CHAPTER TWO

Under the Skin

It’s nothing: I am the Thing.

(SARTRE, NAUSEA)

The supermarket

16 January 2011. It is a cold morning on Rue Saint-Antoine. For the last twenty minutes, you have been pacing up and down outside Franprix, a small supermarket. You are on the outside looking in, peering through the window, towards the back of the store. A strip of lights illuminates the place aggressively, saturating the environment in a homogeneous tone, depriving it of contours and shadows. You are hovering at the door, sensing the weight of the light as you verge towards the entrance before once more pulling away into the cold. Eventually, you make your way through the electric doors, walking beyond the gate, which automatically swings open upon your arrival but leaves no space to exit, and thus entraps you in the interior of the supermarket. You straddle the last remnants of the door, absorbing the proximity to the exit before beginning your long voyage in and through the many aisles, recesses and alcoves of the supermarket.

As soon as the view of the door is out of sight, the heaviness of the fluorescent light begins to infiltrate your body. At first, you sense it as a low level humming in your head, but before long the humming transforms into a thudding, which can then be visually observed as vibrations in the supermarket itself. A series of jagged lines distorts your perception of the fruit, causing the apples to obtrude and deform before reforming into the orthodox shape of an apple. Disoriented, you turn away. To survive this expedition, you have dissected the supermarket into different regions, just as you did on the bridge. These zones circumscribe where you can and cannot place yourself in the world. By the door, which is now out of view, you are able to hold ground, reassured at all times by your relation to the exit. But in the space, there is depth as well as light. The greater you stray from the exit, the greater your anxiety becomes. For you, the mission to the frozen goods will carry with it a great danger, such that you remain unsure if you will ever return the same person. In the recesses of this vast space, the distance to the exit feels immense, as if occupying another world, now inaccessible to you.

Your grip on the cart is tight. The prop serves to steady you in the world, supporting your whole body with its solidity. In the absence of this item, you would feel as though you were floating haphazardly from one point in space to another, without ever being the centre of things. Despite this slippage, your thinking is precise: at all times, you retain a vigilance over both the environment and your body. You keep a constant eye on the signs above the aisles, lest you risk getting lost in this labyrinth. Above all, you are concerned that the light might cause you to faint, leaving you inert on the floor, as other people trample upon your body. That this fate has yet to happen does nothing to dissuade you of a conviction that this place is fundamentally opposed to your existence. The aggression of the light is beginning to damage you. Your anxiety is tinged with hostility. Other people are now experienced as obstacles that must be conquered in order for you to get out of here alive.

FIGURE 2.1 Franprix, Rue Saint-Antoine, Paris.

Pausing, you try to retain control over the body. You are in the frozen aisle, situated at the very depth of the supermarket. Within this frosted world, you see your face reflected in a freezer door. Through the icy veneer, the face emerges as a dissolving set of images; your two eyes, now gaunt and hollow, burrow through the door, as if they had detached themselves from the surrounding region of flesh known as your face. That you continue to recognize your face as your own is nothing more than a formality. Experientially and existentially, your face has detached itself from the sense of being your own. In its place, a trace remains, which becomes increasingly unrecognizable the more you interrogate it. You turn to your hand. It looks numb, distant, an artefact that no longer belongs to you. The hand is held above you, pointing towards a non-visible skyline. Is this the same hand that belongs to you in the home, where it assumes the familiar presence linking you not only to your body, but also to a personal history? In the supermarket, the body part assumes a pallid quality: no longer a hand but a memory of a hand that once belonged to you.

Several minutes have passed, and the urge to flee is intensifying. Alongside the alien hand, your legs have begun to tremble. The very ground beneath you feels as though it is slippery and unable to support your body. Alongside this movement of becoming ungrounded, the cart, previously a beacon of safety, is now losing form. Time is undergoing a series of violent palpitations, at once drawn and compressed, and you decide now is the chance to leave. Before you, several people are waiting to pay for their groceries. You contemplate abandoning everything. Against your instincts, you will see the ordeal through to its end. The four items in the trolley make their way through, a plastic bag is grabbed and the items are semi-packed. Blinded and rendered speechless by your anxiety, you force the credit card into the machine and wait for the code to be accepted while at all times keeping an eye on the exit. Once outside, you take a deep breath, look back into the foreign world from where you have come and shake your head in a state of disbelief.

Experiences of light

Any phenomenology that seeks to approach anxiety must contend in the first place with the central role of the body. As the most familiar and homely of things, the bearer of our sense of self, and the means in and through which our subjectivity assumes an expressive form, the body also reveals another side to it. If the body is ‘one’s own’, then it is such only in a strange way, at all times leading a life of its own irrespective of how ‘I’ assume it as a personal dimension. From time to time, the body dissents from us, manifesting a series of rhythms and responses, none of which fully belongs to us. Anxiety reveals to us an especially striking way in which the body appears to take leave of its senses, responding to the world in a way that is often confounding and enigmatic. From where does the body’s anxiety derive: from ‘me’ the personal subject, or, from another side of the body that senses a danger that I myself am not yet privy to? The very question suggests a dualism at the heart of the subject. If the body is cognizant of a world that I have yet to encounter despite being physically placed in that world, then can it be said that I am truly identifiable with my body? These questions and others will be of special concern to us. We will approach the role of the body from different levels, finding therein a series of increasingly complex issues, which challenge not only the scope of phenomenology, but also the notion of the self itself. Throughout, the body will appear for us as not only an expression of anxiety, but also anxiety’s object.

The body’s being is worldly. At all times, we are not simply situated in a place in an abstract or geometrical sense. Rather, our being is expressively spatial, taken up in the things around us, including supermarkets. A supermarket appears for us not only as a place where we purchase groceries, but as the site of a drama, which is both banal and significant at once. Everything within this space is mediated by something that exceeds it, an atmosphere that belongs to the supermarket itself but also pours into the surrounding world. Indeed, nothing in the supermarket is unaffected by the surrounding world, and we carry our anxieties as much into the supermarket as we do into our homes.

Take the light as an illustration. Consider the experience of exiting a dark room and opening the door upon a world of sunlight. As you pass through the thick door, the shard of light strikes your eyes violently, causing you to partially see only a few feet in front of you. You grimace and raise your hand to your brow. Rays of sunlight pierce through the cracks where your fingers meet. You move your head towards the darker earth, finding in the surface of the ground a respite from the sky above. Slowly but surely, your eyes reconfigure so as to see the world anew. Now, the sunlight seems to recede, integrating itself into the broader world, and allowing you to finally attain a clearer perspective of the street before you. We know from experiences as simple as exiting a dark room and entering the world of sunlight how our relation to light is dynamic and imbued with an affective value. Not only is light relationally defined in terms of where we have come from and where we are going to, but this dynamism carries with it a thematic quality as well, which is significant in its pervasiveness. If light can put us at ease in the world through the creation of corners, shadows and nooks to withdraw into it, then it can also render us ill-at-ease by exposing us to a lack of definition in the world, depriving the world of its homely attributes.

In the supermarket, our concern is with a certain type of light, characterized in part by harshness and homogeneity. For the anxious subject, the light is not an incidental background against which their distress takes root. Rather, the light itself becomes a defining object of their experience. The riddle of how light can induce the urge to flee leads us from an empirical question concerning light as an object in the world to the presentation of light as a certain way of ordering and interpreting the world. At first glance, we see that light is an objective feature of the supermarket – it has a reality independent of the subject. The light is there, illuminating the supermarket. The anxious subject is aware of the light, and long before he steps foot in the place, the light has already installed itself as a habit in the body. When entering the supermarket, a shift in attention occurs, such that the body, in its anticipatory anxiety, reflexively attunes itself to the light above. The subject feels impeded by the light, as though it exerted a physical pressure. Not only does light enter the body by way of the eyes, it also forms a surrounding force in and around the body, such that the experience of light transforms the whole of the body and not just the eyes that see the world.

From where does the anxiety derive: the light itself or the subject? Strikingly, this is not the first time this question has been asked. In fact, the relation between anxiety and lighting has been researched from several perspectives (cf. Hazell and Wilkins 1990; Marks 1987; Saul 2001; Watts and Wilkins 1989). By way of an example, in a paper concerning the relation between fluorescent lighting and agoraphobia, Hazell and Wilkins report that fluorescent lighting plays a key role in contributing to the anxiety of agoraphobic people (Hazell and Wilkins 1990, 591). Notably, the authors single out pulsations of light as being a prominent factor, in turn leading to headaches, eyestrain and a faster heart rate. Of their findings, the authors write, ‘The results indicate that conventional pulsating fluorescent lighting produces a response in the nervous system which is not registered as a sensation of flicker but ultimately is responsible for a variety of bodily symptoms’ (595). The idea, then, is that the body interprets the pulsations of the light as signals of anxiety, which are inextricably bound with the experience of frailty and danger common to the anxious subject, as they write the following: ‘It is possible that some agoraphobia begins when symptoms associated with anxiety are elicited by supermarket lighting’ (596). Limiting their study to a causal perspective, it is hardly surprising that the authors conclude that the onset of agoraphobia might be avoided by the invention of ‘specially tinted glasses’, which would be worn in the supermarket (596). To speak alongside Hazell and Wilkins, therefore, it makes no sense to think of anxiety as constituting a world. Rather, anxiety can be localized as a mis-interpretation of objective phenomena such as light pulsations.

We wish to move beyond the Hazell and Wilkins model of anxious experiences of light by addressing the relational dynamic involved in the supermarket. As we assume a phenomenological perspective on the experience, we see that, as with all instances of phobic anxiety, the mood is neither situated in the body nor in the world alone, but instead in the rapport between each of these aspects. Indeed, phenomenologically, the subjective experience of oneself being anxious is at the same time an experience of the world as inciting anxiety. The anxious experience of the light is not projected into the world by an anxious mind. Nor does the anxious subject ‘imagine’ or even ‘hallucinate’ the light as inducing symptoms. The experimental research on agoraphobia and light establishes that even in objective terms, the fluorescent lighting is a particular hazard for the anxious subject. But we do not require data of this kind to demonstrate that the light is real. That there is an anxious experience of the lighting testifies to the role of the body in establishing the mood of the world. The experience of the lighting in the supermarket is an experience of the world as an anxious place, taken from the centrality of the lived body. The lighting, to cite Merleau-Ponty, expresses ‘the total life of the subject’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 296). In other words, along with the body faced with the environment, the lighting coalesces into a specific experience, whereby the florescence of the beam is given its feel not through the objective pulsations being emitted, but through the expressive and synthesizing role of the body.

As we extend our discussion from light to the surroundings of the supermarket, we see how this relational dynamic is played out more broadly. Let us turn to the door. The door of the supermarket seals us from the world, enclosing us within the supermarket. The door is a border, not only between different spaces, but also between different bodily modes of being. As a border, the door delineates distinctive zones that exist both spatially and corporeally. Here, we can ask, how is it possible for the subject to transform himself so readily between exiting and entering the supermarket? In fact, it is precisely because the door is subjected to an over production of symbolic meaning that it establishes itself as the boundary between the familiar and unfamiliar, and between home and homesickness. Within this heightened framework, the gesture of the closing door gains an especially powerful motif of not only sealing the subject within the supermarket, but also of sealing him inside of his anxiety. Yet again, therefore, it is not a question of the door in and of itself engendering anxiety. But nor is the anxiety solely the projection of an anxious mind. In a multidimensional phenomenology, all aspects serve a mutually edifying role, shedding light upon the structure and content of anxiety from different shifts in perspective.

That our phenomenology is multidimensional does not, however, discount the fact it is centred at all times by the body. Thus, if anxiety is dispersed through the world, finding form in a diverse and heterogeneous way, then the same movement begins with the body as both the expression and object of anxiety. In speaking of the body as expressive we refer to the notion that our bodily existence cannot be considered in isolation from a surrounding world. Thus, to think of what can be termed a ‘symptom’ is also to think of that symptom in relation to one’s own body, to the body of other people and to the spatiality in which those bodies are situated. To stop on a bridge, or respond anxiously to a specific kind of lighting is to express with one’s body a certain style (to use a distinctly Merleau-Pontean term) of being. With these movements, the anxiety involved cannot be localized to the pairing of the person and the bridge, and that alone. Nor can we understand anxiety as something that happens to the objective body, a body to be understood solely in medical terms as a set of functions. Rather, this relation between a person and anxiety is taken up in a much wider and more complex dynamic, such that it involves life generally. To speak in this sense of the body’s capacity for expression is simply to reinforce the relational structure of our being-in-the-world. As seen in this context, the manifestations of symptoms express in a singular form this lived and dynamic existence. In the spirit of Merleau-Ponty, Parnas and Gallagher refer to symptoms as ‘certain wholes of interpenetrating existence … permeated by the patient’s disposition and by biographical (and not just biological) detail’ (Parnas and Gallagher 2015, 72). Such an account captures the nature of the symptom as a ‘gestalt’ involving a relational and intersubjective liaison with the world, which undermines any division between the symptom and the world existing separately (73). When we speak of the body as an expression of anxiety, then we refer to a communicative force that appears in our relation with architecture, with modes of transport, with other people and everything in between.

