The Problem with Anxiety:

how to write the history of an undefinable emotion?

If you allow, I will start by framing today’s topic before addressing the specific events

which make it an unavoidable subject of discussion under the present circumstances.1

First of all, my framework is that of the mutations of contemporary history, and of the

growing interest in the emotions which first became evident around 12 to 15 years ago, to the

point that we can now identify that moment as a sort of emotional turn, rather like the

linguistic turn in its own time. I am not sure that this turning point has always been well

negotiated or that it has led to new directions. We can come back to this, if you wish. But

what I would simply note here is that this new field of interest has crossed paths with that of a

project on which Alain Corbin, Georges Vigarello and I have been engaged for 15 years now:

a cycle of general histories viewed in the long-term, which has seen the successive

publication of a History of the Body, then a History of Masculinity, and now today an almost-

completed History of the Emotions which will bring this cycle to its close. Our guiding idea

has been, to the extent we could, to accompany the shifts occurring in the field of

contemporary history by opening up new spaces of historical enquiry. The body,

masculinity, now the emotions: you will grasp, no doubt, by the nature of these subjects, the

direction of this project, which tries to extend the path so far trodden by the history of

mentalities: that is, from the perspective of a genealogy based on both the tangible and the

feelings, of individuals themselves, of their bodily existence, of their sexual affiliation, of

their emotional life.

And in this history of emotions, the thing which preoccupies me particularly and which

is the subject of my contribution to the whole enterprise is the problem of anxiety. Should it

really be necessary to ask the question these days: why this subject in particular? First of all,

because it is mine, yours, our most common anxiety, the most enduring, in which I believe I

recognise an essential feature of the psychology of individuals living in mass society. Since

the emergence of the latter, anxiety has become a permanent component of both public

discourse and private worries, made worse, it seems to me, by neo-liberalism and

globalisation.

1 This text was presented at the EHESS in Paris in December 2015, about a month after the November terrorist attacks in the capital.

1

I began this work some time ago and what I have outlined in it covers the twentieth

century up to our most recent present. It will therefore concern both fear and anxiety: the

dramas which have recently occurred make the task more painful and more complex to speak

about in today’s context. Painful, because they have touched all of us, far and near, more

profoundly than we could even imagine, and their shockwave is still being felt. Complex,

because I am engaged in historical work which concerns a longer period and I do not want

the weight of these tragic events to crush or to compress the historical timeframe necessary

for a genealogy of the fears and anxieties which are ours. I am therefore going to keep to the

timeframe I had planned before the most recent of these events occurred, right through to

those which already bloodied Paris last year. However, we can in the course of our

discussion, if you wish, let what I have to say resonate with what has recently occurred and

with your perceptions of them.

Anguish within civilization

Having made these preliminary comments, allow me to speak briefly of the genesis of

this enquiry. Why, in this history of emotions over the long-term, write a history of anxiety?

The first answer to that is simple: because, in truth, none yet exists. Although one has at hand

innumerable histories of fear, or rather histories of its innumerable causes, even of its

multiple political uses – works with variations on titles like The Politics of Fear are almost

infinite in number in the English-language social science literature – the causes of anxiety

seem to be missing in them as are historical overviews . Anxiety is most often understood as

a sort of collective mood or feeling which shows itself in given historical periods called, in

the literature to which I have just alluded, The Age of Anxiety. A “politics of fear”, then, and

“ages of anxiety”, sometimes without any relationship between the two, sometimes

mechanically placed one after the other; that is, when they are not quite simply blended,

which is most often the case.

