#yikes at quoting heidegger again

[jacquelinemerritt]

The Existential Dread of Being Queer

“The nothing is the complete negation of the totality of being.”

Martin Heidegger, an influential German philosopher, wrote that as part of his essay “What is Metaphysics?”. Heidegger was not in any way attempting to talk about what we today call “identity politics,” but his definition of nothing is not far from the experience of the queer community, wherein our identities are systematically invalidated by the world around us and we are made to feel unwelcome in the shared experience of being.

“The nothing” was important to Heidegger for other reasons as well. He believed that understanding the nothing was essential to fully understanding being, and he believed that “Anxiety reveals the nothing. … 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 the midst of being slip away from ourselves. … In the altogether unsettling experience … where there is nothing to hold onto, pure [human experience] is all that is still there.” This feeling of anxiety, which Heidegger believed could be self-induced by thinking about the inevitability of death, is how we come to a better understanding of our being.

For the longest time, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around Heidegger’s hypothesis. Sure, it was insightful to say the fear of death was the key to understanding life, but I couldn’t fathom why anyone would willingly put themselves through anxiety for that understanding.

Then, at two in the morning on June 12, 2016, a man opened fire with an AR-15 in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing fifty people and wounding over fifty more.

Over the course of that Sunday, I was slowly and gradually overwhelmed by the very anxiety Heidegger discussed. It was just five days until the anniversary of my coming out, and I had begun to feel more at ease as a part of the queer community than I ever had before. The attack undid that. My feelings of safety and security had been ripped from me. The people of this country hate me and my people enough to commit the worst mass shooting in its history. How the fuck was I supposed to feel safe?

My existence as a queer woman suddenly came into stark light. The world was no longer content to make subtle digs at my identity, attempting to erode my being into nothingness because they don’t understand it. The message of the shooting is clear. I am not only not welcome to experience the fullness of being; I, along with my sisters, brothers, and siblings in the community, may also not be welcome to any form of being for much longer.

It seems unlikely that Heidegger expected the experience of such anxiety, such existential dread, to reveal this specific truth to me. Despite that, this experience has helped me realize what he found important about anxiety. My existential dread over being part of the queer community has shown me that anxiety is essential to understanding the ultimate futility of fighting for being. It’s sobering, and it puts reality into perspective. The hope I had when I first read him is suddenly no longer worthwhile.

I’m not sure that that hope will ever feel genuinely worthwhile again.