Haitian Epistemology, Vilokan/Haitian Idealism, of Boukman Dutty, Cecile Fatiman, the rest of the maroon Africans who congregated for the Petwo Vodou ceremony at Bois Caïman/ Bwa Kayiman. The difference between what the Africans at Bois Caïman wanted and the aspirations of the mulattoes or Affranchis can be summed up through a parallel or complimentary analysis of the dialectical master/slave relationship of the black American experience with their white masters in America [17-31].

Using a structurationist approach to practical consciousness constitution, what Paul C Mocombe [6] calls phenomenological structuralism, this work compares and contrasts the purposive rationality of the black American civil rights movement with that of the originating moments of the ceremony of Bois Caiman. In keeping with the tenets of phenomenological structuralism, the emphasis is on the ideals of structures that social actors internalize and recursively organize and reproduce as their praxis in the material world. In this case, the argument is that two distinct forms of system and social integration would characterize black American and Haitian life, which made their approaches to slavery and colonialism totally distinct: dialectical on the one hand; and antidialectical on the other [31-48].

Theory and Method

Beginning in the sixteenth century, Africans were introduced into the emerging global Protestant capitalist world social structure as slaves. Given their economic material conditions, their African practical consciousnesses, i.e., bodies, languages, ideologies, etc., were dialectically represented by European whites as primitive forms of being-in-the-world to that of the dominant white Protestant bourgeois social order with the ever-declining significance of Catholicism following the Protestant Reformation [7]. From this sociohistorical perspective, under the “contradictory principles of marginality and integration” [7] the majority of African consciousness in America especially was reshaped as a “racial classin- itself” (blacks), a “caste in class,” forced to embody the structural terms (bourgeois ideals in the guise of the protestant ethic) of the dominant global (capitalist) social relations of production, over all other “alternative” African adaptive responses to its then organizational form, slavery [48-64].

This embodiment or internalization of bourgeois ideals, in the guise of the Protestant Ethic, by the majority of Africans in America amidst their poor material conditions created by the social relations of Protestant capitalist organization, in keeping with traditional readings of the black American struggle for freedom, eventually made the struggle to obtain equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition with their white Protestant bourgeois counterparts amidst racial and class discrimination their goal. This goal, brilliantly captured by W.E.B. Du Bois in his work The Souls of Black Folk, progressively crept into their African based spiritualism, which dialectically subsequently became synthesized with the Protestant Ethic of the global capitalist Protestant social structure leading to the ever-increasing materialization of black American faiths and practical consciousness along the lines of their former white slave masters. Hence, the subsequent aim of the majority of black Americans, as embodied in the black American civil rights movement, became a movement for equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition led by liberal black Protestant bourgeois male preachers (hybrid simulacrum of their white colonizers) like Martin Luther King Jr. against alternative responses to enslavement by convicting the society of not identifying with their norms and values, which black Americans embodied and recursively organized and reproduced in their practices [8].

Conversely, the Haitian Revolution as initiated on August 14th, 1791 at Bois Caïman by Boukman Dutty and Mambo Cecile Fatiman was led by various representatives of African nations seeking to recursively reorganize and reproduce their African practicalconsciousness/ thesis, the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism, which emerges out of their African ontology and epistemology, Vilokan/Haitian Idealism, in the world against the bourgeois liberalism of whites and the mulatto or Affranchis class of Haiti, who would subsequently, with the assassination of the houngan, Vodou priest, Jean-Jacques Dessalines in 1806, undermine that attempt for a more liberal purposive-rationale, similar to that of the black American civil-rights movement, that would reintroduce wage-slavery and peonage on the island [64-70].

