CHAPTER THREE
Everybody who passed by looked at him, stared at him, all those faces, pallid in the evening light. He tried to concentrate on some thought, but he could not. All he felt was an emptiness in his head. His whole body trembled and sweat ran down him. He staggered, and now I am falling too. People stop, more and more people, a frightening number of people.
(EDVARD MUNCH)
The bus journey
It is two o’clock on a grey Tuesday afternoon and you are standing at a bus stop on Boulevard Henri IV waiting for the 86 bus. The bus will take you over the Pont de Sully, through the hustle of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where you will get off before connecting to the 39 bus. Once on the 39, you will travel deep into the southern edge of Paris. Along the way, you will cross Sèvres-Babylone, which delineates one edge of Paris from another. There, you will twist gradually into the depths of Rue de Vaugirard, before reaching Rue Lecourbe in the abyss of the 15th arrondissement. Having arrived, you will then walk along the Boulevard Victor before coming to your destination: the now disbanded Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée.
Perched on a seat, you scan your immediate field of perception, giving special attention to places to retreat to, should the anxiety escalate. Although you are unable to visually see your home, you detect its proximity on Rue Saint Paul as a reassuring warmth in your body. When you stand up to gain a better view of incoming traffic, you experience a surge of dizziness pulse through your head. The dizziness is only abated when the bus approaches. You exhale slowly. When it arrives, you are reassured that the bus is comparatively free of passengers. Those passengers that have boarded the bus are either gazing out the window or otherwise buried in newspapers. You take a seat by the window, focus on the outside world and continue to breathe slowly.
The electric doors close and the bus recommences its journey. At the next stop – on the Quai de Béthune – a flux of passengers enters the bus. Despite your best effort to will them away, one of the passengers sits next to you. He is a middle-aged man carrying a suitcase. He takes his seat and begins reading a newspaper. Experiencing the person as trapping you in the seat, you immediately tense your fist and feel a thrust of hostility directed towards the passenger. A transformation is beginning to take place in your experience of the world. Every heterogeneous marker that you pass – a square, a monument or a notable building – becomes further evidence of your distance from home. Indeed, you measure space less in geometrical terms, and more in respect of how anxious your body has become.
FIGURE 3.1 Boulevard Henri IV, Paris.
When the bus passes over the Pont de Sully, you feel the ground beneath you swell with vertiginous force. As though you are floating in mid-air, you grip the man next to you tightly with the aim of rooting yourself in place. But before you have the chance to murmur an apology, your body has begun another series of involuntary reactions and spasms. You grasp the collar of your shirt so tight that three of the buttons proceed to pop off in a comical fashion, landing somewhere on the floor of the bus. As the vehicle turns a sharp corner, you automatically fix your hand on the window, as you feel your inner organs judder violently with every turn in the bus’s course.
Beyond the bridge, the bus is now in dense crowds and traffic-infested roads along the Rue des Écoles. It stops in the midst of congestion. The large windows open upon a stream of people. At times, you cannot even be sure that these beings are indeed human, such is the intense aura of unfamiliarity permeating the enclosure of the bus. The trembling you experienced when crossing the bridge is now accompanied by intense pangs of hunger and thirst. Sensing that you might imminently slip into unconsciousness, you wade through your bag in a frenzied state looking for a bottle of water. The respite afforded by the water is only momentary. As the bus surfaces from the traffic, it journeys through a series of alleyways near the Rue de l’École de Médecine. The seemingly high walls, enclosed darkness and lack of view gives you the impression of being swallowed at sea by mounting waves and thunderous clouds. All that prevents you from succumbing to a primal urge to flee is the thought of being abandoned in an unfamiliar part of the city. That you are able to maintain the course is only because you are now clutching your phone, braced to establish contact with the world of familiarity.
With your phone to your ear, you mutter words through trembling teeth, ‘On the bus … can’t breathe … feel like I’m going to die …’. The voice on the other end of the call is familiar and calming. As the person begins to talk you out of an anxious state, you become aware of the incongruity of the situation, as though the reassuring tone of their voice were mutually incompatible with the alienness of the bus journey. But the two realms are joined in the space of the bus. In being reminded of the need to breathe slowly, you absorb the calmness of the other person’s tone into your body, as though you had previously forgotten to breathe and were instead relying on an external cue to activate your breathing apparatus. Slowly you begin to resume a non-anxious mode of being. Only instead of returning to a pre-anxious body, the post-anxious body you have now fallen into is drained of energy, depleted of spirit and in the midst of an intense migraine. Looking around the interior of the bus, the wariness you previously felt gives way to a numb exhaustion. You sink into the chair in a state of deflated gloom.
The problem of other people
Until now, our attention has been drawn towards the individual experience of anxiety. However, whether it be in the rapport one has with the home or with the body, this experience is mediated at all times with our relation with others. In this chapter, we will explore the multidimensional way other people contribute to the experience of anxiety. Indeed, the question of how the other constitutes our sense of self is not a novel one. While it is true that the ‘question of the other’ has a rich history in the phenomenological tradition, gaining a clear sense of the relationship between the experience of the world and the experience of others remains a complex issue despite this heritage.