The second reason which led me to explore the history of anxiety was probably my

interest in Freudian texts and my conviction that one can sometimes find insights in them

which cultural history should not overlook. I have therefore always been sensitive to the

Freudian idea of the “malaise in civilisation”, and at the same time I have been persuaded of

the necessity of keeping it up-to-date, since I am not convinced of the psychological source

from which Freud saw it emanating: the feeling of guilt. We all know the central thesis of

Civilisation and its Discontents:

2

“The intention of this study is to present the sense of guilt as the most important problem in the development of civilisation and to show how the price we pay for cultural progress is a loss of happiness, arising from a heightened sense of guilt.”2

It seems to me that my scepticism is based, firstly, on recent observations from clinical

psychology itself, which over the course of last century has seen a progressive and

simultaneous reduction both in neurotic structures and the feeling of guilt, in favour of

narcissistic symptoms and the mechanisms of ordinary perversion3, at the same time as

complaints of anxiety or depression have multiplied.4

Reading a little more closely, however, I think we can find in the work of Freud himself

some indications which would allow an understanding of the malaise as a mass affect, caused

not so much by the feeling of guilt, but by anxiety as a symptom felt by the subject.

“The sense of guilt is fundamentally nothing other than a topical variety of anxiety […] (Anxiety) is present in some way behind all symptoms, though sometimes it seizes control of the whole of consciousness, while at other times it is completely hidden, so that we have to speak of an unconscious anxiety […] or of ‘possibilities of anxiety’.”5

I saw there a possible starter for the construction of an historical subject: understanding

the contemporary forms of the malaise which affects us from the starting point of a “history

of the potential for anguish in culture”, that is to say a history of anxiety. And even more so

given that this potential for anguish in collective life seemed to me in no way new and that

without doubt one could, both using Freud and going beyond him, find its historical traces at

the heart of a genealogy of anxiety in civilisation which is, as Freud suggests, “completely

hidden”, and yet is omnipresent in mass society.

An indefinable feeling of insecurity

I am not going to develop this point here, but with a little more time one could probably

identify the strata of such an archaeology, the ancient sediments of anguish in culture. We

would also find them in the tradition of political philosophy as when, speaking about the

origin of democratic societies, Tocqueville discerned “feverish ardour”, “undefined fear”, “an

unusual sadness” which seemed to inhabit individuals in the first mass society: “It was as if a

sort of cloud habitually covered their faces; they seemed to me to be, even in their pleasures,

2 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, New York, Penguin Classics, 2002 (1930), p. 71.3 See, notably: Charles Melman, L’homme sans gravité, Paris, Denoël, 2002; Jean-Pierre Lebrun, Un monde sans limites, Paris, Erés, 1977.4 See, notably : Pierre-Henri Castel, Ames scrupuleuses, vie d’angoisse, tristes obsédés, Paris, Ithaque, 2011; Alain Ehrenberg, La fatigue d’être soi. Dépression et société, Paris, Odile Jacob, 1998.5 Sigmund Freud, op. cit., p. 72.

3

grave and sad”. He had probably perceived the first modern and paradoxical traces of this

malaise specific to modern societies, “a dull sense of worry … in the midst of abundance”.6

Just as later on, this time at the birth of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt recognised the

isolation, the fragmentation, the insignificance of the individual in mass society. I am not,

therefore, planning to develop a detailed listing, because anxiety is everywhere in culture, and

it is necessary rather to record its pulsations over the last century: by making an inventory of

the subjects of urban sociology, of crowds as well as of the bureaucracy (from Durkheim and

Weber to Christopher Lasch, by way of Riesman and the Chicago School… ), by exploring

its literary side (from Stephan Zweig to Don Delillo by way of Kafka or Buzatti… ) and its

philosophical side (with Kierkegaard, Heidegger or existentialism… ), and by finally

considering the lessons which cultural history could draw from the psychopathology of

anxiety.

