Abstract
This thesis argues that the limit concept of anxiety has served a remarkable and phantasmatic organising function in the history of modern Western thought. While the importance of anxiety has long been recognised in isolated studies of the thinkers who developed its significance and in the continued effects of its broad conceptual history, I suggest that the full extent and subtending structures of its exceptional positioning remain to be fully reckoned with. In the effort to redress this, and in the context of a contemporary resurgence of engagements of anxiety across a number of different disciplines and contexts, my thesis has two related ambitions. In the first place, I provide a set of extended readings that trace the construction of the exceptionality of anxiety in the works of the specific thinkers I believe to have contributed most decisively to the foregrounding of anxiety in modern thought. In a series of chapters that analyse the place and function of anxiety in the works of Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, and Martin Heidegger, I detail the iterative, contingent, and contested construction of anxiety, both for these thinkers and for the practices and modes of thought that they variously inaugurate. I situate these efforts in their respective historical and intellectual contexts, whilst simultaneously detailing the shared epistemological conditions and the inherent Euro- and ethnocentric frameworks that have impelled the term’s historical overdetermination.Secondly, and in doing so, I look to demonstrate how anxiety operates not only as an isolated or occasional descriptive term across the writings of these thinkers, but rather as an organising limit concept that conditions and frames their pointed engagements with the traditions, disciplines, and historical situations in which their works intervene. In the effort to contextualise the often essentialising definitions of anxiety to which these efforts lead, and the legacies of their frequently naïve critical rehearsal, I suggest that a failure to fully attend to this organisational dimension has often led to a misapprehension of the historic stakes and conditions of the term’s vaunted theorisation. I argue that this has been of particular significance regarding the relation of the exceptional positioning of anxiety to questions of its possible methodological delimitation and corollary political implications, which extend to many engagements with the term today.
| Date of Award | 1 Aug 2022 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Jon Day (Supervisor) & Kelina Gotman (Supervisor) |