Anxiety and Ontology: Toward the Lacanian Materialist Metapsychology of the Affect

Abstract

In the history of modern philosophy, affects in general, and particularly the affect of anxiety, has experienced a rather peculiar and uneasy fate. In fact, after the Cartesian dualism of mind and body, of reason and senses, gained hegemony, the question of affects as something categorically different than both mind and senses was somehow “repressed” or excluded from serious philosophical engagement. The sole exception to this hegemonic disposition might indeed be Spinozistic monism, which in order to think affects, however, had to “repress” or exclude negativity and, consequently, subjectivity, whereby this exclusion led to the problem, roughly put, of the very indistinguishability of affects and sense, and also of affects and substance. It could be said that the first modern philosophical current that attempted to address the problem of affects broadly speaking is the post-Schellingian existentialist tradition, which, however, thought of affects in a very singular manner, i.e. as affective determinations of decisively subjective existence. Accordingly, Kierkegaardian existentialist affects (boredom, anxiety, despair) are popularly seen as inherently bound with the experience of subjective existence, which seemingly opposes itself to the (Hegelian) dialectics of objective spirit conceived as a system.