I will limit myself here to a brief word on this last point, since it has its importance in

defining the historical field of this work appropriately. Moreover, the subject of clinical

psychoanalysis, since Freud, has been morbid, neurotic anguish. The subject which I am

concerned with here is more a banal, ordinary anguish, which, in order to make the

distinction clear, I have chosen to designate as” anxiety” in a sense close to the Anglo-Saxon

use of the term. I have found a confirmation of this approach in a thesis on anguish written

just after the First World War by Juliette Favez-Boutonier under the supervision of Gaston

Bachelard, of which I quote an extract here:

“All the same, it seems to us that, even if anguish must be viewed as essentially morbid, the majority of individuals have some experience of it, just as certain illnesses are at once so benign and so widely spread that they can be described as characteristic of the “average” human being […]. Rather than being thought of as sicknesses, they can be considered as anomalies to which man is probably predisposed by the conditions of life in society. We believe that anguish could be considered similar to these anomalies by its frequency in our civilisation and its benign nature.”7

Once again, here is the hypothesis of anguish placed at the heart of the perception of

malaise in civilisation. I propose simply reserving the term ‘anguish’ for the morbid context

and instead prefer the word ‘anxiety’ when it comes to understanding this collective feeling

which, with a variable historical intensity, never leaves us; not, however, necessarily

considering it to be individually, socially or politically benign. Despite these slight

reservations, historians of culture will benefit from reading clinical accounts of anguish.

6 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, …7 Juliette Favez-Boutonier, L’angoisse, Paris, PUF, 1956, p. 9.

4

From their reading, they will learn that psychopathology differentiates anguish from

the “dull sense of worry arising from an inexplicable sense of insecurity”8 which is close to

what I mean here by anxiety. This also must be differentiated from fear, but I will return to

that. For if fear always derives from a defined cause, “the feeling of anguish arises from an

unknown source”.9 Anguish, or anxiety as I mean it here, is “the evocation of something

which causes fear, rather than danger itself”,10 “a feeling of an indefinable insecurity” as

Brissaud concluded in 1902 in the Revue neurologique 11. Anguish, in its socially widely

disseminated form of anxiety, is therefore a type of “fear without cause”, according to Pierre

Janet’s formulation.12

Having arrived at this provisional conclusion, I now propose to put it to the test and to

look at our recent history, which immediately preceded the tragic events we have recently

witnessed.

The blending of fears

I wanted first of all to try to grasp the nature of anxiety in establishing, during an

earlier stay in France, a sort of catalogue of a week’s ordinary fears, gathered from the titles

of print and television news during a week in the month of February 2013, chosen at random,

any old week, a banal week, the most normal there could be.

A wave of meteorites came down over Siberia, creating “a glimpse of an apocalyptic

scenario” according to several European and North American newspapers. Simultaneously,

digital pirates attacked Facebook and Twitter. On the same day, in France, the automobile

industry announced unprecedented losses, described as a “descent into hell”. Elsewhere,

unemployed workers threatened to blow up the business which had laid them off. One of

them had chosen to set fire to himself opposite his former workplace. And still on the same

day – and these items followed one another continuously without pause – lasagne fans all

over Europe were suddenly gripped by the jitters: 4.5 million frozen lasagnes, illegally

cooked with horsemeat, had just been sold in 13 different countries. But this European

anxiety overflowed beyond the dinner hour and national borders: economic growth was non-

8 Ibidem, p. 10.9 Ibidem, p. 13.10 Henri Arthus, Les peurs pathologiques : genèse, mécanisme, signification, principes directeurs de leur traitement, Paris, Baillière , 1935  p. 12. 11 Edouard Brissaud , Revue neurologique, 1902, t. II, p. 76212 Pierre Janet, De l’angoisse à l’extase, 2 vol. , Paris, Alcan, 1926-1928, vol. 2, p. 308.

5

existent, public deficits declining vertiginously, and consumer morale at its lowest point.

“Europe is afraid” concluded the French daily newspaper, Le Monde.