Haitians celebrate Bois Caïman as the beginning of the Haitian Revolution in August of 1791. At Bois Caïman/Bwa Kay Iman (near Boukman’s house), the Jamaican-born houngan, Vodou priest, Boukman Dutty, initiated the Haitian Revolution on August 14, 1791 when he presided over a Petwo Vodou ceremony in Kreyol in the area, which is located in the mountainous Northern corridors of the island. Accompanied by a woman, the mambo Vodou priestess Cecile Fatiman, taken by the spirits of the lwa/loas, Ezili Danto/ Erzulie Danthor, they cut the throat of a black pig and had all the participants in attendance drink the blood. According to Haitian traditions, Boukman and the participants, via Boukman’s prayer, swore two things to the lwa Ezili Danto, the Goddess of the Haitian nation, present in Fatiman if she would grant them success in their quest for liberty against the French. First, they would never allow for inequality on the island; second, they would serve bondye/ Gran-Met (their good god) and its 401 manifestations, lwaes of Vodou and not the white man’s god “which inspires him with crime:”

Bon Dje ki fè la tè. Ki fè soley ki klere nou enro. Bon Dje ki soulve lanmè. Ki fè gronde loray. Bon Dje nou ki gen zorey pou tande. Ou ki kache nan niaj. Kap gade nou kote ou ye la. Ou we tout sa blan fè nou sibi. Dje blan yo mande krim. Bon Dje ki nan nou an vle byen fè. Bon Dje nou an ki si bon, ki si jis, li ordone vanjans. Se li kap kondui branou pou nou ranpote la viktwa. Se li kap ba nou asistans. Nou tout fet pou nou jete potre dje Blan yo ki swaf dlo lan zye. Koute vwa la libète k ap chante lan kè nou.

The god who created the sun which gives us light, who rouses the waves and rules the storm, though hidden in the clouds, he watches us. He sees all that the white man does. The god of the white man inspires him with crime, but our god calls upon us to do good works. Our god who is good to us orders us to revenge our wrongs. He will direct our arms and aid us. Throw away the symbol of the god of the whites who has so often caused us to weep, and listen to the voice of liberty, which speaks in the hearts of us all [71-75].

That night the slaves revolted first at Gallifet Plantation, then across the Northern Plains. Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines would join the rebellion after Boukman was captured and beheaded by the French. And as the proverbial saying goes, the rest is history. Under Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who crowned himself emperor for life, Haiti became the first free black nation-state in the world in 1804, the only successful slave rebellion in recorded history, the first democratic nation, and the second republic after the United States of America in the Western Hemisphere [75-79].

The centering of Vodou and Kreyol are the divergent paths against slavery and liberal bourgeois Protestantism that sets the originating moments of the Haitian Revolution apart, as a distinct phenomenon, from the desires and purposive-rationale of an elite liberal hybrid group, the mulatto elite and black petit-bourgeois class or Affranchis in Haiti and liberal black Protestant bourgeois male preachers of America, seeking to serve as the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination for the black masses in both countries by recursively (re) organizing and reproducing the agential moments of their former colonizers within the logical constraints of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. To only highlight the latter, liberal bourgeois Protestant initiative, over the former, originating moments of the Haitian revolution, under the purview of a Hegelian master/slave universal dialectic, as so many theorists, including the work, Black Jacobins, of CLR James, and Susan Buck- Morss’s [4], Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, is to deny the existence of the African practical-consciousness, Haitian Idealism as expressed through the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism, that has been seeking to institute its practical consciousness in the world since the beginning of the slave trade in favor of the liberal bourgeois Protestantism of whites and the mulatto and black petitbourgeois elites who have yet to be able to stamp out, as was done to the black American, the African linguistic system, Kreyol, and practical-consciousness, Vodou, of the Haitian masses, by which Haiti’s provinces have been constituted [79-90].

Discussion

As in the case of CLR James’s work, Black Jacobins, Susan Buck Morss [4] in her work, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History attempts to understand the originating moments of the Haitian Revolution metaphorically through Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. Suggesting, in fact, that it is the case of Haiti that Hegel utilized to constitute the metaphor:

Given the facility with which this dialectic of lordship and bondage lends itself to such a reading, one wonders why the topic Hegel and Haiti has for so long been ignored. Not only have Hegel scholars failed to answer this question; they have failed, for the past two hundred years, even to ask it (2009, p. 56).