The other side of this bodily existence is the experience of the body as an object. What does it mean to experience one’s body as impersonal and why does this experience induce anxiety? This is a complex question, which we will seek to untangle throughout this chapter. But let us stick with concrete phenomena in order to gain a sense of what is at stake. Already in two moments we have met with the body in its impersonality and foreignness: the bridge and the supermarket. In the inability to cross a bridge, the body appears for us as much an obstacle as the bridge itself does. This quality as being a hindrance is grounded in the apparent lack of rational sense as to why the body responds in the way it does before a bridge. In this departure from how I expect my body to conform to the world, it ceases to be experienced irreducibly as my own and is thereby manifest as a thing. The quality of the body as being impersonal is stipulated, then, on a self-alienation from the body when anxious. For this reason, the impersonality of the body is that which undermines the sense I have of who I am, and this sense assumes diverse forms. Note here the terminology of describing the body as impersonal. It is not that ‘my’ body is unable to cross a bridge; rather, the body seems to stop of its own accord, as though it were responding to something that I myself was unaware of. Of course, in describing corporeality in these terms, we are making an experiential claim about what it feels like to be anxious. This is different from a metaphysical claim about the nature of selfhood. At no point does the body in ontological terms cease to be me, as if it suddenly developed a different agency. Rather, I experience it as being impersonal, attached to an objectified quality and thus resisting my sense of self.

So, we have a sense of the body as expressive of anxiety as well as an appearance of the body as being ‘thinglike’. In addition, in impeding my sense of self, the thinglike quality of the body is itself a source of anxiety, thus perpetuating the loop between expression and objectification. This rapport between expression and objectification is at work in spatial phobias, but it can also be thought of in terms of illness and ageing. When my body fails me, I experience the body as betraying the person I take myself to be. The limbs that ordinarily cohere together now appear disconnected, and this experience of fragmentation is also an experience of anxiety, insofar as anxiety takes place in the partial collapse of selfhood. Likewise, when I have a glimpse of myself as having aged, then I also experience the body as the site of a vulnerability, which, as it were, is trailing off without me. In such moments, the body becomes a thing to be observed and monitored. In the case of phobic anxiety itself, we have an especially clear sense of the affective dimension tied up with this quality. We have already encountered one such moment in the supermarket, as the body that pauses, looks at itself and finds that what is reflected back is alien or foreign. The parts of the body lose their overall coherence and now partially dissent from being ‘one’s own’. These and other experiences are by no means peculiar to anxious subjects, but are instead operational for all humans. With anxiety, however, these often-concealed dimensions are illuminated. Our concern in this chapter is with explicating these different dimensions of bodily anxiety, each of which is inseparable and interwoven into a totality.

The ambiguity of the body

To understand the specificity of the anxious body, we will be required to return to the beginning – to the body in its everyday situation in the world, long before it has been thematized as an alien presence. The motivation for turning to a conceptual analysis of the body is not only to address the central role embodiment plays in the structure of subjectivity, but to also consider in more specific terms how the body’s impersonal existence marks a decisive aspect in the birth of anxiety. With Merleau-Ponty as our interlocutor, we begin this discovery by understanding that the body gains its structure, neither from its physical being nor from the ideas imposed upon it. Rather, the body, as Merleau-Ponty sees it, marks itself out as an ‘organic thought’, which is situated between the material and the mental (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 80). What this means is that to understand the body, it is not enough to approach it from a third person perspective, as if it could be understood in isolation from its environment. But nor can we understand the body from a purely abstract or intellectualist perspective. Rather, to understand the body, we need to move both within but also beyond our own experience, seeking at all times a prepersonal and primordial level, which allows us, as bodily subjects, to have a relationship with the world. Merleau-Ponty terms this ‘pre-objective perspective’ a ‘being in the world’ (81). With this phrase, synonymous with phenomenology itself, Merleau-Ponty is seeking a language to characterize our prereflective way of existing, which provides us with an experience of the world as having a ‘particular consistency’ that cannot be understood solely in abstract terms (82). Put another way, no matter how many changes our body undergoes, we are afforded at all times a certain integrity, which is independent of the contingencies of the body’s physical modifications. Indeed, our relationship with the world persists in and through these modifications, even if those modifications entail losing a limb (82). What Merleau-Ponty finds in these manifold experiences is ‘an I that continues to tend toward its world despite deficiencies or amputations’ (83). This intimate and necessary bond between body and world coalesces through the expressivity of the body, as Merleau-Ponty writes:

The body is the vehicle of being in the world, and for a living being, having a body means being united with a definite milieu, merging with certain projects, and being perpetually engaged therein … For if it true that I am conscious of my body through the world and if my body is the unperceived term at the centre of the world toward which every object turns its face, then it is true for the same reason that my body is the pivot of the world. (84)

Merleau-Ponty places the body in an interdependent relationship with the spatiality of the world, denying that each aspect can be understood in isolation. Just as the body constitutes the world, so the body is constituted by the world. In this twofold relation between body and world, both aspects are given structure and content though being intertwined with one another. To conceive of a phenomenology of lived space, as Merleau-Ponty will do, is to simultaneously contend with a phenomenology of the body. Thus when he reflects on his experience of Paris, Merleau-Ponty does not find a series of atomic points and objects located in space, but instead a ‘flow of experiences that implicate and explicate each other’ (293). As he makes clear, the structure of space and the structure of the body mirror one another in their pregiven fold:

Paris is not a thousand-sided object or a collection of perceptions, nor for that matter the law of all of these perceptions. Just as a human being manifests the same essence in his hand gestures, his gait, and the sound of his voice, each explicit perception in my journey through Paris – the cafés, the faces, the poplars along the quays, the bends of the Seine – is cut out of the total being of Paris, and only serves to confirm a certain style or a certain sense of Paris. (294)

Body and space, far from being separable, are conjoined into the same ‘primordial spatiality’ (149). It is thanks to this primordial space that our experience of ourselves as both spatial and corporeal is unified as a relational whole. The identification of the ‘same essence’ in the hand of another person or in the bends of the Seine is possible because neither body nor world are inert chunks of materiality, but are instead involved in a living relation with one another. This interplay of the parts and the whole is thanks to a ‘latent sense, diffused through the landscape or the town, that we uncover in a specific evidentness without having to define it’ (294). We resist defining the sense because the affective essence cannot be reduced to a discernible object. Instead, body and world involve themselves in a mutually edifying relationship, whereby each shapes the other. Note how this intertwinement between body and space is rooted not in an abstracted concept of the world that takes place at the level of lived experience. Rather, the experience of bodily space as united finds its origins in the pre-personal body at work securing the unity of experience. This idea of another level of bodily life at work behind the scenes appears time and again in Merleau-Ponty’s early work. In Phenomenology of Perception, it can be witnessed in the first instance with the idea of an ‘intentional arc’ (137). With this concept, Merleau-Ponty posits ‘a more fundamental function … beneath intelligence and beneath perception’ (137). The purpose of this function, he argues, is to:

[P]roject around us our past, our future, our human milieu, our physical situation, our ideological situation, and our moral situation, or rather, that ensures that we are situated within all of these relationships. This intentional arc creates the unity of the senses, the unity of the senses with the intelligence, and the unity of sensibility and motricity. And this is what ‘goes limp’ in the disorder. (137)

The significance of the intentional arc is pervasive. Through it, personal existence is grounded in an overarching projection of space and time. At all times, the body prehends the world, mapping and layering the specific thematic and structural aspects of the surrounding environment in such a way so as to unify experience. In this respect, the intentional arc is the foundation upon which the temporality of the subject converges into a unified point, allowing us to be situated within a relationship to the world. The creation of space as being meaningful, value laden and expressive is dependent on a relationship between the body and world. Indeed, the world only has a meaning thanks to the fact that it is brought alive by the intentional arc of the body. And the same is true in reverse: without the world, the body would no longer have meaning.

The movement of the prepersonal body synthesizing the world into unity gives Merleau-Ponty’s earlier conception of the body a certain kind of character. Beginning with the idea of the body as ‘a work of art’, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body, as it is presented in Phenomenology of Perception, tends towards a philosophy of unity, in which the body and world seek to renew a reciprocal harmony. Such a unified relation, however, is exposed at all times to a process of disintegration that is not peculiar to traumatic instances of life, but is instead present as a subtheme of bodily life, as he writes, ‘Now, if the world falls to pieces or is broken apart, this is because one’s own body has ceased to be a knowing body and has ceased to envelop all of the objects in a single hold …’ (295). The unknowing body is precisely the body that has lost ground with the world, revealing its integral role in the infrastructure of the world itself. This precarious existence, in which the body must forever renew its relation to the world in order to restore harmony, belies another level of existence, which takes place irrespective of personal life. Such a level of bodily existence is not something that I give to the world as an attribute of my own life. Rather, the generalized and anonymous existence that takes place does so in some sense not only beneath me but also prior to my existence, as a prehistory that I renew in and through my lived experience.

To understand this, it is not necessary to invoke the level of traumatic experience suggested by the loss of a limb and the ensuing figuration of a phantom limb (82). Rather, we can think here of acts as simple as sensing an object or walking from one corner of a room to another corner. Who is it that walks from one corner to another? It is me, certainly, who takes up this task. But at the same time, another level of bodily existence is at work, directing me in the world long before I am aware of this directionality. To walk is not to calculate step-by-step how many feet I must take, nor does this operation occur ‘at the level of thetic consciousness’ (83). Rather, it is a movement of letting my feet take course. Those same limbs that enable me to get from one place to another belong to me insofar as I take possession of them, but they also belong to a natural world that both proceeds and outlasts me. At stake in the structure of the body, then, is a sedimented layer of knowledge that is outside of both cognitive awareness and a reflexive response to the world. Put another way, being able to walk (or, for that matter, developing a phantom limb) is not a mechanical procedure, but is instead an act imbued with an existential value, which is situated at all times in relation to a broader world.

We see, then, that the structure of the body is not reducible to thematic experience, but instead hinges at all times on another layer of intentionality that renders thematic experience possible in the first place. This level of existence generates an ambiguous depth in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body, ambiguous not only in the sense of being a particular kind of object, but also in the sense of never being entirely possessed by the subject, both temporally and spatially. Of this deep ambiguity, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘What allows us to center our existence is also what prevents us from centering it completely, and the anonymity of our body is inseparably both freedom and servitude’ (87). As both free and servile at once, there is always something of our bodily existence that is anterior and unknowable to our experience. The unknowability of the body is not only structural but also experiential. If impersonal existence is thematically present, then it is only ‘when I am in danger’ (86). Beyond these fleeting moments, ‘personal existence represses the organism’ in order to return to itself as a self (86). Concerning this ‘advent of the impersonal’, Merleau-Ponty notes:

A margin of almost impersonal existence thus appears around our personal existence, which, so to speak, is taken for granted, and to which I entrust the care of keeping me alive. Around the human world that each of us has fashioned, there appears a general world to which we must first belong in order to enclose ourselves within a particular milieu … my organism – as a pre-personal adhesion to the form of the of the world, as an anonymous and general existence – plays the role of an innate complex beneath the level of my personal life. (86)

Let us not underplay the striking quality of Merleau-Ponty’s reflections. As a fusion of the personal and the impersonal, the body is that which I rely on without ever knowing what it is that I am placing my trust in. This blind trust renders the body a double-sided entity, at once revealing itself to me in that dimension of personal existence that situates me in lived time, but at the same time folding back upon an immemorial time that forms a trace in and around my existence without ever being identical with that existence. The double-sidedness of the body is neither causal nor linear. To be clear, the anonymous realm that haunts my existence is not a dormant sphere that is ‘recouped’ upon my arrival. Rather, the anonymous body inheres in an elemental way, as part of an immemorial dimension of bodily existence. We are subjected to our bodies in a quite literal way. Our bodies carve out a space for the ‘I’ to exist while establishing ‘regions of silence’, which belong to a different order of corporeal life (84). This independent bodily life mediates with the world prior to ‘my’ engagement with experience. Indeed, so far as it belongs to all bodies, then the anonymity of the prepersonal body does not belong to me, but instead underscores my personal life with a depersonalized foundation that is common to all bodies without ever rendering them the same. In a passage we shall return to, Merleau-Ponty writes:

If I wanted to express perceptual experience with precision, I would have to say that one perceives in me, and not that I perceive. Every sensation includes a seed of dream or depersonalization, as we experience through this sort of stupor into which it puts us when we truly live at the level of sensation. (223)

To live truly at the level of sensation is to divest consciousness of its personal attributes, and thus enter into the dream state that characterizes the recognition of bodily sensation being both beyond possession (cf. ‘I never have an absolute possession of myself by myself’ [250]) and beyond knowledge (cf. ‘I have no more awareness of being the true subject of my sensation than I do of my birth or my death … I cannot know my birth or my death’ [223]). The ‘one’ who perceives in and through me is not strictly me, nor is it knowable by me: ‘He who sees and touches is not exactly myself’ (224). More than this, the ‘one’ is not only ‘beneath’ me, it also precedes and will survive me (224). Merleau-Ponty gives us an account of the body that is not only ambiguous in the sense that it is not one thing among many; it is also ambiguous in the sense that it is both of the I and concurrently before the I. The body is personal and prepersonal, particular and general, immemorial and contemporary at once.

