Anxiety and Lucidity

Reflections on Culture in Times of Unrest

Leszek Koczanowicz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367218232
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429561306
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

This book explores the nature of modern culture as a culture of anxiety, analyzing the modes in which such anxiety presents itself. Drawing on sociological and philosophical concepts of modernity, the author builds on the work of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud to offer an understanding of modern anxiety culture as the reverse side of risk culture, which stabilizes itself by concealing or making familiar the social phenomena of risk society. Through explorations of memory, politics, art, clairvoyance, notions of national community, and identity, this volume sheds light on the fissures in our culture where anxiety appears, thus revealing its underlying volatility. A study of the ruptures in our modern culture, Anxiety and Lucidity will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory, anthropology, and philosophy with interests in late modern culture.

1
Angor animi

Or, on the culture of anxiety

Angor animi and the beast: two facets of fear

“What a strange force it is that can stir, and with such intensity, a consciousness of the imminence of an event of which there can never have been any actual experience, and yet is so frequently inoperative when death is at hand” (Ryle 1928, 371). This is how distinguished physician John A. Ryle described a syndrome he famously and extensively studied. The syndrome was the sensation of dying in which a patient tells their doctor that they are actually dying now, this very moment. The fundamental symptom of the syndrome is a profound conviction that this is indeed happening right now, that the process of dying is in progress. This conviction is what differentiates angor animi from fear of death or death wish. In the times when medicine had hardly any of the sophisticated diagnostic tools that we have at our disposal today and, thus, had to rely on patients’ subjective sensations to a far greater extent, angor animi was deemed a salient syndrome. It should not be underestimated even in our era. Medical journals from the first half of the 20th century abound in letters in which medical practitioners describe their experience with patients who displayed angor animi. The physicians’ reports evidence their attempts to grasp and cope with the phenomenon which was hardly explicable in strictly medical terms.

Let me quote a handful of such depictions. In a letter to The British Medical Journal, Dr. J.C. Baker writes:

Some 10 years ago, when I was the admitting house-physician at a London teaching hospital, I was called to examine a man aged about 60 with a history of effort angina which had increased progressively during the preceding few weeks. He was sitting up in a bed chain-smoking and appeared extremely tense. I inquired about the character and distribution of the pain and its relationship to exertion, and his replies were lucid and gave a clear picture of angina pectoris. I then inadvertently asked him whether he ever felt he was going to die during one of the attacks. He did not reply to this question but his attitude immediately changed. He seemed to become increasingly distressed and looked at me with fixed, staring eyes. He died one minute later while I was auscultating his heart.

In conclusion to his letter, doctor Baker states: “As a result of this alarming and unforgettable experience I have always refrained from asking patients with angina about this symptom” (Barker 1964, 668). One year later, Barker reported another case of angor animi in which the patient had a very clear sensation of an “impending dissolution”:

I well remember seeing another patient in 1952 in his early 40’s who … had some foreknowledge of his imminent demise. On admission to hospital he was extremely agitated, overbreathing excessively, and appeared to be suffering from a cardiac asthma. There was no significant previous medical history. He was sitting up in bed all the time struggling for breath, clutching on to me and another doctor shouting, “Doctor, doctor, I am going to die, I am going to die, please don’t let me die, please don’t let me die, please, please …” He repeated this over and over again and caused much commotion in the ward. With great difficulty we administered oxygen and intravenous aminophylline, but perhaps mistakenly withheld morphine, fearing that this might depress respiration. Thereafter we just stood back and watched him helplessly while he cried out. Suddenly he stopped and slumped down in the bed. He was dead half an hour after admission. Curiously, a most careful necropsy revealed no abnormalities whatsoever and there was no evidence of pulmonary oedema. We were all of the opinion that he had died of fright.

On that occasion, Barker concluded his report with a bold proposal: “Perhaps the boundaries of western psychiatry should now begin to be extended to include some of the phenomena of extra-sensory perception?” (Barker 1965, 591).