My position here is that James’s and Morss’s conclusions do not hold true for the Africans who met at Bois Caïman, and only holds true for the case of the Affranchis of Haiti-who usurped, following their assassination of Dessalines, the originating moments of the Revolution from the Africans who met at Bois Caïman-and the black Americans who, in choosing to rebel against their former masters, were not risking death to avoid subjugation, but in rebelling were choosing life in order to be like the master and subjugate.

In Hegel’s master/slave dialectic as Morss explains,

Hegel understands the position of the master in both political and economic terms. In the System der Sittlichkeit (1803): “The master is in possession of an overabundance of physical necessities generally, and the other [the slave] in the lack thereof.” At first consideration the master’s situation is “independent, and its essential nature is to be for itself”; whereas “the other,” the slave’s position, “is dependent, and its essence is life or existence for another.” The slave is characterized by the lack of recognition he receives. He is viewed as “a thing”; “thinghood” is the essence of slave consciousness-as it was the essence of his legal status under the Code Noir. But as the dialectic develops, the apparent dominance of the master reverses itself with his awareness that he is in fact totally dependent on the slave. One has only to collectivize the figure of the master in order to see the descriptive pertinence of Hegel’s analysis: the slaveholding class is indeed totally dependent on the institution of slavery for the “overabundance” that constitutes its wealth. This class is thus incapable of being the agent of historical progress without annihilating its own existence. But then the slaves (again, collectivizing the figure) achieve selfconsciousness by demonstrating that they are not things, not objects, but subjects who transform material nature. Hegel’s text becomes obscure and falls silent at this point of realization. But given the historical events that provided the context for The Phenomenology of Mind, the inference is clear. Those who once acquiesced to slavery demonstrate their humanity when they are willing to risk death rather than remain subjugated. The law (the Code Noir!) that acknowledges them merely as “a thing” can no longer be considered binding, although before, according to Hegel, it was the slave himself who was responsible for his lack of freedom by initially choosing life over liberty, mere self-preservation. In The Phenomenology of mind, Hegel insists that freedom cannot be granted to slaves from above. The self-liberation of the slave is required through a “trial by death”: “And it is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained…The individual, who has not staked his life, may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person [the agenda of the abolitionists!]; but he has not attained the truth of his recognition as an independent self-consciousness.” The goal of this liberation, out of slavery, cannot be subjugation of the master in turn, which would be merely to repeat the master’s “existential impasse,” but, rather, elimination of the institution of slavery altogether (53-56).

The Africans at Bois Caïman, given that they were already recursively reproducing their African practical consciousness in the maroon community of Bois Caïman away from the master/slave dialectic of whites neither cared for the master, nor his structuring metaphysics, but instead wanted to be free to exercise their African practical consciousness, which would be precarious, given the possibility of their re-enslavement if captured, by whites and the Affranchis, who also practiced slavery, remained on the island. In essence, the events at Bois Caïman represented an attempt by the Africans to exercise their already determining independent African self-consciousness against the whites and Affranchis’s dependent self-consciousness which sought to repeat the masters’ “existential impasse.” The liberal Affranchis and the black Americans, in other words, who would lead the civil rights movement, wanted, given that their very practical consciousness was determined by their relations to, and yearning to be like, their masters, rebelled in order to themselves be “free” masters and not an “independent self-consciousness.” In essence, the Affranchis, like their black American counterparts, merely rebelled in order to be like their masters, and sought neither to subjugate the master nor eliminate “the institution of slavery altogether,” since their consciousness as slaves was from the onset revealed to them only through the eyes of the master. Hence, the only other consciousness they had, outside of their slave consciousness, “thinghood,” was that of the master, whose position they desired, and that of the African masses whose practical consciousness they abhorred. But Boukman, Fatiman, and the other maroon Africans of Bois Caïman had their abhorred African Consciousness, which to revert to. The Affranchis, like their black American counterparts did not. Be that as it may, whereas the former sought to institute a new historical/universal, Absolute, order onto the material resource framework of Haiti by invoking the aid of their lwaes/loas to assist them in rooting out the whites and their gods, the latter, like their black American counterparts, wanted to maintain the status quo, the master/slave relationship by which their practical consciousness was constituted, in a national position of their own [91-116].