Indeed, it is thanks to the fact the body is structured between the personal and impersonal, and between the human and the not-yet-human, that I am able to exist at all. As human subjects, we owe our lives to an anonymous level of existence, which remains latent and is never entirely incorporated into the realm of embodiment as cultured or gendered. Prior to these vital distinctions, another operation is at work, not as a substratum of personal existence, which can then be retrieved in and through experience, but as an alterity that prevents human beings from ever being at home in their bodies. It is precisely this primordial difference that Merleau-Ponty will variously term the ‘prehuman’, the ‘one’ or the ‘anonymous body’.

This enigmatic discussion of a subject both beneath and prior to me is not an appeal to disembodied mysticism. Rather, what he is describing is situated in the realm of phenomenology itself, as he remarks, it is ‘the life of my eyes, hands, and ears [where we find] so many natural selves’, each of which has ‘already sided with the world’ (224). Such claims are not abandoned by Merleau-Ponty as his thinking evolves. Indeed, so important is the formulation of the subject as structured by a primordial depersonalized mode of perception that he will return to it at the end of his life. Thus, in a working note from 2 May 1959, he writes as follows:

I do not perceive any more than I speak. Perception has me as has language. And as it is necessary that all the same I be there in order to speak, I must be there in order to perceive. But in what sense? As one. What is it that, from my side, comes to animate the perceived world and language? (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 190)

What we are faced with in these descriptions of bodily existence is a body that is on the verge of the personal and the impersonal. Such a body never entirely reveals itself, but instead gestures towards a latent depth that in occasional moments – not least in depersonalization and dreaming – takes form as a central structure in the life of a human. Hidden behind the veneer of being a discrete self who is identifiable with ‘one’s own’ body, there dwells another kind of existence, indifferent to the self that assumes a relationship to it. This non-possessable body, which operates at all times as a ‘pre-history’ of a ‘past that has never been present’, situates itself at the threshold of experience, revealing itself indirectly as a trace or a symptom, yet a symptom that can never be reduced to the level of lived experience (250–252). We remain, in short, outsiders to ourselves, and specifically outsiders to the bodies, which impart a joint sense of intimacy and alienation upon us. Merleau-Ponty draws to light the strange undercurrent of bodily life. But what he overlooks and underplays is how this impersonal dimension is given to experience, either directly or indirectly, in an affective sense. As we will now discover, we take the impersonal dimension of the body to be central to the experience of anxiety. The reason for this can be formulated as follows: As a particular kind of affective experience, anxiety is predicated on the idea of a personalized self encountering the impersonal dimensions of corporeal life, such that the impersonal dimension threatens the image of the self as being in possession of itself. In what follows, we shall unfold this complex claim.

Dimensions of the anxious body

Our excursion into the conceptual framework of Merleau-Ponty reveals the complexity of the body. As we have seen, the narrative that is told in this framework begins with the body in its interdependent relation with the world, before moving to the other side of corporeal existence, which renders this relation possible in the first instance. Despite Merleau-Ponty’s appeal to the image of the body as a familiar source of expression and motility, a strangeness haunts his vision of corporeal life, and indeed it is the mood of strangeness that links anxiety with the uncanny (a point already prefigured in Merleau-Ponty’s early aesthetics, where he will suggest only ‘one emotion is possible for the painter – the feeling of strangeness’ [cited in Johnson 1993, 68]). The strangeness inherent in Merleau-Ponty’s thought is captured most strikingly in the form of the body as anonymous and impersonal. What is striking about this aspect of bodily life is the level of importance Merleau-Ponty assigns to the anonymous function of the body, as both independent of ‘my’ existence and also temporally prior to that existence. Yet for all that, Merleau-Ponty underplays the affective dimension of impersonal existence, even though he explicitly notes that this dimension is tied up with a dreamlike quality, which engenders itself towards anxiety. Our reading of Merleau-Ponty, therefore, is against the grain of his intentions insofar as we wish to elicit the disturbing quality of impersonal existence.

As we have seen in the preceding chapter, it is with Levinas in fact that we gain a visceral affective sense of impersonal being. I have elaborated elsewhere on the relation between impersonal being and horror in Levinas, but it is worth noting presently the extent to which Levinas will align impersonal with a suffocating horror, stating that the impersonal existence is what persists, stubbornly and anonymously, once we imagine the ‘destruction of things and beings’ as having taken place (Levinas 2005, 46; Trigg 2014b). The excess that survives the imagined destruction of things survives in the form of a presence, ‘an atmospheric density, a plenitude of the void, or the murmur of silence … [an] impersonal “field of forces”’ (46). If this anonymous existence takes flight in insomnia and in nocturnal space, then the ‘horror of darkness’ also appears in waking life as the structure of consciousness being stripped of its subjectivity, leading to the subject becoming ‘depersonalized’ (Levinas 2001, 54–56). While his account of anonymity as being a stifling presence seems prima facie to describe anxiety, Levinas himself explicitly distances the movement of horror from that of anxiety, at least in a Heideggerian form (58). The reason for this is that Heideggerian anxiety is concerned with ‘the fear of nothingness’, which in turn brings about the positivism of a ‘being toward death’, and thus the redemption of anxiety (58). It is an anxiety that is to some extent resolvable through its transformative and disclosive aspects. The scenario in Levinas is rather different. For him, horror ‘is an irremissible existence’ (58). In other words, horror is both infinite and irresolvable, given that the anonymity of being is not reducible to existence, but instead constitutive of it. It is this idea of impersonal existence as preceding the formation of the (personalized) subject, and thus marking a constant source of danger for the self that we take from Levinas. To this extent, his distance from Heideggerian anxiety only confirms what we wish to demonstrate in the ensuing analysis; namely, that anxiety is not reducible to the conflict within an already existing subject, but is instead framed as the basis of an impersonal existence, which if provoking anxiety, also provides the grounds of selfhood.

To give voice to these conceptual issues, let us return to the stage upon which anxiety is enacted: the supermarket. What is important about this scene is less the locality of the place itself – we might also be in a museum, a zoo or anywhere else where we might feel trapped within a border, visible or invisible. What is important is the transformative power of the place. Whether it derives from the lighting or from the configuration of the space, the place serves to amplify and enact an anxiety, which is tacit as a generalized mood rather than a seizure in the body. As we have seen, the mood of anxiety attests to the intertwining of body and world as co-constituting each other in a dialogical fashion. From a strictly structural perspective, the difference between the mood of anxiety and the mood of jubilation is negligible. In each case, the corporeality of the world is given its experiential feel, as Heidegger has it, ‘neither from “without” nor from “within,” but rises from being-in-the-world itself as a mode of that being’ (Heidegger 1996, 129). In other words, the mood of anxiety is not a mood that is superimposed upon an otherwise neutral world. Rather, it is in and through a mood, taken in a prereflective way, that our interpretations and bodily perceptions take root. The specificity of anxiety as a mood is marked as a rupture in the body’s complicity with the constitution of the world.

The key movement in this phenomenology is the self-alienation that transpires when the subject catches sight of himself as a partially unknown and unknowable zone of materiality, manifest in our illustration as the apparition of the reflected face and perceived hand, each of which loses its quality as being one’s own and instead becomes an organ of anonymity. Indeed, the entire movement of our phenomenological exploration revolves around the felt transformation of materiality – either in the home or in the body – from the centre of personalized and intimate existence, to the site of an anonymous and foreign life. From the outset, it is important to note that the transformation in question is not a transformation of the body’s materiality. Anxiety does not introduce a new facet to the body, but instead unveils that a dimension that is operational, if latently, in both anxious and non-anxious existence. What is transformed is the relation we have with our bodies, such that the concealed dimension of the body in its anonymity becomes visible. We take this experience of a transformation not only as an expression of anxiety, but also as its source. There is much to say on the multifaceted nature of this transformation. To formulate the contours of the experience, at least four interdependent dimensions can be thematized. In the first instance, we are concerned with the question of how there can be a personalized experience of impersonal matter; second, we are concerned with how this experience is taken up as a figure of the uncanny; third, our concern falls with the thematic implication of to what extent the body as impersonal and uncanny can be trusted; in the final case, our question concerns what kind of materiality is at stake in the phenomenology of the anxious body.

1. Experiencing the impersonal

Our analysis begins with a paradox: how is it possible to conceive of an experience of the impersonal? The question is paradoxical given that any experience of the impersonal presupposes a personalized perspective, from which the impersonal is taken as an intentional object. This paradox is not a logical concern, and that alone. Rather, our concern remains tied to the lived experience of one’s body as impersonal. We are remaining with this tension given that the experience of anxiety, as we conceive it, entails the partial transformation of the body from that which is irreducibly personal and intimate to that which is insufferably impersonal and alien. How, then, is it possible for the impersonal and personal bodies to be situated in relation to one another without personalizing the impersonal? In response to this question, let us remind ourselves that in Merleau-Ponty’s formulation, the ‘advent of the impersonal’ is never absolute, but instead marks the ‘margin of almost impersonal existence [that] appears around our personal existence’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 86). Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on an ‘almost’ impersonal existence proves instructive, as it underscores the fact that what appears as impersonal does so on the fringe of the personal. The liminal status attached to the impersonal dimension of the body means the personal body remains intact throughout, and at no point is it wholly colonized by the anonymity of the body as an organism.

To situate this ambiguity in the context of the anxious body, we can begin by noting that it is precisely because the body is able to host (at least) two different levels of existence at once that anxiety takes form. Were the subject to regress to a level of organic existence, then it would be impossible to conceive of anxiety as assuming the place it does in the subject, given that what remains would be nothing more than inert matter. In the moment of anxiety, a human subject remains present, gazing onwards upon his own body, and it is thanks to this ability to regard the body as both one’s own and not one’s own concurrently that anxiety emerges in the interstitial space between subject and object, between personalized experience and impersonal materiality. Through the anxious episode, we survive and despite the visceral sense of impending collapse, no such breakdown occurs. Is the collapse a product of an overactive imagination or otherwise a cognitive misreading of one’s immediate situation? The answer in each case is no: the prospect of collapse gains the value of reality insofar as we come to the borderland where the body as one’s own is put into question. The subject feels himself to be disappearing, as the body in its knowable presence recedes, while the impersonal body as a set of anonymous functions takes over, as Merleau-Ponty has it: ‘It can even happen that, when I am in danger, my human situation erases my biological one and that my body completely merges with action’ (86). This mergence with action is predicated on the personal body not being sufficiently present to ensure the continuity of self. In such an instance, the anonymity of the body assumes influence, ensuring the brute survival of the subject, irrespective of our own relation to the situation. The experience of the impersonal, such as we are phrasing it, is the experience of oneself sliding towards the anonymity of general existence but without ever losing the conviction (however illusory) of selfhood.

In anxiety, we reach the edge of an almost impersonal existence, and it is through this unrealized (and unrealizable) movement that the possibility of one’s boundaries being effaced by the impersonal materiality of the body comes to the foreground. The body of anxiety is a body whose edges are no longer clearly delineated, but instead are slithering between divergent levels of existence. In the confrontation with the underside of bodily life, the anxiety provoked is not simply structural – that is, a possible erasure of one’s personal boundaries in the face of becoming anonymous – but also thematic insofar as the subject is confronted with a body that is both intimate and alien at once, a body of both interiority and anteriority. Thematically, this encounter with the body’s impersonal side operates as a movement of dispossession.

Consider in phenomenological terms the significance marking the subject of anxiety when he feels as though his legs will give way. The trembling of the legs is not a mechanical fault in the limbs, but instead the necessary outcome of a broader process of self-alienation from the body. Where the legs are concerned, we are confronted with an especially striking vision of the body as sliding away from the subject. Indeed, what is more alien than the experience of no longer being able to support oneself, but instead of having to rely on props in the world to steady oneself? The gap between the body in its personalized being and the body in its impersonal being is not absolute. The legs remain present, and they do not become phantoms of an otherwise functioning body. Rather, their very trembling accents the overwhelming facticity of being subjected to the body as a unit of matter. The legs become overly abundant, overly materialized in their strangeness. Thanks to this elevated materialization, the sense of the legs as no longer mine (yet precisely for this reason still mine) becomes a reality. In the case of trembling legs, we are faced with an excess in materiality, which distorts the subject’s relation to his body. The body becomes a site of instability, incongruity and vulnerability. But the dispossession of the body is not only a question of excessive materiality, but also the very unknowability of the body. Yet another way the body becomes dispossessed is through its symptomatic rapport with the world. Nowhere is this clearer than in the symptom of immobility.