In what follows, we will see two things. First, intersubjectivity is essentially an issue of intercorporeality. This claim can be taken in the context of the ‘problem of other minds’. Instead of accessing knowledge of other minds through analogical reasoning or abstract theorizations, our relations with others is already established in the primacy of the prepersonal body, a point we shall see through Merleau-Ponty. This primacy is as much an active force in infancy as it is in adulthood. What this means is that despite the idiosyncrasies and neuroses of adult life, evading or withdrawing from the other remains structurally impossible so long as we remain bodily subjects.
Second, the necessary relation with others defines our thematic and affective experience of the world. Far from a formal connection with others, the corporeal basis of intersubjectivity means that our lived experience of the world is mediated via our bodily relations with others. The implication of this is that our bodily experience of the world cannot be considered apart from our relations with others. Rather, the thematic and affective experience of the world coincides with the structure of intercorporeality. In this way, intercorporeality reveals the body as having being dynamically receptive to social interactions with others.
To get a sense of the thick complexity at the heart of our intersubjective relations, let us return to our case study. How can we begin to make sense of this experience of being on a bus? Thematically, the following observations can be made. First, the subjective orientation during the journey hinges at all times on the reference of a fixed point: home. As we have seen (and will continue to see), the idea of ‘home’ is inherently ambiguous, ranging from a particular building or room, to a general neighbourhood that assumes the appearance of being familiar. In each case, as the anxious subject becomes distant from this fixed point in space – home – so his anxiety escalates. This relation between anxiety and the home colours the subsequent experience of self and other. What follows is a series of intersubjective moments, each of which is determined by the increased distance of home.
The first intersubjective moment is manifest as the experience of being trapped by the other. To be trapped in this way is not only a spatial prohibition, but also a threat to the tightly wound space the agoraphobe has cultivated in the bus. As a threat, the other assumes the appearance of being a danger to general well-being, and thus something the agoraphobic body recoils at. The second intersubjective moment almost immediately reverses this hostile space when the forearm of the other person is gripped in a heightened flurry of anxiety. This transition between hostility and vulnerability is played out in the body shifting from a withdrawn state to a dependent state. The third movement in this arc of intersubjective exchanges focuses on the anonymity of the crowds. If the first two movements give a precise definition to the other, then here we are confronted with a resistance to ascribing any form of affective character. Together with an adjoining sense of unfamiliarity, what remains is a total alienation from the visual materialization of other people’s bodies. The final moment in this narrative involves the trusted other. Central to this stage is the fact that the precarious calm opened up in the presence of the trusted other is not limited to the experience of bodily sensations, as though those sensations were autonomous entities interfering with the world. Rather, the presence of the other restores the world to a place that assumes some semblance of being ‘homely’.
‘One single intercorporeality’
From hostility to intimacy, the role others play in the lifeworld of the agoraphobe is complex and ambiguous. This ambiguity is not limited to instances of pathological embodiment, but instead is incorporated into our everyday experience of the world. For Merleau-Ponty, far from an additional component of lived experience, the coexistence of the other person is implicated from the outset. Ordinarily, so he argues in ‘The Child’s Relations with Others’, we begin our lives as children who are able to recognize the gestures of others in a prereflective way (Merleau-Ponty 1964a). As he goes on to say, when a baby is born, the baby will smile if smiled at by another. Or the baby will open its mouth if another person pretends to bite it. In such a case, the baby ‘perceives his intentions in his body, perceives my body with his own, and thereby perceives my intentions in his body’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 368). Likewise, when hearing the cries of another baby, another baby will also cry. This ‘phenomenon of the contagion’, as M. C. Dillon puts it, testifies to the synchronicity between different babies, with each baby sharing in the same discomfort (Dillon 1997, 121). Lacking the advantage of perspective, the crying babies attest to a ‘pre-communication, in which there is not one individual over against another but rather an anonymous collectivity, an undifferentiated group life’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964a, 119). Thus, whereas traditional accounts of subjectivity tend to begin with the solipsistic subject entrenched in what Husserl would term a ‘sphere of ownness’, Merleau-Ponty begins from the view of the infant’s consciousness as lacking the distinction of different perspectives (Husserl 1977). It is not, then, a problem of establishing the existence of other minds, but instead of learning to ‘distinguish his experience of himself from his experience of others’ (Dillon 1997, 121). All of this takes place on a prereflective way. The baby does not orchestrate these gestures, but experiences the body of the other baby as being incorporated into his own self, as Merleau-Ponty says: ‘What is true of his own body, for the child, is also true of the other’s body. The child himself feels that he is in the other’s body’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964a, 134).
As we grow older, this lack of independence is replaced with a self-conscious distance between ourselves and others. The body becomes an object, at once separating and distinguishing self and other. Yet despite the independence that maturity confers upon us, our bodies remain prepersonally bound with other bodies. This prereflective bodily reciprocity between ourselves and others, originally experienced in childhood, retains a presence in our ability to recognize ourselves in others. Merleau-Ponty again: ‘It is the simple fact that I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine. It is a manifestation of what we have called, in other terms, the system “me-and-other”’ (154). Because of this dialogical structure, it becomes possible to ‘place’ ourselves in the perspective of the other person’s bodily experience. When we witness someone in shock, then we do so not as detached observers, but as subjects who share in that shock. We feel the other person’s tremor through our own bodies, as though their experiences were reverberating through us. This we are able to do because the body has a potentiality that enables us to project ourselves beyond the limits of our flesh.
