Public Lecture by Dr. Aron Dunlap, Asst. Prof. of the Liberal Arts at Shimer College, delivered at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore
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Description:
In the years following WWII there seemed to be a general consensus among intellectuals in the West that if there was a pathological underbelly to any psychological health we might presume to own, it was anxiety. This was, they agreed, the Age of Anxiety, which was the title of a long poem by W.H. Auden that functioned as the inspiration for Leonard Bernsteinâs 2nd symphony. The phrase made its way into common parlance and we see it forming the nucleus of concern in theologian Paul Tillichâs tremendously popular work, The Courage to Be. In this work, Tillich agreed with existentialists such as Sartre that, while fear has an object, the problem with anxiety was that it had none. For these thinkers, anxiety was part and parcel of human life, and one had to learn to take responsibility for a life that would never be free of the awe(ful) dread of living and the certainty of death. For Freud, the neurotic anxiety issuing from the castration complex was a kind of âbedrockâ beyond which psychoanalysis could not venture. In his wake, Jacques Lacan re-interpreted this aspect of his masterâs thought while also challenging the existentialists by claiming that anxiety, in fact, is ânot without its object,â namely, objet a, the object cause of desire, which stands in the confluence of Lacanâs three registers of the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real, and which is an entirely dependable âsignalâ of the Real. While Hannah Arendt uses a radically different vocabulary, there is, in her political thought, something that, like objet a, falls away. In the American political experience what falls away is enjoyment in politics. What takes its places is the inevitable duality (right, left; conservative, liberal) that settles down in the place vacated by the object cause of desire.
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