***

You are in a military cafeteria. There is a space where you will receive lunch; an entire world will be available to you. Following your colleagues, you ascend a series of stairs, proceed through a set of hallways and arrive at the dimly lit space where food is served from behind counters. You cannot be seen clearly in this space, despite the fact that it is full of other people getting their own lunch. Shrouded in the low light, you scan the room, as if looking on from afar. Your selection of food is perfunctory, and for you, the only concern is with getting through the process unscathed by what follows next. The tray of food is assembled and ready to be purchased. As you come to the edge of the dimly lit space, another world opens. It is a world where everyone and everything is exposed to a brutal architecture, wholly indifferent to the welfare of those who eat their lunch in the zone of aggression. Harsh light floods in from above, pierces through the ceiling, through the iron grates, violently interrogating those beneath the light. A spotlight descends on each of the subjects who occupy the space. Dense clusters of military personnel are seated in and around the expansive room, their bodies tightly interwoven not only within each other, but also in complicity with the space. As a mark of respect for these people and the sanctity of their institution, you are instructed to remove your hat and dark glasses, which until now have defended you against this world. Your colleagues have gone ahead, finding their place within the new world despite its apparent dangers. You must follow, yet at the threshold between the dining area and the dimly lit space where the food is selected, you are unable to move. You look outwards, towards the sea of people within the light, and an invisible line divides you from joining them. Your body has assumed the paralysed presence of a monument, lodged in both space and time. A colleague turns her gaze back to you, evidently aware of your breakage in the world of things. Your legs, far from trembling, are instead inert, and it remains for your hands to function where your legs would otherwise act. You are motionless, the tray of tepid rice and chicken held in one hand. The other hand gestures to your colleague to move on, to concede to the impossibility that you will be able to participate in the collective activity of eating beneath the aggressive skyline of the military cafeteria.

***

In the act of coming to a standstill before no visible danger, the body evades our grip on the world. A symptom is produced: that of being unable to cross an invisible barrier. From the perspective of empirical reason, the symptom is incongruent within the context of the situation. A human being is unable to move, inhibited by a body that can no longer be deciphered as belonging to the world. Through the lens of anxiety, the body both protrudes into the world through its excessive materialization while also intruding upon the subject in terms of its opaqueness. From where does this symptom derive? For that matter, from where is this danger drawn? To cross the invisible line that demarcates one zone from another is to confront the alterity of the body in its brute materiality. Maintaining oneself within the darkness – behind the column or within a shadow – not only splits space into different parts, it also establishes a series of regions, from which the body’s centre of existence can be directed. So long as there remains a relatively fixed perspective, upon which the body can survey the world around itself, then a border remains in place, against which the subject of anxiety can both evade and repel the world. To cross that boundary is to confuse the line between where the body begins and where it ends.

This idea of the body as both not-mine and mine at once might seem at odds with a phenomenological account of the body as being irreducibly mine. Indeed, how can the materiality of the body lose its status as being mine and thus transformed to an alien entity? How, that is, can I experience my body as anything less than mine? The question has a specific peculiarity to it given that in a phenomenological context, the body is, in Husserl’s words, ‘constantly in the perceptual field quite immediately’ (Husserl 1970, 107). The body is with us at all times, allowing us to ‘hold sway’ in the world, and thus maintain a relation with materiality generally, by which our bodies are never truly ‘alien living bod[ies]’. Similarly, as we have seen for Merleau-Ponty, the body presents us with a ‘primitive spatiality’, in turn forming a compact with the world, from which no escape is truly possible (Merleau-Ponty 2012). In the experience of anxiety, we face a rupture in the concordance of the body’s being-in-the-world, such that the contingency of this relation is revealed. Indeed, it is notable that when Merleau-Ponty talks about the ‘living experience of vertigo and nausea’, he refers to ‘the horror caused by our contingency’ (265). If being a self means being embodied, then what Merleau-Ponty reminds us is that this bodily status is exposed to self-alienation precisely thanks to the intimacy of the body.

The irruption of the body in its uncanniness is not peculiar to the mood of anxiety, but remains an ongoing if often concealed dimension of bodily existence more broadly. In his essay ‘L’Intrus’, Jean-Luc Nancy reflects on the strangeness of his heart transplant (Nancy 2000). These reflections begin with the classical question, ‘what is the enunciating subject?’ (2). Against the backdrop of his own heart transplant, Nancy poses a question of the heart’s betrayal:

If my heart was giving up and going to drop me, to what degree was it an organ of ‘mine,’ my ‘own?’ … It was becoming a stranger to me, intruding through its defection … A gradual slippage was separating me from myself … My heart was becoming my own foreigner – a stranger precisely because it was inside. Yet this strangeness could only come from outside for having first emerged inside. (3–4)

Nancy traces the inroads leading to the body’s dispersal. The strangeness that comes from within does so not as a pathology of the body, much less a deviation of what is otherwise a body of plenitude and certainty. More than this, the empirical fact of the heart transplant reinforces a strange and non-possessable body. The heart comes to the foreground as a broken part. But we would misread the appearance of this broken heart if we were to regard it, in Heideggerian terms, as a mode of being present-at-hand, and that alone. That the heart presents itself as being more present means not an incursion of strangeness, as if strangeness were contingent to the body, but instead an amplification of the intrusion of an already existing (if dormant) strangeness. Nancy’s heart gives voice to the body as a site of anonymous and interchangeable functions, a nexus of sometimes living, sometimes dying components, each of which has a history outside of the host subject (a heart that is some twenty years younger than the rest of Nancy’s body). Furthermore, as Nancy reminds us, as a gesture of hospitality and intimacy, the transplant of body parts is not without the risk of repulsion, as the immune system of the patient consists of a process of ‘vomiting up the heart and spitting it out’ (8). Thus, this intrusion that promises to save the patient serves also to render his host body foreign, altering the immune system that is originally designed to fend off foreign attacks. To survive, one must welcome the foreignness, both that of one’s own but also that which can never belong to the enunciating subject, as Nancy writes eloquently:

I feel it distinctly; it is much stronger than a sensation: never has the strangeness of my own identity, which I’ve nonetheless always found so striking, touched me with such acuity. ‘I’ has clearly become the formal index of an unverifiable and impalpable system of linkages. Between my self and me there has always been a gap of space-time: but now there is the opening of an incision and an immune system that is at odds with itself, forever at cross purposes, irreconcilable. (10)

The strangeness of identity speaks of both anxiety and trauma. The gap of space–time that Nancy speaks is now filled with the occupancy of two bodies inhabiting the same space. This dynamic rapport between different materialities is as evident in Nancy’s heart transplant as it is in the case of the bodily experience of anxiety. Each corporeal modality is to a certain extent a privileged one, insofar as it reflects the very limits of identity, the precise point when the gap of identity appears. This phantom zone (to employ a previously developed concept) designates a corporeal zone, in which the felt experience of being a self is split between conflicting bodily temporalities (Trigg 2012, 253). On the one hand, there exists the felt sense of time as cohering in the present. Yet on the other hand, another past – conceived in trauma and therefore denied its expression as the event occurs – is sedimented in the flesh, announced only retroactively and even then, indirectly. The phantom zone concerns those brief moments where one’s own self catches sight of one’s own body being remolded for another past. Such moments fold back upon the almost impersonal horizon of experience, which, as soon as it appears for the perceiving body, is rendered personal. But through this conversion of traumatic and anxious materiality to the consolidated image of the body as unified, that same level of ruptured and fragmented materiality persists. As with trauma, anxiety occupies a phantom presence, at once both visible and invisible, both experiential and non-experiential, but never dissolved nor forgotten.

2. Uncanny anxiety

By way of heartbreak, we are returned to the experience of the impersonal. In speaking in these terms, it becomes necessary to accept the paradox of the body as cannily familiar and uncannily strange. To understand this, we can consider the idea of the ‘body uncanny’. The term ‘body uncanny’ can be traced back to the work of Richard Zaner, an expression that has since been applied in a diverse fashion, not least in the field of the medical humanities (cf. Burwood 2008; Leder 1990; Svenaeus 2000; Zaner 1981). Broadly speaking, we understand the body uncanny as an affective atmosphere, which is not yet anxiety, but instead an underlying sense of the body as not entirely my own. Thus, the uncanny body is linked to the experience of anxiety as a matter of amplifying this sense, with each gradient accenting the corporatization of uncanniness. To say more on this relation between uncanniness and anxiety, it is worth pausing to consider Zaner’s reflections on the body uncanny, given that his elaborations on this theme will enable us to approach the experience of anxiety with greater precision.

Zaner’s framework consists of four aspects of the body uncanny. In the first modality of the body uncanny, the issue concerns the inescapability of the body (Zaner 1981, 50). As we have already seen in Merleau-Ponty, being a subject means being limited and delimited by our bodies. This does not simply mean that our existence as human beings is limited by the particular bodies we have; more than this, it means that our general existence as subjects is always already given to the world in a corporeal form. To transcend the body would mean to divest ourselves of what it is to be human. Born into a corporeal form, human beings are then faced with the prospect of rendering this set of parts, modules and zones of flesh ‘one’s own’, even though we play no part in determining the bodies we have (51). The inescapable body carries with it an important consequence: if my sense of self is inescapably interwoven with my body, then there is a parallel sense in which the body ‘implicates’ me. Zaner writes, ‘If there is a sense in which my own-body is “intimately mine”, there is, furthermore, an equally decisive sense in which I belong to it – in which I am at its disposal or mercy, if you will’ (52). Merleau-Ponty’s concept of freedom and servitude, which we have already glanced at, echoes in Zaner’s formulation of being at the mercy of the body. Subjected to the body’s anonymous existence, I am also vulnerable to its failures and fault lines. My body serves to both protect me, but as it protects me, it remains unmoved by my own existence, except in terms of assuming a set of biological functions, which enable me to live.

With the idea of the body as inescapable and implicating, we have a specific kind of structure. Such a structure is double-sided, for it is a body that is both available to me while also transcending me. The affective realization of this structure is what Zaner terms ‘the chill’ (52). The experience takes form as a shudder or shiver one undergoes when faced with the existential realization that I am at all times exposed to the otherness that constitutes me but at the same time deprives me of ever being at home within my own body. That I am both unable to escape my body and implicated by the materiality of the body, instils a fission between my sense of self and the body that I am interwoven with but never identical with. Zaner reflects, ‘Inescapable, my embodiment is as well dreadfully and chillingly implicative’ (53). In the idea of the chill, we move closer to the presence of anxiety, and this affective dimension is underscored in the felt experience of the body as alien (54). The underside of the body as an alien presence disembarks from its function as ‘me’ and assumes the category of an ‘it’ (54). It is for this reason that we can speak of the body as an ‘it’, which has its own nature and rhythms, each of which must be accommodated in turn. ‘It’ lives, and importantly, it does so in spite of me. ‘It’ is impersonal, and may at times repel the life I give it through my own history, memories and experiences. ‘It’ remains the same for each of us, a set of discrete organs, the prehistory of which predates my own existence and will proceed to outlive that existence.

For all that, the alien quality of the body is never alien to the point of being wholly foreign. My affective relationship to the body as uncanny is predicated precisely on an ambiguous interplay, in which the body is both intimately my own while simultaneously being that which is most alien to me. If the body appears for me as alien and uncanny, then this is thanks to the fact that something of me still inheres in and through the alien presence that is unveiled in the body. Indeed, the sense of uncanniness that accompanies bodily existence is characterized by a threat to our sense of self, while rarely leading towards the total dissolution of self. It is at the point of betrayal, when the body not only reveals itself as having another life, but also reinforces that alien life, that the uncanny affect intervenes. What is uncanny, therefore, is that the betrayal of the body is only fractional. As a partial betrayal, there is a collision in different orders of materiality existing alongside each other rather than one order supplanting the other.

***

In the experience of the body uncanny, we are positioned at the threshold of anxiety. With Zaner, we find the body uncanny presented not as a deviation of an otherwise normal body, nor as an articulation of the body as broken. Such is the Heideggerian reading of the concept framed by Svenaeus and others, which we dissent from (Svenaeus 2000). Uncanniness is not an accident of bodily existence nor is it an affect peculiar to certain psychopathologies. Rather, we find it as a permanent structure of self-consciousness, which is never eliminated, except through a process of concealment. Indeed, the merits of Zaner’s analysis is that he ties the body uncanny to the structure of subjectivity itself, rather than reducing it to certain thematic dimensions of existence. Thus, that the body implicates me is a dimension of corporeal life common to us all. We are not disembodied agents autonomous from our materiality. At all times, we hinge upon and are indebted to the primacy of our bodies. To what extent this dimension leads to a sense of the uncanny is contingent on the sensibility of the subject. For the most part, we proceed through life either unaware or otherwise unconcerned with the dimension of our bodies that is not our own. We grant trust to the body that keeps us alive, knowing in advance that its unknowability is neither a source of distress nor something to be interrogated. At times, however, this steadfast confidence comes into question. Illness is only one way this level of the body appears. Anxiety is yet another way, arguably more far reaching. For some subjects, the onsets of symptoms of anxiety are experienced as being separate from oneself, as though deriving from an ‘ego-alien’ that intrudes upon oneself (Marks 1987, 432). The strategic advantage of assuming this perspective on one’s symptoms is that bodily sensations in turn become externalized as a foreign presence, no longer belonging to me, but instead framed as a monstrous invasion to be avoided. For other sufferers of anxiety, symptoms emerge from within and are thus recognized as one’s own, but are regarded as deviations that must be eliminated (346). Throughout, our relation to our body alters. On occasion, the body reinforces the sense we have of ourselves, while at other times the uncanny sense that there is something decidedly strange about the body comes to the foreground in the shape of anxiety. In these moments, the uncanny frames the ‘I’ as being exposed to a fundamental gap between my body and myself.