In other words, black Americans subjectified/objectified in the “Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism” of American society were completely subjectified and subjugated on account of race and class position [8,9]. They were subjectified objects, i.e., slaves, things, whose initial practical consciousness prior to their enslavement was used dialectically by the master, by presenting the practical consciousness of the slave as backwards and damned within the metaphysics of the master’s practical consciousness, against the slave to objectify them as a thing. W.E.B Du Bois, for example, relying on the racial and national ideology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century theoretically, en framed by Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, conceived of the ambivalence that arose in him as a self-conscious thing, as a result of the “class racism” (Étienne Balibar’s term) of American society, as a double consciousness: “two souls,” “two thoughts,” in the Negro whose aim is to merge these two thoughts into one distinct way of being, i.e., to be whole again [117-125].

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, -a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, -an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, -this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a coworker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius [3].

This double-consciousness resulting from his thingness in relation to the master’s consciousness, Du Bois alludes to, in this famous passage of his work The Souls of Black Folk, is not a metaphor for the racial duality of black American life in America [8,9]. Instead, it speaks to Du Bois’s, as a black liberal bourgeois Protestant man, ambivalence about the society because it prevents him from exercising, not his initial African practical consciousness which is “looked on in amused contempt and pity,” but his true (master) American consciousness because of the society’s antiliberal and discriminatory practices, which made him a thing, i.e., slave. Although over time his “thinghood” forced Du Bois to adopt “pan-African communism” against his early beliefs in liberal bourgeois Protestantism, i.e., his desire to be like the masters, whites. Du Bois, in this passage, like the many black Americans who would share his class position and liberal bourgeois Protestant worldview, does not want an independent self-consciousness that is not the masters since the only other consciousness he is familiar with is that of the slaves, but simply wants to be like the collective dependent masters, whites, “without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.” His later pan-African communist message simply turns this desire, the attempt to be a master, into a desire to constitute the master/slave dialectic in a national position of his own. But contrary to this later “pan-African communist” message against assimilation for a nationalist position of his own, however, to make themselves whole the majority of black Americans of the civil rights movement, especially, did not yearn for or establish (by averting their gaze away from the eye of power or their white masters) a new independent object formation or totality, based on the initial “message” of their people prior to their encounter with the master, which spoke against racial and class stratification and would have produced heterogeneity into the American capitalist bourgeois world-system; instead, since there was no other “message” but that of the society which turned and represented the “original” African message of their people into inarticulate, animalistic backward gibberish, they (blacks) turned their gaze back upon the eye of power (through protest and success in their endeavors) for recognition as “speaking subjects” of the society seeking not to subjugate the master in a national position of their own but for equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition with their white counterparts. Power hesitantly responded by allowing some of them (the hybrid modern “other” liberal bourgeois Protestant) to partake in the order of things, which gave rise to the black American identity, the liberal black bourgeoisie or hybrids, which delimits the desired agential moments of the social structure for all blacks [8-13].

Thus black American protest as a structurally differentiated “class-in-itself” (subjectified/objectified thing) led by this liberal black bourgeoisie within the American protestant bourgeois master/slave order did not reconstitute American society, but integrated the black subjects, whose ideals and practices (acquired in ideological apparatuses, i.e., schools, law, churches (black and white)), as speaking subjects, were that of the larger society, i.e., the protestant ethic, into its exploitative and oppressive order-an order which promotes a debilitating performance principle actualized through calculating rationality, which may result in economic gain for its own sake for a few predestined individuals. The black American, like the early Du Bois of the Souls prior to his conversion to pan-African communism, in a word, became like their masters within the master/slave dialectic, which constituted their historical experiences.