However, there is nothing in this daily litany of fears and threats but the most banal,

nothing that can’t be found day after day in western media: this is the normal regime, the bass

continuo, the white noise of ordinary anxiety, the persistent worry about what is happening

when nothing is happening. All the same, it exhibits several recurrent discursive

characteristics: its permanence, for it is continuous; its ubiquitousness, where global threats

sit side by side with local concerns; the variability of its seriousness, where major perils

alternate with minor concerns; its indifference to the relative reality of the dangers, nothing

distinguishing the real catastrophes from purely imaginary constructions, the products of a

discursive machinery which creates anxiety; its cumulative nature, as if the sum of the threats

and the fears or the multiplicity of their origins (cosmic or technological, political and war-

related, industrial and financial, nutritional and medical) were the very proof of its existence;

its particular relationship to time: the present of contemporary fears is haunted by the

evocation of ancient ones (the metaphors of apocalypse and hell, or resurrection from the

flames, in the list above), but it remains extraordinarily sensitive, from one day to another , to

the most banal dangers (after all, the industrial lasagne scandal had no other victims than the

horses themselves), and deploys this mixture of archaic horrors and daily concerns upon an

anxious horizon of expectations which seems to be inevitable: the worst is yet to come.

In short, in the most ordinary discursive regimes where contemporary fears appear, it

is the blending of time, place, subjects, imaginary dangers and real risks which reigns. What

is more, these enunciations are based on a rather singular discursive device. We know

perfectly well to whom this discourse is addressed, whose attention it captures: yours, mine,

all of ours individually and collectively. But there is something that we do not know: who is

speaking? Who, through the mouths of this responsible politician or that journalist in a

television studio, through the voice-off of a news report, who is telling us to be afraid? We

cannot know: this discourse, where time, place and subject are muddled together – always be

afraid, everywhere, of everything, without really knowing what to be afraid of – is itself a

discourse without a subject. We still have to ask ourselves if it might not be a matter, as the

clinical treatment of anguish suggested a moment ago, of being a discourse without an object.

Are we dealing, however, with something new in the order of discourse? You could

object that there is nothing really new in the massive and undefined presence of individual

6

and collective fears in our society. And without even making recourse to the ancient fears

which preceded the historical moment which interests us here – the scourges of sin, of

famines, of epidemics and of the wars of former times,13 “fear always, fear everywhere” said

Lucien Fèvre of life in ancient France – the previous century and the dawn of our present one

have given us a continuous experience of human catastrophes triggered by the historical

transformations of a world which has gradually globalised itself through the violence of

world wars, of colonial conquests and of economic crises. Time does not allow me to list its

disasters here: it will suffice to recall that modernity, which since the Enlightenment has

promised to hasten the arrival of a world where the ancient fears are dissipated, has given

birth to an age of anxiety, just as W.H.Auden predicted in a long poem composed in the

1940s: “Then back they come, the fears that we fear”.14 So it is possible to fear fear. Fear can

sometimes have no other basis than fear itself, can have no other material existence but in

language: the discourse of fear itself. For, if it so happens that anxiety has no cause, might not

language therefore become its privileged form of material existence? Now we are arriving at

the heart of the problem.

Fear in the age of anxiety

There is no doubt, however, that there are good reasons for being afraid. Some of our

fears are familiar while others seem to be without precedent. We have kept the memory of the

mass unemployment and the precariousness of life of the 1930s which led to the economic

crises and the financial crash; we have in no way forgotten the return of old epidemics and

the emergence of new diseases; and fear of crime and the disasters of war are deeply rooted

in western consciousness. But we seem less prepared, and our minds less open, to facing the

globalisation of fears – global warming, global financial crisis, global terrorism – which have

inaugurated the twenty-first century. Which in truth began, as now seems obvious, on

September 11, 2001.

And at the same time as dangers have become planetary, fear has gone global and its

nature seems to have changed along the way: a permanent state of individual and collective

anxiety would seem to have colonised western minds and western societies. This anxiety is

13See particularly here the works of Jean Delumeau : La peur en Occident, XIV-XVIIIème siècle (Paris : Fayard, 1978) ; Sin and Fear.The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture (New York : St Martin’s Press, 1990) ; Jean Delumeau and Yves Lequin (eds), Les malheurs du temps. Histoire des fléaux et des calamités en France ( Paris: Larousse, 1991). See also: William G. Naghy & Penny Roberts, Fear in Early Modern Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).14 W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety. A Baroque Eclogue, Princeton (NJ), Princeton University Press, 20117 (1947).