In Freud’s essay on the uncanny, we find additional evidence of this gap between the I and the body (Freud 2003). At the heart of Freud’s thinking on the uncanny is a series of ambiguities, each of which undermines the clear and distinct idea of a sovereign and rational self. The theme takes as its point of departure a thought posed in an earlier formulation of the uncanny, as presented by Ernst Jentsch, namely, ‘Whether an apparently animate object really is alive and, conversely, whether a lifeless object might not perhaps be animate’ (135). Jentsch has in mind bodies such as those of waxworks, dolls and automata. In each of these figures, the motif of the uncanny concerns the prospect that there might be ‘vague notions of automatic – mechanical – processes that may lie hidden behind the familiar image of a living person’ (135). This blurring between the familiar and the unfamiliar appears in Freud as a recurring motif. Thus, in his analysis of the doppelgänger, Freud comes to the conclusion that what is uncanny about the doppelgänger is not simply the theme of encountering oneself as another, but that the very persistence of this figure belongs to a ‘primitive phase in our mental development’ (143). The retention of such a sensibility assumes an anarchic place in the mind and body of the contemporary human. The appearance of the doppelgänger as a specific kind of belief is thus uncanny in that it forms a discord with an existing idea of the self as rational and resistant to superstitious avoidance patterns. In this sense, the uncanny is announced not as a radical departure from the subject, but instead as a confirmation of a presence that was already there. As Freud has it, ‘this uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it through being repressed’ (148).

This temporal ambiguity mirrors the bodily ambiguity, where we are faced with different levels of existence coexisting in the same body. What Freud brings to this analysis of uncanny is an affective dimension that is for the most part lacking in Merleau-Ponty’s account of the body. This affective dimension reconnects us with our question concerning the experience of the impersonal. As we have seen, this movement involves a sliding towards the impersonal aspect of bodily existence without ever entirely encountering that aspect. Anxiety finds its genesis in this space for two reasons. First, the movement of descending towards the impersonal involves a deformation of boundaries, and thus marks a threat to the structure of the subject; second, anxiety presents itself here as a confrontation with the unknowable substrata of the body. There are several thematic implications that derive from the anxious experience of the body uncanny. A central theme is that of trust.

3. Bodily trust

A body that is prone to collapse, and which presents itself as a strange artefact, never fully possessable by the subject, is a body that forms a discord in the life of a person. We have already established contact with this body throughout the book. As we recall, on the outside of a place – be it the place of the bridge, the supermarket, or, as we will see in time, on a bus or a plane – the subject experiences himself as a locus of integration, and thus able to survey space from a relatively fixed site. To put it another way, the pre-anxious body conforms to the Husserlian zero point of intentionality, stretching out towards a world, which is taken from the centrality of the subject. In a word, there is a relation of certainty placed in the body’s perception of things. All of this changes once in the supermarket or on the bridge. At first, there is a tension in the head, which then morphs into visual disturbances. Throughout this, there is a vigilance over bodily sensations, a constant monitoring as though to bring any wayward sensations into order. Before long, the subject’s vigil over the body falters, and the body reveals itself in its brute or naked facticity. In response, self-alienation ensues, which then intensifies anxiety as both being expressed by the subject and also further provoked by the body as an object of anxiety. As a dispossessed body, which threatens to give way at any point, revealing therein another side to its appearance that undermines the integrity of the subject, such a body is experienced as no longer being trustworthy.

To speak of the body in terms of being trustworthy or not trustworthy gives us two very different sides of bodily existence. Once more, it is in concert with Merleau-Ponty that these differences can be voiced. Despite his insistence on the body as ambiguous, as both bearer of time and object of time, prima facie the body that appears and reappears in Merleau-Ponty’s earlier phenomenology does so as a unity, writing in Phenomenology of Perception of the body as ‘a work of art’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 152). As we know, the body synthesizes the world as a whole thanks to the trust implicitly placed in the body’s alliance with the world. As Merleau-Ponty indicates, the synthesis of the world cannot be understood in causal terms, or in strictly empirical terms, but is instead as a movement that takes place in a prereflective way. This rapport between trust and a prereflective affirmation of the bodily world appears elsewhere in his writing as central to love, where Merleau-Ponty will speak of a ‘trusting tenderness which does not constantly insist upon new proofs of absolute attachment but takes the other person as he is’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 228).

This sense of trust as being outside of empirical proof is reinforced in the recent literature on the phenomenology of trust, where the affective experience of trusting one’s body is variously described in terms of a ‘unity’ that supersedes any bodily ambiguity, from which a taken-for-granted sense of bodily certainty emerges, allowing us to exist in the world without the need to question our body’s ability to act (Carel 2013). Either through habit or through repetition, the trusted body that emerges in this literature is characterized as a body that is able to act, providing a background context, against which the subject propels him- or herself through the world. On an affective level, the implicit trust placed in the body is thought to generate a sense of familiarity and bodily continuity, devoid of concern insomuch as the body presents itself as a fulcrum of stability, which thus lacks any compelling reason to be interrogated (180). Importantly, the continuity of the body is stipulated on a capacity for it to adapt to situations and sensations in and through ambiguous modes of bodily existence. To speak of bodily continuity, then, means speaking not simply of the continuity of the body as an organic structure, but also of the continuity of a relation with the body as being trustworthy. In remaining intact through the ambiguities and ambivalences of human existence – whether it be fatigue, illness or disorientation – the tenability of the body as trustworthy is contingent on the capacity to renew trust through and beyond these situations. From this stance, trusting in the body does not simply mean placing trust in the body’s capacity to act and function; more than this, the experience of trusting the body serves to establish a trustworthy relation with the world more broadly, such that we could speak of a generalized mood of trust.

Formulated in these terms, the body as trusted is a body that is aligned with a level of ‘normalcy’, even if that felt experience of normality is conditioned at all times by what Havi Carel terms ‘epistemically ungrounded beliefs’ concerning the reliability of the body (192). Notwithstanding the epistemic vulnerability that grounds our beliefs about the body, in much of the phenomenological literature, we find that the trusted body is equivalent to the healthy body, such that ‘belonging to the world’ is grounded in ‘bodily certainty’ (180). In this reading, the body that is untrustworthy and subject to doubt is a body that presents itself not simply as a dysfunctional obstruction, but in fact ‘unnatural’ (193). To speak in terms of natural and unnatural embodiment, as they relate to the affective experience of the body as trustworthy, is to presuppose a particular constitution to bodily life. Even if, as Carel argues, bodily certainty is a construct that functions irrespective of its epistemic status, then by pairing this ‘achievement’ with the felt experience of normalcy, everyday experience is presented as hinging on a certain mode of comporting oneself to the body. Seen in this way, instances of bodily doubt and uncertainty are framed as both unnatural and unhealthy deviations of an otherwise normal existence.

There are two points to mention in response to this account. The first is to recognize the validity in this description of the body from an experiential perspective. Without the tacit belief that our bodies persist with a minimal regularity, there can be no question of functioning in the world, at least not without the risk of inhibition and disintegration. Fictitious or not, such a belief in our bodies is what enables us to restore our relation to the world, despite the contingency that underpins that relation. But while accepting the necessity of this tacit trust, we do not need to follow Carel in assigning a ‘natural confidence’ in the body, such that the body subject to doubt delineates an ‘unnatural’ body. The risk inherent in such a move is to further pathologize bodily instances of ‘abnormality’, not least anxiety, as intrusions upon a subject. Indeed, Carel goes as far as to describe the ‘failure’ of bodily doubt as giving ‘rise to a kind of anxiety’ (185). Yet at the same time, she avoids conflating anxiety and bodily doubt, given that for her, the noetic content of bodily doubt is ‘neither irrational nor meaningless’, but instead tied to the ‘true beliefs’ regarding the possibility of collapse (186).

The second point proceeds from this marginalization of anxiety: to give a complete account of whether or not the body gives itself to experience as something to be trusted will depend in large upon what constitution the body has. To begin from the perspective of the body as unified means phrasing doubt and anxiety as interruptions in an otherwise integrated framework. This vision situates anxiety within the realm of a particular concept of the subject, such that anxiety is ultimately reducible to a conflict in what is an already constituted subject. Indeed, in Carel’s vision, anxiety is read in a strictly Heideggerian guise as concerning the loss of ‘practical coherence’ (189). For this reason, at no point does anxiety risk collapsing and destroying the subject, given that it is from the subject that anxiety appears.

***

Against Carel, there can be little doubt that in our formulation of the anxious body as the site of uncanny mechanisms, we are contending with a body that is both beyond possession and, in some sense, unknowable. If there is a side of the body that is knowable to us in personal perception, then this experience of the body as one’s own does not exhaust it of its broader significance. The hidden dimension of the body is thus uncanny in that it is both partially known and unknown, visible and invisible at once. At times, the body confirms the image we have ourselves as subjects while at other times it betrays that image. Already in Freud’s etymological analysis of the term ‘uncanny’, this reversibility between the known and the unknown is evident (cf. Freud 2003). Thus, he will speak of the uncanny as that which is ‘concealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know about it, withheld from others’, while at other times, he will speak of the uncanny as ‘that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar’ (129). Throughout this interplay between the known and the unknown, formal knowledge alone does not lessen the affective force of the uncanny. To know in abstract that one’s body is constituted by a set of impersonal organs that will likely never be perceived first-hand, or to otherwise study the body in an anatomical manner, does nothing to assuage the original strangeness of the body itself. Thus, to speak of alleviating the uncanny through the acquisition of intellectual certainty is to misunderstand the nature of the uncanny.

Given the close rapport between anxiety and the uncanny, a particular relation to the issue of trust emerges. Already in Freud’s essay, a connection is made between the hidden and secretive dimension of the uncanny and a sense of untrustworthiness (153). To what extent we can entrust a body that is prone to partial collapse, not simply as an accidental or pathological deviation of an otherwise normal and natural set of functions, but as the very constitution of bodily subjectivity, is central to the phenomenology of trust. To approach this issue, two aspects of the anxious body merit attention: discontinuity and betrayal. These themes take place against a broader mood of anxiety, which curtails, inhibits, and shapes the movement the subject. As we have seen, the anxious experience of being-in-the-world is framed by a cautious vigilance, such that the body presents itself as an organ with, if we may say paradoxically, a mind that appears to be of its own. Against this atmosphere of disquiet and trepidation, the theme of distrust emerges.

In the first case, we are concerned with what we can call the discontinuity of the anxious body. If there is a certain predictability in how the anxious body responds to certain situations and events – harsh light, enclosed spaces, exposed spaces, to name but a few of what are misleadingly termed ‘triggers’ – then this foresight does not domesticate the rupture that emerges when the body becomes anxious. This advent of anxiety breaks suddenly and often violently from the non-anxious body, such that how one comports oneself to the body and the body is fundamentally altered. Not only is there a felt discontinuity between the anxious and non-anxious body, but in the aftermath of anxiety, a fatigued body remains in its wake. The apparently paradoxical mention of an ‘anxious body’ rather than an anxious subject is employed deliberately to accent the felt quality of the body as the organ of anxiety. Of course, this experiential dualism is not a substance dualism, but an indication of the subject’s experience of their body as a site of betrayal. As a site of potential betrayal, the different modes of bodily existence frame the identity of the anxious subject as one of temporal and narrative discontinuity. In fact, we are faced with at least three modalities of selfhood: a pre-anxious self, an anxious self and a post-anxious self. We take the pre-anxious self as the source of self-identification for the subject. It assumes the role of a centre of orientation, vigilance and avoidance, and is able to survey the potential onset of anxiety from afar. The anxious self erases this distance, and thereby renders the precarious image of the self as non-anxious an illusion. In the aftermath of anxiety, the post-anxious self turns back upon his experience, now unable to consolidate how anxiety and non-anxiety can coexist in the same body without undermining the integrity of the subject. Each of these three delineations thus carries with it a specific way of being-in-the-world, and while they can all be considered as contributing to an overall arc of anxiety, these movements are nevertheless discontinuous in that they do not constitute a unity, but rather divide the self into discrete parts given that each of the parts contradicts one another.

This sense of affective and narrative discontinuity reinforces the sense of the body as being trustworthy only in certain contextual situations. The body, as it is experienced when in the home is markedly different from the body that is in the midst of a crowd of people while waiting to board a plane. Likewise, the agoraphobic person’s experience of an urban environment is radically different when accompanied by the presence of a trusted person than when travelling alone. As we have seen, and as we will continue to see, beyond the confines of the home, the body becomes the bearer of a different kind of materiality, and this transformation requires interrogation not only to verify that the hand of the subject is the same one that belongs in the home, but also to ascertain that the hand is my own. When away from the home, the homebody becomes an unhomely body, a body that is no longer irreducibly mine, but instead a body that cannot be relied upon as reinforcing the sense of self I identify with.