The same can be said for the Affranchis of Haiti, who sought for equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition with their blanc counterparts at the expense of the agential initiatives of the Bois Caïman African participants. The Affranchis, like Toussaint, for example, who owned African slaves, rebelled not to eliminate slavery or subjugate the master, but to be a master, like their liberal black American counterparts, through their dialectical claim for equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition. Their slave status only revealed to them the “other” consciousness in the dialectic, i.e., the master consciousness. Therefore, their desire was not to be slaves, who had no other consciousness to look to but that of the newly arrived Africans and the maroon Africans, but masters who enslaved the other slaves, i.e., the newly arrived Africans and the marooned Africans, who were not like themselves. This desire of Toussaint, for example, to be like the master, however, was not the aim of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Boukman, Cecile Fatiman, and the other participants at Bois Caïman. The former, Affranchis, like their black American counterpart, wanted equality of opportunity and recognition from, and with, their former white masters by recursively organizing and reproducing their (the slave masters) liberal agential moments; the latter, Boukman, Fatiman, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and the Africans of Bois Caïman did not, but instead sought to anti-dialectically reify and practice their traditional African ways of life against the purposive-rationality of their former white masters. The slaves at Bois Caïman were already an independent self-consciousness in their maroon communities. They did not share in the “existential impasse” of their masters. The originating Vodou and Kreyol moments of the Revolution was an attempt to get rid of the whites and Affranchis, who desired to be whites, in order that they may recursively organize and reproduce their practical consciousness, not to be like their white masters as Toussaint and the rest of the Affranchis desired. That the Affranchis would come to direct the Revolution after the death of Dessalines October, 17th, 1806, would give rise to their purposive-rationality, their desire for equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition within the global capitalist social structure, at the expense of the agential moments of Boukman, Fatiman, and the other participants of Bois Caïman who sought to anti-dialectically manifest their selfconsciousness onto the stage of history by evoking the aid of their own Gods to fight against the Gods and metaphysics of the whites and Affranchis who had adopted the purposive-rationality of their white masters [126-133].

Conclusion

Essentially, the Frankfurt school’s “Negative Dialectics” represents the means by which the Du Bois of The Souls, the majority of liberal bourgeois black Americans, and the Affranchis of Haiti confronted their historical situation. The difference between the “negative dialectics” of Du Bois of The Souls, the majority of liberal bourgeois black Americans, the Affranchis, and the discourse or purposive rationality of the enslaved Africans of Bois Caïman is subtle, but the consequences are enormously obvious. For the Frankfurt school, “[t]o proceed dialectically means to think in contradictions, for the sake of the contradiction once experienced in the thing, and against that contradiction. A contradiction in reality, it is a contradiction against reality” (Adorno, 1973 [1966]: 145). This is the ongoing dialectic they call “Negative Dialectics:”

Totality is to be opposed by convicting it of nonidentity with itself-of the nonidentity it denies, according to its own concept. Negative dialectics is thus tied to the supreme categories of identitarian philosophy as its point of departure. Thus, too, it remains false according to identitarian logic: it remains the thing against which it is conceived. It must correct itself in its critical course-a course affecting concepts which in negative dialectics are formally treated as if they came “first” for it, too (Adorno, 1973 [1966]: 147).

This position, as Adorno points out, is problematic in that the identitarian class convicting the totality of which it is apart remains the thing against which it is conceived. As in the case of black Americans and the Affranchis, their “negative dialectics,” their awareness of the contradictions of the heteronomous racial capitalist order did not foster a reconstitution of that order but a request that the order rid itself of a particular contradiction and allow their participation in the order, devoid of that particular contradiction, which prevented them from identifying with the Hegelian totality, i.e., that all men are created equal except the enslaved black American or the mulatto. The end result of this particular protest was in the reconfiguration of society (or the totality) in which those who exercised its reified consciousness, irrespective of skin-color, could partake in its order. In essence, the contradiction, as interpreted by the black Americans, and just the same the Affranchis, was not in the “pure” identity of the heteronomous order, which is reified as reality and existence as such, but in the praxis (as though praxis and structure are distinct) of the individuals, i.e., institutional regulators or power elites, who only allowed the participation of blacks within the order of things because they were “speaking subjects” (i.e., hybrids, who recursively organized and reproduced the agential moments of the social structure) as opposed to “silent natives” (i.e., the enslaved Africans of Bois Caïman). And herein rests the problem with attempting to reestablish an order simply based on what appears to be the contradictory practices of a reified consciousness. For in essence the totality is not “opposed by convicting it of nonidentity with itself-of the nonidentity it denies, according to its own concept,” but on the contrary, the particular is opposed by the constitutive subjects for not exercising its total identity. In the case of liberal black bourgeois America, the totality, American racial capitalist society, was opposed through a particularity, i.e., racism, which stood against their bourgeois identification with the whole. In such a case, the whole remains superior to its particularity, and it functions as such. The same holds true for the Affranchis of Haiti, but not for Boukman, the other participants of Bois Caïman, and Dessalines who went beyond the master/slave dialectic.