7

hazy, diffuse, liquid, or nebulous –describe it as you will – and contagious. It knows no

frontier and remains present even in the absence of immediate or identifiable danger, like a

“fear of fear itself”. Even if, as Freud suggested, “fear has no need of introduction”, anxiety,

this contemporary form of fearing fear, can’t go without one. That is the essential subject I

want to address. That is to say that it is not fear itself, as is written too often in the multitude

of books which are devoted to it,15 which in a history of emotions should be at the heart of the

enquiry into our ways of fearing, but the relationship between fear and anxiety, the status of

fear in the age of anxiety. For they are inseparable from each other, presuppose each other,

feed off each other. And it seems to me that understanding the emergence of collective fears

in the age of anxiety, quite aside from the intellectual difficulty which this clearly represents,

is a priority political task in the battle for democracy, at the very moment when politics of

terror threaten the fundamental principles on which our conception of public affairs and

community life are built. Not giving in to fear, resisting anxiety: this is exactly what is at

stake here and this is what I would like to speak about now.

“Je suis Charlie”: Paris, capital city of fear

I returned to Paris about a year after my previous trip, when I had compiled the list of

European anxieties which I set out earlier. And it so happened that I was there in January

2015 at the very time of the massacre at Charlie-Hebdo and of the sequence of events which

followed, a hunt for the terrorists followed by the most significant mass demonstrations since

the Liberation of Paris at the end of the Second World War. In other words I, someone who

reflects on the history of anxiety, found myself in a position which I don’t dare characterise

as “privileged”: that of watching the entangling, in a semi-experimental historical situation,

of the links between anxiety, fear, discourse, events, and memory.

15 If we limit this enumeration to just some of the most notable books and forget scores of articles, see, particularly: Frank Furedi, The Culture of Fear. Risk-Taking & the Morality of Low Expectation (London: Continuum, 1997); Mike Davis, The Ecology of Fear. Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Vintage Books, 1998); Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear. Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Jacob Levy, The Multiculturalism of Fear (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Corey Robin, Fear. The History of a Political Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Haynes Johnson, The Age of Anxiety. McCarthyism to Terrorism (New York: Harcourt, 2005); Rachel Pain & Susan J. Smith, Fear: Critical Geopolitics & Everyday Life (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); Paul Virilio, L’administration de la peur (Paris: Textuel, 2010); Sean P. Hier (ed), Moral Panic & the Politics of Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 2011); Michael Laffan and Max Weiss (eds), Facing Fear. The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Fear: Across the Disciplines, Jan Plamper & Benjamin Lazier (eds), Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012; Marc Augé, Les nouvelles peurs (Paris: Payot, 2013). A couple of other books, though, do deal with the role of anxiety in contemporary psychic and social life, but in a more limited way than the central part we intend to see it play in this project. See particularly: Joanna Bourke, Fear. A Cultural History (London: Virago, 2005); and Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Fear (Cambridge: Polity, 2006). ). Renata Saleci’s book, On Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 2004), written in a clinical perspective, is of limited interest from a historical point of view.

8

I had landed in Europe several weeks earlier in a general climate of anxiety more

oppressive than I had known a year before. The same economic and social problems

continued, without any signs of alleviation. On top of that, and across much of the continent,

was the prospect of political troubles and upheavals: in Germany, the European Patriots

against the Islamisation of Europe made mass marches every week; in Greece, the extreme

left seemed to be at the doors of power; and France, in keeping with long tradition, added its

own literary touch to the general concern. Cultural news trumpeted the success of two works

which, although very different, displayed an undeniable family resemblance in prophesying,

each in its own way, the type of collective suicide or voluntary servitude which would

accompany the decline of the nation in the face of the rising influence of Islam.16 And the

critics seemed blind to the genealogy of this literature of anxiety, as these works confined

themselves to repeating, each in its own way, a tradition which has been solidly entrenched in

the history of European crises, and for which precedents abounded at the end of the 19th

century and in the 1930s.