It might be counterproductive to add other accounts of the cases of angor animi at this point, yet let us spare a moment to look into the experiences of Dr. Ryle, himself the researcher of the syndrome, who, according to an article in The Lancet,

was able to describe in careful detail the sensation of dying and the symptoms associated with it. It was most liable to befall him when he had dropped into a pleasant sleep after doing rather too much and increasing his hyperpiesia. He was roused abruptly, on these occasions, by a surging sensation behind the sternum, spreading into the head and neck and down the arms, and associated with the indescribable conviction that he was dying. There was no feeling of faintness or failure of consciousness, and no pronounced changes in pulse-rate or colour.

Ryle’s own medical and biological explanation of these sensations was that: “The heart … at a time of muscular anoxia, announced its distress by pain and by a secondary arrest of bodily movements, and might induce a reflex respiratory inhibition as well. The biological purpose of the whole episode would thus be a warning or protective one” (Ryle 1928, 371).

Interestingly, our contemporary physician defines the syndrome in very similar, albeit slightly more precise, terms:

Since Descartes we’ve had a tendency to believe that from the chin down we are just meat and plumbing. Angor animi suggests that there is more to us than that; that in some way we become aware when a valve is no longer working or that a tear, or “dissection,” is developing within the wall of the aorta. As a sensation, angor animi carries great predictive power: I have ordered an urgent CT scan of the chest because of a patient’s conviction that they’re about to die.

(Francis 2014, 38)

I cite these detailed medical depictions of angor animi at length because I believe that the phenomenon is emblematic of a very peculiar variety of fear. According to Słownik łacińsko-polski [A Polish-Latin Dictionary], the primary meaning of angor is literal and denotes “suffocation, choking” (“Angor” 1998, 191pass). This physical sensation is, however, extended to refer to a number of mental states, including “fear, anguish, anxiety, trouble, vexation, and mental distress” (ibid.). In English, angor animi is often rendered as “anguish of the soul,” an expression which also combines a bodily sensation with mental suffering. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) tells us that “anguish” is derived from Old French angustia, which meant “straitness, tightness,” and, in plural, “straits.” Let us notice that, interestingly, the word which basically designates a geographical feature also carries metaphorical meanings of difficulty, predicament, trouble, and plight (e.g., “dire straits”), and as such is connotatively redolent of “distress.” The OED also references the Latin word angustus, which means “narrow, tight” (“Anguish” 1989, 460). Again, this very tangibly physical term also evokes situations of pressure, discomfort, and even enforced immobility. If we remove the phrase “angor animi” from its medical context and apply it to social settings, it also becomes a metaphor for a very special situation where the belief that annihilation is imminent prevails. Such a conviction of impending death can be felt not only by individuals but by entire cultures, societies, and communities as well. The latter can be oppressed by an acute sense of choking, tightness, and tension, a feeling which only death seems capable of removing.

Henry James’s novella The Beast in the Jungle (2011 [1903]) is commonly regarded as one of the writer’s greatest literary feats. In her study of James’s life and work, Millicent Bell insists that “‘The Beast in the Jungle’ may be James’s most extreme expression of the theme of human character as potentiality which cannot or will not move out into the world of action” (1991, 256). With this thematic focus, it is perhaps no wonder that the novella has invited predominantly psychoanalytical readings. Such a line of interpretation is encouraged by the peculiar personalities of the story’s protagonists: self-centered John Marcher and his devoted May Bartram, and by subtle analogies between the novella’s plot and James’s complicated and mysterious life (Young 2008, 225–37).

The psychoanalytically inflected readings focus principally on refined explorations of the protagonists’ mental states, and often seek to unravel the enigma that Marcher harbors. Most interpreters tend to agree that Marcher poignantly exemplifies the “unlived life,” but they differ as to the reasons behind this. Their diagnoses range from the protagonist’s alleged, concealed, and unwitting homoeroticism (Sedgwick 1990, 182–212), to his incapacity to stand up to life’s demands, to the intricate power relations between the protagonists (Heyns 1997), to finally concluding that in James’s writings, this is the “most powerful short story on the subject of sexual and marital inaction, confused sexual identity, and evasive personal self-deception” (Kaplan 1999, 456).