In order to go beyond this “mechanical” dichotomy, i.e., whole/part, subject/object, master/slave, universal/particular, society/individual, etc., by which society or more specifically the object formation of modernity up till this point in the human archaeological record has been constituted, so that society can be reconstituted wherein “Being” (Dasein, Martin Heidegger’s term) is nonsubjective and nonobjective, “organic” in the Habermasian sense, it is necessary, as Adorno points out, that the totality (which is not a “thing in itself”) be opposed, not however, as he sees it, “by convicting it of nonidentity with itself” as in the case of black America and the Affranchis or mulattoes, but by identifying it as a nonidentity identity that does not have the “natural right” to dictate identity in an absurd world with no inherent meaning or purpose except those which are constructed, via their bodies, language, ideology, and ideological apparatuses, by social actors operating within a reified sacred metaphysic. This is not what happened in black America or with the Affranchis or mulattoes of Haiti, but I am suggesting that this is what took place with the participants of Bois Caïman within the eighteenth century Enlightenment discourse of the whites and Affranchis.

The liberal black American and the Affranchis by identifying with the totality, which Adorno rightly argues is a result of the “universal rule of forms,” the idea that “a consciousness that feels impotent, that has lost confidence in its ability to change the institutions and their mental images, will reverse the conflict into identification with the aggressor” (Adorno, 1973 [1966], pg. 94), reconciled their double consciousness, i.e., the ambivalence that arises as a result of the conflict between subjectivity and forms (objectivity), by becoming “hybrid” Americans or mulattoes desiring to exercise the “pure” identity of the American and French totality and reject the contempt to which they were and are subject. The contradiction of slavery in the face of equality-the totality not identifying with itself-was seen as a manifestation of individual practices, since subjectively they were part of the totality, and not an absurd way of life inherent in the logic of the totality. Hence, their protest was against the practices of the totality, not the totality itself, since that would mean denouncing the consciousness that made them whole. On the contrary, Boukman, the participants at Bois Caïman, and Dessalines decentered or “convicted” the totality of French modernity not for not identifying with itself, but as an adverse “sacred-profaned” cultural possibility against their own “God-ordained” possibility (alternative object formation), Haitian/ Vilokan Idealism, which they were attempting to exercise in the world. This was the pact the participants of Bois Caïman made with their loas/lwa, Ezili Danto, when they swore to neither allow inequality on the island, nor worship the god’s of the whites “who has so often caused us to weep.” In fact, according to Haitian folklore, the lwa, Ezili Danto, who embodied Faitman, or Mambo Fatiman, descended from the heavens and joined the participants of Bois Caïman when they initially set-off to burn the plantations in 1791, but her tongue was subsequently removed by the other participants so that she would not reveal their secrets should she be captured by the whites. Haiti has never been able to live out this pact the participants of Bois Caïman made to Ezili Danto, given the liberal bourgeois Affranchis’s, backed by their former colonizers, America and France, claims to positions of economic and political power positions, which have resulted in the passage of modern rules and laws grounded in the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism that have caused the majority of the people to weep in dire poverty as wage-laborers in an American dominated Protestant postindustrial capitalist world-system wherein the African masses are constantly being forced via ideological apparatuses such as Protestant missionary churches, industrial parks, tourism, and athletics, for examples, to adopt the liberal bourgeois Protestant ethos of the Affranchis and the black Americans against the Vodou ideology and its ideological apparatuses.

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