On 7 January 2015, two terrorists forced their way into the premises of Charlie-

Hebdo. You will be familiar with what followed and I won’t comment on it directly here,

save for quoting a passage from Zygmunt Bauman’s book, Liquid Fear, or perhaps more

appropriately here, “liquid fears”. It seems to me to illustrate the sequence of events which

took place, and to resonate with what we have just experienced, posing at the same time the

complex question of the very relationship between fear and anxiety which I am trying to pin

down:

“Bizarre, and yet quite common and familiar to all of us, is the relief we feel, and the sudden influx of energy, and courage, when after a long time of uneasiness, anxiety, dark premonitions, days full of apprehension and sleepless nights, we finally confront the real danger: a menace we can see and touch. Or perhaps this experience is not as bizarre as it seems, if, at long last, we come to know what was standing behind that vague but obstinate feeling of something awful and bound to happen….”17

Bauman arrives in this way at a paradoxical conclusion: fear alleviates anxiety, when

it occurs. For fear has an object, we know what the threat is, while anxiety does not. Or

rather, it has one, but we do not know what it is. Here Bauman is perfectly faithful both to the

Freudian tradition of analysis which links fear to anguish, and to the crucial importance

which Freud attaches to this: “It is certain that the problem of fear is at the crossroads of

16 Michel Houellebecq, Soumission, Paris Flammarion, 2015; Eric Zemmour, Le suicide français, Paris, Albin Michel, 201417 Zygmund Bauman, op. cit., p. 1.

9

some very important questions, an enigma whose resolution would shine a light on

psychological life.”18 He is also faithful to the Freudian distinction between the two, which

could be summarised in this way: “fear is concentrated on the object” while “anguish makes

its object abstract”.19

And Bauman continues: “ Fear is at its most fearsome when it is diffuse, scattered,

unclear, unattached, unanchored, free-floating, with no clear address or cause; when it haunts

us with no visible rhyme or reason, when the menace we should be afraid of can be glimpsed

everywhere but is nowhere to be seen. ‘Fear’ is the name we give to our uncertainty: to our

ignorance of the threat and of what is to be done”.20

I subscribe totally to this definition with one slight but important reservation: it is a

definition, not of fear, but of anxiety. For what is diffuse and free-floating (the term used in

English translations of Freudian texts), perceptible everywhere but visible nowhere, what

defines “expectant fear”, as the English translations of Freud have it, is indeed anxiety rather

than fear. It is anxiety which presents itself in a nebulous, dispersed, nomadic form, unless

we choose to characterise it with the liquid metaphors of underground waters, of the water

table. And it is indeed nebulous anxiety which in certain historical circumstances precipitates

into crystals of fear, anxiety which crystallises itself into fears. Unless it is the water table of

subterranean anxieties, which we do not see but which is just beneath our feet and which

suddenly, having reached a critical threshold, breaks through the calm surface of our

existence which turns out to be less stable or resilient than we had hoped.

I do not know which metaphor is the most fruitful – gas, liquid, or some other quality

– to express these conversions of an anxiety which is diffuse into multiple fears each with

their own origin, even if these are often simply the displacement of other dangers which we

are unable to recognise. I also have the feeling of confining myself up to this point to the

comfort of non-historical generalities. But it is not impossible, either, that there is at the heart 18 Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Newstead, Emereo Pty Limited, 2012, p. 122.19 Ibidem, p. …. In 1920, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud once again makes the distinction between ‘fright’, ‘fear’ and ‘anxiety’: “’Fright’ (Schrek), ‘fear’ (Furcht) and ‘anxiety’ (Angst) are words which are wrongly used as synonyms; their relation to danger allows to differentiate them clearly. The word ‘anxiety’ names a state characterized by the expectation of danger, and by being prepared to confront it, even if this danger is known. The word ‘fear’ implies a definite object one is afraid of, when ‘fright’ indicates the state which occurs when we unexpectedly stumble upon a dangerous situation, without being prepared to it. It emphasizes the element of surprise. In 1926, In Inhibition, Symptom, Anxiety, Freud again insists on the relation of anxiety to danger, rather than to any actual object: “Anxiety has with expectation an unmistakable relation: it is anxiety in the face of something. It has an indeterminate nature and an absence of object; once it has found its object, the correct use of language changes its very name and replaces it with ‘fear’” (op. cit., p. 77). “Neurotic anxiety is anxiety before an object we do not know” (ibidem).20 Zygmund Bauman, op. cit., p. 2.

