The unnameable object of anxiety
Maro Bellou
Anxiety is one of the most enigmatic terms introduced by Lacan in his teaching. And it is enigmatic both because of its differentiation from the Freudian concept of anxiety and because of its relation to what Lacan calls “the real”. To shed light on anxiety, we will begin from the juxtaposition between Kierkegaard and Hegel, a question explicitly raised by Lacan in the last lesson of Seminar X: “I don't know if Kierkegaard's audacity in bringing in this term [the concept of anxiety] has really been taken account of. What can it mean other than that there is either the function of the concept as Hegel would have it, that is, the symbolic hold over the real, or the hold that we have, the one anxiety gives us, the sole final perception and as such the perception of all reality - and that between the two, one has to choose?”[1].
Anxiety also plays a central role in Kierkegaard’s thought. It is no accident that, as he was writing Repetition, he was also working on Fear and Trembling, while one year later he continued his work on the book titled The Concept of Anxiety. This is an element that makes it possible for him to distance himself from Hegel’s philosophy. Where Hegel is concerned, “the real is rational, and the rational is real”. This means that everything is transparent, ; there are no residues or anything that cannot be understood, something that can be ascribed as tuché. Using Lacanian terms, we could say here that, in Hegel, the symbolic and the real match perfectly. As Jean Wahl remarks, “in a philosophy where Being is said to be plenitude, rational and clear, there is no room for a phenomenon such as Kierkegaardian [anxiety] which is basically ambiguous, on the one hand, and linked to nothingness, on the other”[2]. This is where Kierkegaard steps in: “if Reason and the real are the same, why am I anxious?”. We could say that, for Kierkegaard, anxiety is the expression of the impossibility to align the symbolic and the real. It is the passion for the real.
Let us go back to Seminar X, then. There, Lacan juxtaposes concept in Hegel and anxiety in Kierkegaard as two completely different roads towards the conception of the real, one of which we are all but obliged to choose. The fundamental difference between these two roads consists in the fact that, in Hegel, the function of meaning aims at a purely symbolic understanding of the real, while, in Kierkegaard, anxiety looks to the real without the intermediation of the symbolic order. Lacan sees in Kierkegaard an emergency exit from the full absorption of the real by the symbolic, as we see happening in Hegel.
We must not, however, fail to notice that Lacan, referring to anxiety in Seminar XVII, clearly distances himself from Kierkegaard, as well, whose book, as Lacan takes pains to point out, bears the title The Concept of Anxiety. That is to say, where Lacan is concerned, Kierkegaard, in his attempt to move away from Hegel’s thought, gets stuck halfway down the road, as he continues to consider anxiety as a concept. Lacan invites us to walk the second half of the road, i.e., to grasp anxiety without mentioning the symbolic order. Only then can anxiety become a way of grasping the real. As Jacques-Alain Miller points out: “Anxiety is a way that aims at the real, using, to do this, something other than the signifier”[3].
In Seminar XVII, Lacan goes back to anxiety, pointing out that it is “the central affect”[4]. Lacan declares his disagreement with the traditional psychiatric definition, according to which fear refers to an object, while anxiety lacks an object. Lacan repeats: “anxiety is not without an object”[5]. The question is: which object would that be, precisely? – bBecause the object to which anxiety refers cannot be the same as the object of fear. In truth, Lacan introduces a dimension of paradoxical and strange object, before which all words cease to exist: “It’s very precisely the… I am unable to say the name, because, precisely, it’s not a name. It’s surplus jouissance, but it’s not nameable, even if approximately nameable, translatable, in this way”.[6] In other words, the object of anxiety is unnameable and can only be described with the word “surplus jouissance” only approximately. This is jouissance that is impossible to name and which forces repetition to continue. And this is precisely where we see, in a field over which the symbolic order no longer has any jurisdiction, the two traces of the presence-absence of the real: the impossibility of repetition and the unnameability of jouissance.
References
[1] Lacan, J., Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X, ed. J.-A. Miller, tr. A.R. Price, Cambridge, Polity, 2014, p. 333.
[2] Jean Wahl, Philosophies of Existence, London, Routledge, 1969, p. 112.
[3] Miller J.-A., “Introduction à la lecture du Séminaire de L’angoisse de Jacques Lacan”, La Cause freudienne, 58/3 (2004), p. 77.
[4] Lacan, J., The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII, ed. J.-A. Miller, tr. R. Grigg, New York/London: Norton, 2007, p. 144.
[5] Ibid, p. 147.
[6] Ibid, p. 147.