Nevertheless, I believe that James’s texts emblematizes a different kind of fear than angor animi, namely, a fear that makes us so preoccupied with its object that we fail to notice anything else, including our own death. Before I elaborate on this insight, let me briefly summarize the novella even though I realize that any plot summary of The Beast in the Jungle will rob it of its uniqueness, which lies in that nothing actually happens in the story. The narrative is woven of fleeting mental states, interrupted conversations, and vague feelings.

The protagonist of the novella, John Marcher, accidentally meets a woman whose acquaintance he made several years earlier. He hardly remembers their first meeting, and is shocked to be reminded by May Bartram that he confided his deepest secret to her back then. She is actually the only human being who knows his mystery:

“What exactly was the account I gave –?” “Of the way you did feel? Well, it was very simple. You said you had had from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within you, the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious or terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you, that you had in your bones the foreboding and the conviction of, and that would perhaps overwhelm you.”

(James 2011, 12)

At this moment a bond is established between the protagonists, which helps Marcher overcome, at least for a while, the fear that lies at the core of his life. Yet the bond must remain extraordinary, uncoventionalized, and indeterminate:

Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years, like a crouching Beast in the Jungle. It signified little whether the crouching Beast were destined to slay him or be slain. The definite point was the inevitable spring of the creature; and the definite lesson from that was that a man of feeling didn’t cause himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger hunt. Such was the image under which he had ended by figuring his life.

(ibid., 20)

As years go by, Marcher and Bartram often see each other, but essentially nothing changes in their relationship. The “Beast” is the axis of their shared life, which is their only “real” life. Whatever happens beyond it is brushed aside by James in a few curt sentences. The overall stalemate is somewhat disturbed when May Bartram falls terminally ill. In a few conversations, she intimates that she knows what has happened – that the beast has made its spring. Yet Marcher is at a loss about what to make out of his long-time friend’s confession. This is how their last conversation plays out:

“I’m not sure you’ve understood. You’ve nothing to wait for more. It has come.”…

“You mean that it has come as a positive definite occurrence, with a name and a date?”

“Positive. Definite. I don’t know about the ‘name,’ but, oh, with a date!”

He found himself again too helplessly at sea.

“But come in the night – come and passed me by?”

May Bartram had her strange faint smile.

“Oh no, it hasn’t passed you by.”

“But if I haven’t been aware of it and it hasn’t touched me –?”

“Ah, your not being aware of it” – and she seemed to hesitate an instant to deal with this – “Your not being aware of it is the strangeness in the strangeness. It’s the wonder of the wonder.”

(ibid., 46–7)

This is where the plot basically comes to an end, and what remains is a painful epiphany Marcher experiences when, some time after Bartram’s death, he realizes the point, or rather the pointlessness, of his life:

One’s doom, however, was never baffled, and on the day she told him his own had come down she had seen him but stupidly stare at the escape she offered him. The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived. She had lived – who could say now with what passion? – since she had loved him for himself; whereas he had never thought of her (ah, how it hugely glared at him!) but in the chill of his egotism and the light of her use…. The Beast, at its hour, had sprung … as he didn’t guess; it had sprung as she hopelessly turned fr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Angor animi: or, on the culture of anxiety
• 2 Identity as a nuisance: two genealogies of modern hamartia
• 3 A gladioli postcard: memory and communication
• 4 The memories of childhood in a spectral world
• 5 Post-communism and culture wars
• 6 The anxiety of intimacy: or, on telling the truth in the age of the Internet
• 7 The anxiety of politics
• 8 The magical power of art: the subject, the public sphere, and emancipation
• 9 Anxieties of community
• 10 “Please, don’t be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due”: happiness in the age of democratization
• 11 “Mortal generations”: on two phenomenologies of ageing – Cicero and Améry
• 12 The anxiety of clairvoyance: terminal lucidity and the end of culture
• Index