Overview

Anxiety as not only a feeling of dread, but a feeling that we dread is widely considered by both philosophical and psychoanalytic thinkers as an important signal related to our experience of the cultural and intersubjective world. Stephen Felder explores the experience of anxiety through the writings of the existentialist, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic traditions, especially Jacques Lacan, to make sense out of this dreadful experience. Working from Lacan’s claim that the structure of anxiety and fantasy are the same, Felder shows that anxiety is a signal of the Lacanian Real and thus provides us with a point of view from which to critique the cultural world by clarifying how we experience ourselves and others. The chapters examine the implications of this insight for how we think about the visual field, sex, race, consumerism, and what Stuart Hall called the “contradictions of culture” in our attempts to live more vibrant lives and create more emancipatory practices in the twenty-first century.

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9781666947212

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Reviews

Anxiety is always singular. But Stephen Felder's magnificent Anxiety and the Contradictions of Culture reveals how anxiety unlocks a novel understanding of our current situation, if we know how to interpret it correctly. This book is a revelation, the first work to link the travails of anxiety to the maladies of our culture--and the first to show how anxiety must become a site for political action. Every page is a revelation about how anxiety works and what it tells us. --Todd McGowan, University of Vermont

Author Information

Stephen Felder is professor of humanities at Irvine Valley College.

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