10

of these questions the potential for building an historical subject, which could be a

contemporary history of fear, whilst also detailing, because it is obviously one of my

preoccupations, its inscription in the language, its articulation in discourse. Let me explain.

An archaeology of anxiety: preconstructions, sediments, memory of fear

Initially, I had the conviction that I could take an approach which would unwind the

chronological thread of the instances of fear and anxiety in the second half of the 19th century

up to the present, placing an emphasis on the presence of anxiety, which seemed to me to be

entirely missing in this history, and which would be constructed in this way: how to write the

history of an emotion without cause or, more precisely, since it is not the same thing, how to

write the history of an emotion whose cause is not known?

Because there does exist a simple, canonical, way to tell a history like this. In the

course of the century which has recently closed, there would be ages of anxiety marked by

handy milestones, those of the wars. Before the First World War, says Stephan Zweig in The

World of Yesterday, everything was for the best and life was sweet in the Austro-Hungarian

Empire. With the human carnage followed by the economic depression of the 1920s and 30s,

a new age of anxiety opened, a crisis of concern of the European consciousness when, as Paul

Valéry declares in his Crisis of the Spirit of 1919, “civilisations discover that they are

mortal”. It is this age of anxiety whose nature Freud wants to characterise in Civilisation and

its Discontents of 1930, which ends like this: “It has become easy [for men] to exterminate

one another to the last. They know it, and that is the source of a goodly part of their present

unease, of their unhappiness, of their anguish”. But about this, he concludes, “who can

predict the outcome?”21 Here is a book on anguish within civilization which finishes, then,

with a question: it could not be said better, if the defining characteristic of anguish is

precisely to be without an answer.

With the arrival of the Second World War came the return of fear, of terror, of horror.

It would be followed immediately by a second age of anxiety, the advent of which was

heralded by Auden’s 1947 poem bearing exactly this title. And the world after the war, after

Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the world of the Cold War over which the shadow of total

destruction still hung, would once again, but more explicitly this time – covert anxiety of the

first half of the 20th century, overt anxiety of the second – be a universe of anguish: leisure

and consumerism did not seem to be able to lastingly relieve individuals from the anxiety of

21 Sigmund Freud, Civilization…, p. 81-82.

11

anonymity, of isolation, of the consumerist and bureaucratic constraints of mass society. A

third age of anxiety unfolded later, for which September 11 again provides a handy marker,

one of fears about the planet, about the economy, terrorism, and sanitation: the anxious

subject, duly equipped with chemical and psycho-technical prostheses which have become

indispensable, has become the Everyman of the new century and of globalised society.

Witness the recent autobiography of Scot Stossel, editor of The Atlantic magazine,

which is symptomatically titled My Age of Anxiety,22 and which finishes by merging the

anxious aspect with the narcissistic toolkit of the normal personality. Witness also this blog

from the New York Times, appearing for more than a year and a half in 2012-13, on the

theme: Anxiety. We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways. Woody Allen’s films, I

would say, opened up this field long ago.

It seems to me now that this exclusive attention that I wanted to give to anxiety, for

the simple reason that it would otherwise have been neglected by history, was insufficient,

and probably a symptom of the times. Just as the history of which I have just outlined the

framework would have been too simple, in which the fear and terror of the wars would have

been succeeded mechanically by the nervous expectation of the pre-war periods and the slow

decline in anguish during the post-war ones. Of much greater interest, and much greater

relevance historically, would be the construction, as an object, of the successive modes of co-

presence of fears and anxiety in contemporary society, of the machinery of their coexistence,

and in particular of the systems of reciprocal conversion of one into the other. All in the

context of discourse, to which I plan to return by way of conclusion.