The temporal structure of the discontinuous body serves to accent the futural orientation of anxiety. Anxiety appears for the subject as a possible threat on the impending horizon. Indeed, from Freud up to contemporary clinical literature, anxiety is framed as an anticipatory mode of being directed at all times towards an unwritten future (cf. Barlow 2004; Marks 1987). Seen in this way, the experience of discontinuity is not only lived from the standpoint of the present; it is also embedded in a projection towards the future. Prior to the onset of anxiety, the subject has an experience of himself in the present. For the most part, it is an image he affirms as himself. But from all sides, this precarious – indeed, fictitious – image he has of himself as a non-anxious subject is framed by the possibility of rupture. As the future presses down (imagine our subject must leave the home in order to travel somewhere unfamiliar), so the future becomes a canvas upon which anxiety is cast, defined by the phrase emblematic to the experience of anxiety: what if.

The phrase what if is registered here in terms of the subject’s urge to domesticate if not repress alterity. To ask in concrete terms what if my body gives way while travelling from one point to another is to ask on a more fundamental level: what if the body I trust when at home betrays me when outside the home? Likewise, to ask in very specific terms, what if the underground train stops between stations, exposing the passenger to an indefinite darkness, is also to ask: what if the world betrays my expectation of how it ought to work? In this concern over the future, we are faced with a counterpart to the vigilance directed towards the uncertainty of the body, in its independence and otherness. In each case, the motivation is to reduce and localize the otherness of time and embodiment to the image of that which is most familiar (even if, as Freud taught us, this image is itself a product of anxiety).

Alongside this anticipatory awareness, the function of ritual transpires as key in the mastery of anxiety as an unbridled and formless presence, whether it takes form in the body or in the alterity of time more broadly. Most obviously, the role of ritual in domesticating anxiety is at work in obsessive–compulsive disorders, whereupon the subject devises a series of rules in order to localize anxiety, much in the same way an agoraphobe localizes his or her anxiety to a discrete object, be it a bridge or, in classical terms, a broad plaza. Enacting the ritual serves to confer an atmosphere of familiarity upon what is otherwise unknown and unknowable. Seen in this way, it is not by chance that the image often associated with the sufferer of obsessive–compulsive disorders concerns the door both into and away from the home. Time and again, we are told of various rituals performed at the door: opening and shutting the door, using gloves to touch door for fear the handle is ridden with germs, and most frequently, compulsively checking to see if the door is locked (cf. Abramowitz 2005). As the boundary line between inside and out, personal and impersonal, the door becomes the ambassador for a set of anxieties either contained within the home or otherwise dispersed through the world, and to proceed in each direction requires the intervention of this boundary as the guarantor of safety.

Both phobic anxiety and obsessive–compulsive disorders concern behaviour that is, objectively speaking, at odds with a sense of self. The obsessive and compulsive drive, which can motivate a subject to expend his or her energy on a series of Sisyphean tasks – collecting dust particles, counting sand grains, hoarding pinecones – only appear meaningless if we subtract these acts from a broader context. The precise manifestation is less important than the need to localize the vortex of anxiety, which, in the absence of the obsessive act, emerges as an all-consuming, violent force that threatens to destroy the subject. In the act of cultivating a phobic relation to a bridge, or in the insistence on ritualistically sitting on the aisle in a plane, we are confronted with a similar relation to how the obsessive–compulsive subject insists on checking to see if a door is locked. At stake in each of these modes of comporting oneself to the world is the motivation to neutralize the otherness, which underpins the existence of both the phobic and obsessive subject. That cleaning and scrubbing oneself is another key trope in the literature on obsessive–compulsive disorders is yet more evidence for this attempted neutralization of otherness as a kind of possession or infection, now manifest in literal form.

***

As we have seen, the reduction of time and embodiment through anticipatory awareness and ritualistic behaviour strives to control the extent to which the pre-anxious self, anxious self and post-anxious self fragment, while also developing the means through which anxiety can be localized to a specific image. If the uneasy relation between anticipation and expectation disturbs the trust we have in both the body and the world, then this futural direction about uncertainty is also mirrored with fixation on the past as a point of betrayal. To speak of betrayal in the sense of one’s own body as the betrayer seems odd if not paradoxical. When invoking betrayal, we do so usually in intersubjective terms. The betrayer is the one whom I place my trust in only for that trust to be abused. In this way, the act of betrayal requires a certain degree of deliberation on behalf of the betrayer. But can we say the same of our relation to ourselves, and especially to our bodies? In speaking of the experience of rock climbing, Anthony Steinbock touches upon this issue:

Now, the rock beneath my foot slips, or my fingers get tired and they lose their grip. Do I experience a violation of trust? Did the rock betray my trust? Did my fingers violate my trust in them? I do not think that we can meaningfully speak of violation or betrayal in this instance, and likewise of trust in a genuine sense. (Steinbock 2010, 88)

Steinbock is surely correct to resist assigning the status of betrayal and trust to inanimate objects, but the concept of the body as being immune to self-betrayal is tenable only if we grant the body the affective status of being irreducibly my own. The phenomenology of anxiety provides us with a different impression of the body. From the perspective of the anxious subject, the paradoxical and uncanny status of the body deprives us of the means to unreservedly trust it as a site of stability and self-affirmation. Indeed, the anxious body is an existence that presents itself as having an independence from the subject him- or herself, and to this extent, can never be possessed so long as it transcends me. We maintain our position on the high ledge, but change our perspective through Sartre’s analysis of vertigo.

Vertigo is anguish to the extent that I am afraid not of falling over the precipice, but of throwing myself over. A situation provokes fear if there is a possibility of my life being changed from without; my being provokes anguish to the extent that I distrust myself and my own reactions in that situation. (Sartre 1998, 29. Emphasis added)

Against Steinbock, Sartre gives us a different account of self-betrayal. The relationship here between vertigo and anxiety does not concern the materiality of the precipice itself, but instead one’s own boundaries in the face of the fall. The distrust I have within myself is nothing less than an expression of the contingency of the self as indeterminate, and, of course, for Sartre, radically free. If the materiality of the precipice exists as a more or less stable object of fear in the world, then what remains entirely unpredictable is how I respond to this object, whether that object is a cliff or another person. Moreover, the freedom that derives from this situation, which is to be contrasted at all times with a localized fear of the precipice as an objective danger, is dizzying, and in this height, anxiety emerges in the impossibility of tying myself down to a fixed relation with the precipice.

The mistrust in one’s own boundaries is not peculiar to Sartre’s illustration, nor by any means unusual. Clinical cases of patients terrified of how they will respond to situations of danger, such as crossing bridges and fearing they may ‘become crazed and, in panic, jump over the rail’ are recurring motifs, especially for agoraphobic subjects (Chambless and Goldstein 1982, 131). Likewise, in a case from 1890, the same compulsion reappears on a boat: ‘This feeling [of anxiety] is at times so strong that even when on a steamboat or a vessel, I cannot bear to look across any wide expanse of water, feeling almost impelled to jump in and out of sheer desperation’ (cited in Marks 1987, 326). What Sartre brings to the foreground in such circumstances is the opacity of the body. Of course, what Sartre is describing is not the anonymous body as the site of an autonomous agency, but instead the radical contingency of the subject as lacking a fixed essence. In each case, the possibility of throwing oneself over the precipice, together with the anxiety this prospect entails, involves a movement of self-betrayal, insofar as we take the betrayed and the betrayer as a distinction between the fixed and radically free subject. The free subject enters the stage in the shape of anguish, displacing the role fixed upon the subject in a gesture of bad faith, and thus is experientially given as a betrayal of the image of oneself as stable. In this context, the question posed by phobic patients in this situation is telling; namely, what if I go mad in this situation and throw myself off the cliff or bridge (132)? At stake in this madness is not a psychotic breakdown of the subject, but instead a confrontation with madness as a level of subjectivity ordinarily concealed in waking life.

Metaphysically, we are not in the realm of a Cartesian dualism, in which different selves demarcate two substances. Indeed, it is precisely because we maintain a phenomenological commitment to the subject as a bodily subject that the very experience of alienation and anxiety is possible. If we were approaching anxiety from a Cartesian or Lockean perspective, then arguably the detachment of mind and body would be the grounds of relief rather than anxiety. What matters is that the experience of interrogating the body both as an organ of perception and as the expression of my being-in-the-world leads to the destruction in the integrity of self. This interrogation emerges from the broader history of the body, with a special appeal to cases of what we term ‘self-betrayal’. As we have already seen, for Freud, the anxious dimension of agoraphobia is rooted in ‘the recollection of an anxiety attack’ (Freud 2001a, 81). Past experience emerges here as a pivot, against which the agoraphobic subject is able to measure the likelihood of encountering a given situation without being faced with a threat to the image of self, thus one patient writes, ‘When the time comes I fortify myself by recalling my past victories, remind myself that I can only die once and that it probably won’t be as bad as this’ (cited in Marks 1987, 346). In circumstances where the subject takes a leap into the unknown only to be met with panic upon finding him- or herself in the middle of a bridge, both unable to proceed to the end while also incapable of returning to the beginning, and so stuck in the hinterland between places – in such a situation, the ensuing shame is directed at the body, which materializes as the betrayer of a trust (naïvely) placed in it. The body thus becomes inscribed with a litany of near disasters (along with some victories), from which the agoraphobe is negatively educated in Kierkegaard’s model of anxiety as a ‘school’ (Kierkegaard 1981, 156).

The significance attributed to rituals as a way of ordering anxiety finds another expression in the usage of so-called props. Already we have encountered the prop as the means of generating a sense of self-integrity, otherwise lacking in the troubled mistrust placed in the body. Think back to the role the cart plays in the supermarket and the lamppost plays on the bridge. In each case, the object functions not only as a means of steadying balance, but also of maintaining a relation with the world above and beyond the subject’s transformation in the world. The object – emblematically and historically that of an umbrella or a bicycle – is both steady in its essential and unwavering quality as a distinct object, but also steadying in terms of allowing for a relationship with the world despite the body’s vulnerability to collapse.

FIGURE 2.2 Rue Chanoinesse, Paris.

‘The presence of a cart’, so we read in a case study from 1884, ‘even a stick or umbrella in the hand, persons, or trees, gives a sense of confidence when walking an unknown road’ (White 1884, 1140). To be clear, out concern with objects such as umbrellas is not with their status in empirical terms, less even with the factual prospect of the object as being able to physically support the subject. For the agoraphobe, the umbrella enters the horizon of experience as an entrusted other, providing therein a familiar and reassuring presence. We can refer here to a case study from 1898, in which a medical doctor, Dr Headley Neale (and fellow sufferer of agoraphobia), writes as follows:

I have referred to the possibility of recognising the ‘agoraphobic’ as he walks along the street. Apart from the coarser evidence of his suddenly pausing to lay hold of a paling or to place a hand upon a wall, he will hardly ever be without a stick or umbrella, which you will notice he will plant at each step at some distance from him, in order to increase his line of support. (Neale 1898, 1323)

The distinct gait of the agoraphobe – cautious, uneven, erratic – testifies to a reliance upon props to guide the body through the world. Lacking trust in his body as both an objective thing positioned in the world and a centre of perception through which the world is experienced, the agoraphobe converts this instability through a transference to the objects around him. As his body extends to the umbrella, undermining a strict distinction between the two, so the prop becomes enshrouded with a totemic and ritualistic significance elevated beyond its mere existence as a device to fend off rain.

The individuation of a zone of safety in the form of a prop such as an umbrella reflects a much broader tactic for survival, which is played out in the agoraphobe’s rigid way of being-in-the-world, adhering at all times to a need to be near the exit, on the margin, behind the column, within proximity of a beacon of escape and stability. In the case of an open umbrella, we have a particularly striking expression of both the agoraphobe’s refusal to face the world on its terms, and instead to filter it through the perception of a screen, as well as a means to conceal oneself from the intrusive gaze of others. Once more, the screen serves to divide the subject from the world, establishing a distance that prevents him from getting too close to the world as the site of an anonymous if not hostile existence. To see the world through a screen (and note the invariant presence of dark glasses for the agoraphobe) is to gain the illusion of being able to editorially select content that either reinforces the subject’s standing in the world or otherwise risks destroying it (cf. Marks 1987, 338). In turn, this selective perception of the world extends beyond localized objects and becomes invested in the surrounding environment along with the people in that environment. Thus, in one of Westphal’s patients, Mr C, the following observations are made:

The same feeling of fear overtakes him when he needs to walk along walls and extended buildings or through streets on Holiday Sundays, or evenings and nights when the shops are closed. In the latter part of the evening – he usually dines in restaurants – he helps himself in a peculiar way in Berlin; he either waits until another person walks in the direction of his house and follows him closely, or he acquaints himself with a lady of the evening, begins to talk with her, and takes her along until another similar opportunity arises, thus gradually reaching his residence. Even the red lanterns of the taverns serve him as support; as soon as he see one his fear disappears. (Knapp 1988, 60–61)

With Mr C, we bear witness to an extension of the trusted object into the presence of another person, able to guide the patient through the world in the same way an inanimate object does. We shall have more to say of the agoraphobe’s relations with others in the following chapter. In the meantime, consider how the agency of the other person is rendered a mere prop for the patient. If there is a trust involved in this relation, then it is a trust that is stipulated on the agoraphobe’s insistence on framing objects as having a fixed essence to them, incapable of betraying their own nature. This objectification of the other person serves to portray him or her as corporeal expressions of home, where we take the homely dimension to typify the ‘safe’ world, which at all times reinforces and mirrors the patient’s sense of self. To succumb to panic in the company of the trusted companion means being able to survive the bodily metamorphosis from a centre of meaning to a site of impersonal existence without entirely undergoing a loss of self. More precisely, that the companion ensures the ‘survival’ of the subject means surviving the onset of panic as a self, rather than enduring as a biological and organic body. All of which is possible thanks to the fact the other person becomes a surrogate prop for the agoraphobe to reinforce and solidify a body, which, lacking something or someone to hold onto, risks collapse.