And so the question: how, at which moment, in which circumstances, under the effect

of which historical factors, does a nebula of diffuse, free-floating anxiety without any

particular origin crystallise itself into fears about such and such a threat, such and such a

danger? Historical examples come immediately to mind: how did the diffuse anxieties of the

America of the Cold War unleash the fear of the “red peril” and the hunting down of

communists orchestrated by Senator Joseph McCarthy? How did the mass unease in

Germany on the eve of the First World War feed the rise of Nazism and along with it the fear

of, and then the hatred of, the Jews? We can find a partial response in Hannah Arendt: inert

masses of disorganised individuals without roots, who are joined only by a “terrifying

negative solidarity”, represent a vast reservoir of stagnant anxieties for totalitarian 22 Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety. Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind, New York, Knopf, 2014.

12

propaganda to tap into and to channel. It knows, too, how to mobilise the mass (“molten

mass” says Canetti) in order to relieve the anxiety of each and substitute it with a sense of

identity and a collective structure which each lacked but which all desired: the story of the

conversion of mass anxiety into totalitarian terror.

In other words, all this comes down to seeing anxiety as free-floating narrative

structures, partly submerged, largely undefined, empty of subject and object but ready, when

historical circumstances demand, or when events pave the way (even if the Reichstag must be

burnt down), to rise to the surface and convert themselves into discourses of fear, bristling

with threats and enemies. So we see that anxiety, as discourse, is the pre-construct of the

formulation of fear, a virtual fear, latent, a kind of dormant discursive cell awaiting an object

and an agent.

And another question: how, conversely, is it that fears, which seemed solidly

embedded and destined to last, instead disperse in the grey zone of indistinct anxieties? And

in consequence, in which way does anxiety carry within itself a vague, unconscious memory

of the fears and traumas which preceded it and fed it? What has become of the fears of the

war, of the bomb, of the great epidemics, of economic depression? Great fears deposit

discursive sediments in the collective memory and anxiety digs them up. Anxiety is the

memory domain of smouldering, filtered fears which have not been totally obliterated. These

fears bury themselves, become blunted, unrecognisable, “blanched”, empty, schematic, but

they never completely disappear. Anxiety, and the discourses which make them materialise –

vague noises, rumours without foundation, urban legends, worrying news, moral panic,

conspiracy theories, alarmist predictions, prophecies of evil, silences which say too much… –

are at one and the same time the ghosts of fears past and the harbingers of fears to come.

And so a final question, perhaps, to finish with, linked to what has gone before: how

can the discourse of anxiety, this unconscious memory, this floating recollection of ancient

fears, how can it again become the cradle, the discursive matrix of new fears which attach

themselves to new causes presented to them by history? We look once again to North

American history: there were certainly witch hunts before the one undertaken by Senator

McCarthy in the 1950s. There was one at the end of the 17th century in puritan New England,

others all through the 19th century against various religious sects, and another at the beginning

of the 20th century against the socialist threat. There are still others which are taking place

before our eyes and there will be more to come, against other enemies of the homeland, other

13

conspirators, other terrorists, other perils, real or imaginary. Why? Because of language and

the fact that discourse is the framework of the collective memory. Obviously, fear comes in

historical cycles, inscribed in discourse, at the centre of which fears and anxieties circulate

and change places with each other, metamorphosing. It is that, I believe, which is the true

subject of a history of fear, much more so than a detailed listing of the causes of our most

recent fears, an inventory without end which is what so many works attempt to achieve.

Finally, I would like, speaking of discourse but recognising that images must also be

taken into account, to highlight an additional problem. What we have considered today are

discursive flows, disseminated on networks, instantaneous, delocalised, not time-bound, with

no certitude of being able to attribute a subject or even an object to them. The history of the

reciprocal metamorphosis of fears into anxieties is the exemplary proof of this: for what is the

history of anxiety if not that of fears which are remembered after they have been forgotten?

14