4. Nausea and slime

Sealed off from the surrounding station, the waiting area of the Eurostar terminal in the Gare du Nord is an enclosed world. In it, there is a small space marking the transition from the cultural milieu of Paris to that of London. Passing from the French to the British passport control, the traveller will drop their baggage through the security check before reclaiming it on the other side. There, one can take a seat in the waiting area at the lower end of Gare du Nord before boarding the Eurostar. At 250 feet beneath sea level, the train will journey through the darkness separating the two countries. Finally, the passenger will emerge in Great Britain on the same train boarded in Paris a mere two hours before. Such a miracle of transport remains for you a figment of your anxious imagination, forged while you still occupy the waiting area of this transitional place.

A vast window overlooks the Rue du Maubeuge. It runs parallel to the waiting room, marking another life outside of the Gare du Nord. You are positioned as close to the window as is possible, as though the mere sight of an exterior world in all its clarity will become more accessible to you, despite being sealed off by thick glass. There is no escape other than through the way you came, backwards through the passport control, once more passing from British to French hands, before returning to the streets of Paris. Other people come and go on Rue du Maubeuge, and you view them from above while they remain entirely oblivious to your gaze. As the train nears its departure, the space becomes crowded. The once deserted seats that surrounded you on all sides are now filled with passengers, each of whom locked in their own world will eventually board a train just as you plan to.

These moments of anticipation are charged with the pathos of drama. In the minutes separating you from the train, you have no idea whether you will survive the wait. You cannot be trusted to retain your composure and the presence of other people sitting in and around you only underscores the unpredictability of how your body will respond to this situation. Very often, you will flinch without provocation. A trail of sweat will form on your forehead before dripping on your cheek. You will grip the collar of your shirt; a button will shoot off, landing in a remote region of the waiting room. But no matter how much you tear at your clothes, the anxiety cannot be rid off. It remains beneath the skin, within you, yet registered as an invasive presence. When your anxiety escalates and you panic – that sensation of needing to be anywhere aside from here – then it will remain for you an unvoiced and silent presence. It will occur solely within the interior of your existence, and other people will merely witness the surface expression of a disquiet that forms a fundamental discord in you.

The anxiety possesses you, betrays you. Manifesting itself in and through your body, the anxiety seizes control, constricting your breath and rendering you mute. Now, it is you that are subjected to the clairvoyance of your body, which senses a danger inaccessible to your own reflections. Thanks to some invisible arrangement, the waiting room at the Eurostar terminal in Paris has set these sensations alight. The place has exposed you as a forgery, no longer identifiable with your personalized body but instead a stranger within your own skin. That you are able to conceal and maintain a semblance of composure outside of the station is due merely to good fortune. This appearance, however, is an achievement rather than a given, and the revelation of your existence as a contingent image superimposed upon what is otherwise a largely formless mass is irreducibly nauseating.

***

Anxiety is both in the world and beneath our skin. Because of its liminal status – as neither belonging to one space nor another, but instead converging on the ever-changing terrain between borders – anxiety proves an elusive phenomenon. Upon emerging, it disappears; in disappearing, it reappears. Unable to be tied down, anxiety belongs, to paraphrase Heidegger, in the nowhere. All of which we can discern from the lived experience of anxiety. Part of the destabilizing quality of anxiety is its resistance to sedimentation and certainty. Can we, after all, ever be sure that the experience we are having is, without question, anxiety, and not some other phantom of our waking lives? Anxiety distorts and repels our attempt at drawing a frame over it. Thus, any phenomenology of anxiety remains a liminal one, a method that pursues the mood without ever dwelling alongside it, except as a form of resistance. Our attention is drawn to the slippery shadows where anxiety derives and gravitates. One way to conceptualize this shadowline is through Sartre’s notion of nausea.

The rationale for turning to Sartre’s concept of nausea is that with it, we find a conceptual vocabulary that complements Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between the personal and anonymous body of perception. Yet while Merleau-Ponty presents the bodily subject as being structured by a series of boundaries between the personal and impersonal, those boundaries nevertheless exist in a porous and dynamic relation with one another. To this end, anxiety as a phenomenological experience remains impossible so long as the body’s different levels of exist in an ambiguous if ultimately unified relation with one another. With Sartre, the boundaries and levels structuring the body do not interact in a fluid and dynamic way, but instead appear as rigid delineators, which, in coming into contact, destabilize the image of the subject as sovereign. We have, then, two different accounts of the subject, each of which shed light upon the other. Yet what is vital in Sartre’s analysis is not his account of the ontology of the subject, but the visceral and affective sense of the body’s capacity to melt – a dimension that is arguably necessary to any phenomenology of anxiety – which is present but not explicit in Merleau-Ponty’s account. To get a sense of the visceral affectivity inherent in Sartre’s concept, let us plunge into the murky world of Antoine Roquentin.

‘Something has happened to me’, so Sartre writes at the beginning of Nausea, ‘I can’t doubt it any more’ (Sartre 1964, 4). As is well known, what had happened to Antoine Roquentin is that both his body and his world were transformed from a solid and reliable mass to a nauseous thing, which is both constantly wavering and wholly unfamiliar. ‘It came as an illness does’, so Sartre notes before continuing his reflections:

[T]here is something new about my hands, a certain way of picking up my pipe or fork … just as I was coming into my room, I stopped short because I felt in my hand a cold object which held my attention through a sort of personality. I opened my hand, looked: I was simply holding the door-knob. This morning in the library, when the Self-Taught Man came to say good morning to me, it took me ten seconds to recognize him. I saw an unknown face, barely a face. Then there was his hand like a fat white worm in my own hand. I dropped it almost immediately and the arm fell back flabbily. (4)

The opening lines of Nausea are striking on several levels. In the first case, the hand appears to be strange, and therefore obtrudes into the consciousness of Roquentin. In response, Roquentin considers to what extent this strangeness inheres in the hand or in the pipe. Yet again, the same disturbance creeps into the door-knob. We ask the same question as that of our existence in the supermarket: does the hand bring its strangeness to the door or was that strangeness already there? We discover that Roquentin is witnessing this increasing nausea spread to the world more broadly. Now, in the face of another person, ten seconds must pass before the man can be identified as having a face of his own. In each case, both body and thing begin to lose their irreducible and singular identity as ‘one’s own’ and now become impregnated with a sense of the uncanny.

FIGURE 2.3 Rue du Prévôt, Paris.

The sense of the uncanny in Sartre’s novel recurs time and again, each time finding a new mode of expression. From objects in general, to the face, to the division between inside and out, and then towards space and time, Sartre’s book can be read as a mediation on the uncanny, which, though manifest in innumerable ways, always finds its root in the body itself. Indeed, the body that appears and then disappears in Nausea extends beyond the caricature of ‘existentialist hero’ by defining itself quite precisely in phenomenological terms as a body at the intersection of the I and the non-I, the personal and impersonal, and the specific and anonymous at once. It is a body that betrays the Husserlian account of the body as being a ‘zero point’ of orientation, and presents itself instead as a series of parts and fragments. More than this, it is a body on the verge not simply of inhumanity, but also of an animality. Time and again, the body appears as fishy or in other occasions, crabby. The hand ‘lives – it is me. It opens, the fingers open and point. It is lying on its back. It shows me its fat belly. It looks like an animal turned upside down … like the claws of a crab which has fallen on its back’ (98). Throughout, there is a porous interchangeability between body parts and objects, with each thing rejecting the name arbitrarily imposed upon it and, as a result, liberated from having a form. Take the face as it appears in this novel. It is a particular kind of face, one that finds its origins in human flesh, but a face that nevertheless appears to deform the flesh. ‘There is’, so Sartre writes, ‘a white hole in the wall, a mirror. It is a trap’ (16). Unable to resist taking a look at the ‘grey thing’ reflected in the mirror, Roquentin draws in closer:

It is the reflection of my face. Often in these lost days I study it. I can understand nothing of this face. The faces of others have some sense, some direction. Not mine. I cannot even decide whether it is handsome or ugly … At heart, I am even shocked that anyone can attribute qualities of this kind to it, as if you called a clod of earth or a block of stone beautiful or ugly … Obviously there are a nose, two eyes and a mouth, but none of it makes sense, there is not even a human expression … When I was little, my Aunt Bigeois told me ‘If you look at yourself too long in the mirror, you’ll see a monkey.’ I must have looked at myself even longer than that: what I see is well below the monkey, on the fringe of the vegetable world, at the level of jellyfish. It is alive, I can’t say it isn’t … The eyes especially are horrible seen so close. They are glassy, soft, blind, red-rimmed, they look like fish scales. (16–17)

Sartre divests the face of its human attributes and renders it a set of discrete parts, no longer bound by anything in common, except for occupying the same patch of flesh. With this decomposition of meaning, the face can no longer be understood in aesthetic terms. To confer the quality of ugly upon it is already to presuppose a certain knowledge of the face. But in this nauseous face, bodily knowledge is lacking, and the face becomes a part of the same world as blocks of earth, of which it would be equally absurd to cite as ‘beautiful’. Throughout this fragmentation, the body in its brute materiality persists. The parts that constitute the face do not vanish at the moment their meaning is put into question. Instead, they transcend that loss of meaning, but only now reveal their underside as anonymous and nameless. As understood from a nauseous perspective, things resist the human attempt at being tied down to how they appear for consciousness. As Sartre indicates, life goes on – ‘It is alive’ – but it is a life reduced to the level of a gelatinous lifeform, amorphous in its structure, and lacking any fixed essence.

Sartre’s concept of nausea runs strikingly close to the formulation of anxiety as involving a transformation of the body towards an anonymous materiality, no longer irreducibly human, but instead, suggestive of what Sartre describes as a ‘dumb, organic sense’ (17). As with anxiety, nausea assumes either a tacit, free-floating mood that shapes our experience of the world in a pre-cognitive way, or, it becomes thematized explicitly in our experience of the body as a site of disintegration and alienation. Here, too, we find a similar double-sided structure to Sartre’s account of nausea. On the one hand, nausea is diffused through the world as a vague and non-specific movement of disquiet: ‘It came as an illness does, not like an ordinary certainty not like anything evident’ (4). On the other hand, and more often than not, it announces itself sharply as a gradual transformation of the world, such that ‘the Nausea seized me, I dropped to a seat, I no longer know where I was; I saw the colours spin around me, I wanted to vomit’ (18–19). Of this seizure, it is, of course, the body that becomes the foremost place of nausea. The body, as Sartre presents it, is an amorphous body, a body that has been hollowed out and inverted. This hollow deprives the body of a discernible affective form, be it pleasure or pain, and in this absence, nausea comes to light as an apprehension of the body’s contingency. Several years after Nausea, Sartre returns to the theme of the hollow body in Being and Nothingness, writing that:

Coenesthetic affectivity is then a pure, non-positional apprehension of a contingency without color, a pure apprehension of the self as a factual existence. This perpetual apprehension on the part of my for-itself of an insipid taste which I cannot place, which accompanies me even in my efforts to get away from it, and which is my taste – this is what we have described elsewhere under the name of Nausea. A dull and inescapable nausea perpetually reveals my body to my consciousness. (Sartre 1998, 338)

True to his phenomenological heritage, the nausea that embeds itself in Sartre’s account of the body also finds expression in the world more broadly, thus he writes, ‘The Nausea is not inside me: I feel it out there in the wall, in the suspenders, everywhere around me. It makes itself one with the café, I am the one who is within it’ (Sartre 1964, 19–20). In describing street scenes, Sartre extends this world: ‘The Boulevard Noir is inhuman. Like a mineral. Like a triangle’ (26). We are witnessing the extension of the body’s mutation in spatial form. It is a world in-itself, whereupon people are also subjected to a loss of personalization: ‘Here are some people. Two shadows. What did they need to come here for?’ (26). Time, also, is subjected to the fate of nausea, as temporal order is stripped of its fixed structure: ‘Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are no beginnings’ (39). Objects as innocuous as books come into question, their presence reduced to a derealized screen of appearance, no longer situated within the context of a referential whole: ‘Nothing seemed true; I felt surrounded by cardboard scenery which could quickly be removed … I looked at these unstable beings which, in an hour, in a minute, were perhaps going to crumble’ (77). Against this ever-present possibility of collapse, it is only through ‘laziness that the world is the same day after day. Today it seemed to want to change. And then, anything, anything could happen’ (77). The utter contingency of things, compounded with the sense that anything could happen at any time, gives rise to the vertiginous aspect of nausea. When the nausea strikes Roquentin, it does so with a dizzying force, disempowering not only his relation to his body, but also to his immediate surroundings and the objects within those surroundings, which now gain a supernatural quality divorced from the meaning superimposed upon them:

A real panic took hold of me. I didn’t know where I was going … As long as I could stare at things nothing would happen: I looked at them as much as I could, pavements, houses, gaslights; my eyes went rapidly from one to the other, to catch them unawares, stop them in the midst of their metamorphosis. They didn’t look too natural, but I told myself forcibly: this is a gaslight, this is a drinking fountain, and I tried to reduce them to their everyday aspect by the power of my gaze. (78)

The passage presents us with a compressed attempt at forging a home (parallel to that of the panic room we encountered in the previous chapter), upon which Roquentin can regain his perspectival bearings. This passion is taken up in the simple act of gazing at things. Here, we have an especially striking image of the attempt at keeping things in place through fixating upon them visually, enacting what Merleau-Ponty would term the ‘narcissism of vision’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 139). This gesture is already familiar to us as a mode of surveying the body’s response to the world through a vigilant gaze. So long as things – not least the human body – are surveyed by sight (ostensibly the most rational but also violent of the senses), then the meaning given to those things stands a better chance of remaining placed. Through a forceful reduction, vision restores what objects themselves reject: their existential meaning. This gesture of monitoring things in order to forestall their metamorphosis is taken as the ultimate statement of egology, consisting of nothing less than a conversion of the alterity of things to the sameness of the I. As such, the attempt fails and Roquentin finds himself once more haunted by the world around him: ‘Doors of houses frightened me especially. I was afraid they would open of themselves’ (Sartre 1964, 78).

Passages such as this give us indication of the two salient features of anxiety: the mistrust placed in things together with the formlessness of things. ‘As long as I could stare at things nothing would happen.’ With this indictment of a thing’s autonomy, the world becomes a site of potential betrayal and discontinuity, in which anything could happen and at any time. This loss of trust in things is intertwined and interdependent with the lawlessness of matter itself. That things exist means that they do so on the verge of almost (but never entirely) being dissolved: ‘Things are divorced from their names. They are grotesque, headstrong, gigantic and it seems ridiculous to call them seats or say anything at all about them: I am in the midst of things, nameless things’ (125). In his venerated account of the root of a chestnut tree, we witness the final expression of the impenetrable resistance of things existing in an infinite cycle of forming, deforming and reforming:

T]he root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder – naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness … This root, with its colour, shape, its congealed movement, was … below all explanation. Each of its qualities escaped it a little, flowed out of it, solidified, almost became a thing … This moment was extraordinary. I was there, motionless and icy, plunged in horrible ecstasy. (127–131)

In the forever shifting boundaries that both veil and unveil things, Sartre locates the specificity of anxiety in material terms. At stake in this moment is not an abstract recognition of factual contingency, but a ‘vision’ that leaves one ‘breathless’ (127). As a disordering of boundaries, anxiety spreads in and through the world, defamiliarizing and depersonalizing the everydayness of habitual experience, and rendering it the site of an unhomely alienation. The anxiety that emerges in the mood of nausea does so, therefore, with a horrifying and visceral presence. Such an anxiety departs from the contemplative mood one finds in Heidegger’s account, and situates us, instead, in an ‘obscene’ world, where even the thought of one’s own death reinstates the stubborn and elemental persistence of indifferent matter, which can never be possessed: ‘In the way, my corpse, my blood on these stones, between these plants, at the back of this smiling garden … my bones, at last, cleaned, stripped, peeled, proper and clean as teeth, it would have been In the way’ (128–129). What is in the way is the superfluous excess of the body, which, despite being constitutive of the self, is nevertheless other than, and in certain situations, even against selfhood.

Here, Heidegger comes to an agreement with Sartre: ‘In anxiety beings as a whole become superfluous. In what sense does this happen? Beings are not annihilated by anxiety, so that nothing is left. Rather the nothing makes itself known with being and in beings expressly as a slipping away of the whole’ (Heidegger 1977, 104). But Sartre goes beyond Heidegger in his emphasis on a movement of slipping by returning this theme to that of the body itself. Let us not be surprised, therefore, that Sartre will talk of things as oozing and melting in response to the imposition of meaning (Sartre 1964, 130–131). What is repelling (if also compelling) about anxiety is the movement of interstitial being that opens up in the gap between the experience of oneself as coherent and knowable and the realization that this level of familiarity is only an image. The gap is not a static or neutral space waiting to be colonized or excavated. Rather, the space emerges in the form of a fundamental threat to the image of selfhood as a sanctuary from the insecurity of the world.

Sartre’s conception of a psychoanalysis of slime articulates the repugnant and horrifying quality of interstitial space as having both a moral and ontological dimension to it (Sartre 1998, 604). At stake in the image of slime is a ‘fusion of the world with myself’, only the fusion is not a co-dependent harmonious synthesis, but instead involves an ‘outline of appropriation’ (606). The slime enters my horizon as an amorphous materiality, as a ‘leech sucking me’ (606). The oozing quality of slime derives neither from myself nor from naked materiality, but instead from an ‘ontological expression of the entire world’, which individualizes itself quite precisely in the amorphous mass of slime. Sartre’s elaboration of this expression is both incisive in-itself and also pertinent to our study of anxious corporeality.

There are a number of points that Sartre mentions, each of which contributes to the overarching quality of slime as a zone of pure interstitiality. In the first case, the slime is beyond possession. Unlike water, which Sartre utilizes as a counter-example, slime ‘rolls over us’ in an ‘infinite temporality’ (607). Thus, in distinction to the lucid image of constant becoming suggested in the Heraclitean river, slime appears in ‘slow motion’, marking the ‘agony of water’ (607). For these reasons, slime occupies the disturbing (and disturbed) terrain between solidity and liquidity, as he writes, ‘Nothing testifies more clearly to its ambiguous character as a “substance in between two states” than the slowness with which the slime melts into itself’ (607). In its lassitude and density, the slime does not lend itself to being captured, or otherwise slowed down to the point of becoming a solid thing, despite appearing as though it can be possessed thanks to this slowness. Rather, the non-possessable dimension of slime is taken up as the unfolding of constant becoming that neither ends nor begins, but instead folds back upon its own materiality, forging an increasingly complex layer of existence, which, in expanding its sphere of influence, appropriates things within its embrace. Sartre contrasts this hideous formation with that of a drop of water ‘touching the surface of a large body of water’ (607). Almost instantaneously, the waters converge and become one, without any boundary dividing them. Here, there is no struggle to speak of, and no excess produced, which would threaten the stability of the pool of water. The same is also true if I myself jump into water, boundaries remain intact, as does personal identity: ‘I experience no discomfort, for I do not have any fear whatsoever that I may dissolve in it; I remain a solid in its liquidity’ (610). Where the slime is concerned, any such absorption of foreign matter is met throughout with resistance: ‘In the slimy substance which dissolves into itself there is a visible resistance, like the refusal of an individual who does not want to be annihilated in the whole of being’ (608). The ‘softness’ that accompanies this movement does not eventually integrate itself into a moment of solidity or liquidity, but instead is preserved as softness, much like, to use Sartre’s formulation, ‘a retarded annihilation’ (608). The slime is not a passive backdrop, against which I can propel myself from it. Rather, to fall into the slime risks becoming lost within it, ‘like the haunting memory of a metamorphosis’ (610).

The creeping movement of the slime, venerated in the genre of classical horror for its ominous quality, is not a pure fiction, but instead a mode of formulating the nature of matter itself. As with the body in its anxiety, there is a duplicitous structure to the formulation of slime: ‘Only at the very moment when I believe that I possess it, behold by a curious reversal, it possesses me’ (608). Here, the slime turns, revealing itself not only to be experientially slippery, but ontologically, too. Sartre’s hand has become immersed in a pool of slime: ‘I want to let go of the slimy and it sticks to me, it draws me, it sucks at me’ (609). The more the hand tries to free itself of the slime, the greater it becomes entrenched within it. The slime, this ‘poisonous possession’, gets under the fingernails, within the cracks of the hand, without at any point fusing with that hand (609). There is no evasion, less even a destruction of the hand. If the slime breaks apart upon the removal of the hand, then it only reconfigures elsewhere. This pure interstitiality is the spectre of an indifferent superfluity.

In the figure of slime, we find the consummate expression of both the structure and the thematic content of the anxious body. In no uncertain terms, slime indexes a materiality that is not only between states, but also attaches itself in the manner of a leech to those states. In the attempt to free ourselves of the slime, we only become more entangled within it. And so, the slime deprives the image of the bodily self as autonomous while reinforcing its quality as being beyond possession. In this, the slime proves repugnant and horrifying. At the heart of this horrific affect is the power of slime to deform boundaries while leaving the subject intact, if paralysed. To speak of a slimy body is to speak of a body that is tied down by its own thickness.

We speak of the anxious body in the same way: it is a body that is in the first instance situated between different if not contradictory states. As both mine and not-mine, personal and impersonal, specific and anonymous, the anxious body’s malleability reflects its slimy nature. Moreover, because this movement is listless rather than dynamic, the interstitial quality of the anxious body invokes repulsion rather than delight. A body that is in the process of transforming itself suggests affirmation so long as that transformation takes as its point of departure a desiring subject. In the case of the anxious body, the metamorphosis is experienced as an invasion, which threatens to destabilize rather than reinforce the subject. Hence, just as the slime leaves a trace upon its departure, so the fragmentation of the anxious self is only realized once the moment has passed.

Furthermore, the materialization of the slime upon the body – to think here of the hand – finds form in our accent on the anxious body as a self-alienated body. In the moments before the body has been re-constituted and re-identified as my body, it appears for the subject in a fleeting moment as residual, alien and elemental. The anxiety that frames this movement of self-alienation does not de facto carry with it a sense of ‘panic’. Rather, we are in the midst of an uncanny expression of anxiety, an anxiety subtended to by a noiseless disquiet, which is exposed nevertheless at all times to the possibility of paroxysm, such that the body ceases to function as a human body. Anxiety, like slime, leaves a mark upon the subject, and this mark is not an innocuous memory destined to vanish, but a presence that continues to exert an active presence upon the structure of the subject. As with the slime, moreover, anxiety dwells under the skin, possessing and haunting the subject even when the subject is unaware of its presence.

***

From a seemingly innocent journey to a supermarket – surely, the exemplary ‘non-place’ – we have been led through the complex, multidimensional topography of the body’s anxious being-in-the-world. This journey, which began with the sense of the body as one’s own, has ended with a very different incarnation of bodily existence. Indeed, the body that emerges in anxiety does so on the fringe of experience. Such a body issues a challenge not only to our sense of self, but also to phenomenology’s treatment of the body as a largely invulnerable locus of unity. The body as we find and experience it in anxiety, transforms human subjectivity into an almost impersonal thing, no longer one’s own, yet at the same time, not entirely alien. In and of itself, what is anxiety inducing about this transformation is not the existence of impersonal, non-possessable and unknown aspects of bodily existence themselves. We can readily imagine a relationship to the different levels of the body, such that anxiety does not come to the foreground. When one of my limbs is burnt, I do not experience the process of healing – which is, after all, an impersonal process that occurs irrespective of ‘my’ relation to the body – as inducing anxiety. The reasons for this non-appearance of anxiety centre on the fact that the healing of the body reinforces my sense of self rather than dissolving that sense. Structurally speaking, the ambiguous and duplicitous side of the body does not ‘cause’ anxiety. Rather, the emergence of anxiety takes form in a specific relation to the body, such that the encounter with the impersonal dimension of the body invokes a destabilization in the self, thus rendering the experience of anonymous bodily life an experience of uncanny matter.

Seen in this way, the experience of anxiety and nausea does not mark a departure from an otherwise normal or stable life, but instead amplifies and accents structures, themes and dimensions, which are there all along in non-anxious life. The unstable transition between the personal and the impersonal is not peculiar to anxiety, but is an invariant structure of the body more broadly. What is specific about anxiety is that the experience of this impersonal dimension threatens the image of the self as a coherent and fully mastered self. We have described this threat in terms of the uncanny, given that the expression and materialization of anxiety involved in this movement renders the body both present and absent at once. As the body undergoes doubt, so an insistence on rituals and props enters the frame. Yet if we have so far described these props as inanimate objects elevated in their symbolic value, then we have also seen how other people function in a similar way for the subject of anxiety. What remains to be said is how other people are not only ambassadors of a homely presence, but how in turn, they can also assume a hostile role in the life of the phobic subject. In what follows, we will attend to this intersubjective dimension.