In moving away from the objective account of others, Merleau-Ponty is able to put forward an account of others that calls upon ‘the opacity of an originary past’ (408). What this means is if I reflect upon my own experience of the world, and there discover a ‘primordial setting in relation to the world’, then what is to prevent me from regarding other bodies as sharing in this primal relation? As he puts it simply, ‘why should other bodies that I perceive not be equally inhabited by consciousness?’ (367). Merleau-Ponty’s question presents a challenge to the positivistic account of others, which takes things of the world to either exist as mental or physical. For Merleau-Ponty, the body assumes ‘a third genus of being’, problematizing this division (367).
What Merleau-Ponty has in mind when he is talking about other bodies is not simply the phenomenal appearance of the body as mine. What enables me to recognize the existence of another person through their body is not the idiosyncratic characteristics of a particular body, or otherwise, a style of bodily language. In fact, ‘another person is never fully a personal being’, given that what structures bodily existence is an anonymous, prepersonal being, which we have been tracing in the previous chapter (368). As he writes, ‘Insofar as I have sensory functions – a visual, auditory, and tactile field – I already communicate with others, themselves taken as psycho-physiological subjects’ (369). Because world and body belong together, other bodies, and not only my own, also belong to the world. Here, the reference to ‘my’ body is not me the personal subject, but instead the anonymous and prepersonal subject that inheres in all bodies. Merleau-Ponty writes:
Henceforth, just as the parts of my body together form a system, the other’s body and my own are a single whole, two sides of a single phenomenon, and the anonymous existence, of which my body is continuously the trace, henceforth inhabits these two bodies simultaneously. (370)
This is a key passage. In it, Merleau-Ponty deprives the egocentric subject of an ontological centrality, replacing it with it an anonymity that belongs to all bodies. In turn, this privileging of the prepersonal body means that self and other partake of the same world, cohere in the same space and reveal the possibility of a shared understanding of bodily experience. That I already have a human body necessarily puts me in contact with other things of this world that also have human bodies. As bodily subjects we belong to the same ontological and thus corporeal order. To this end, the experience and behaviour of the other person can, in potential, also be my own experience and behaviour, given that our bodies dovetail into the same plane of existence. The ‘miraculous prolongation’ of the body cements my subjectivity with that of the other, cojoining each of us in a ‘single fabric’ of being (370). What we see in Merleau-Ponty is that intersubjectivity is really an issue of intercorporeality. That I am in a world of others is thanks not simply to the superimposition of an abstract idea, which would give agency to other people. Rather, ‘he and I’, so he writes in the essay ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow’, ‘are like organs of one single intercorporeality’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 168). This union of flesh places each of us in an ‘interworld’, whereupon having a body means necessarily being open to the experiences of others (Merleau-Ponty 2012). It means, moreover, sharing in the world of the other, a world that is taken up in the materiality of the lived environment.
The alignment between intersubjectivity and intercorporeality points towards a third union; that of interspatiality. If our experience of the world is mediated by the presence (and equally absence) of others, then such a mediation is not limited to the realm of the lived body. Instead, the relation we have to others extends to the materiality of the world itself. But consider at the outset how our experience of the world is fundamentally affected when we are distant from those we love and our dear to us, such as when loved ones die or are far from us. Those who mourn for the loss of loved ones do not carry that pain within their own bodies alone. Rather, the grief breaches the walls of the body, and reaches into the world itself. In the absence of those loved ones, the world and others become distant, and thus impregnated with a level of unfamiliarity that parallels our own estrangement from the world.
Merleau-Ponty has shown us that relations with others are primordially bodily in structure and involve a level of prepersonal existence that is resistant to the contingences of personal life. In a word, we are always already in touch with others long before others are visually in our frame of perception. The body’s intentional relation with others is not only structural but thematic, too. In the complexity of their look, movement and language, people’s bodies affect us. People’s bodies affect us not only in terms of being able to physically interact with us, but also in the sense of bearing influence upon the experience of our own bodies. This we can already see in an especially visceral way in our example of being an agoraphobic subject on a bus. There, the very presence of another’s body instigates a transformation not only in the agoraphobe’s experience of their own bodily sensations, but also of the spatiality the agoraphobe shares with others. How can we understand this double transformation of space and sensation? Let us return to the specificity of the agoraphobe’s body.
In common with all anxiety disorders, the body of the agoraphobe is conditioned by a highly sensitized mode of being. That the body of the agoraphobe is receptive to such intense sensations means that their body is already attuned to the world through the primacy of the senses. As we have seen in the preceding chapters, the sense we have of the agoraphobe’s experience is a constant vigilance over any unfamiliar or undesirable sensations, as though those sensations could be arbitrarily activated from any source. In order to domesticate these sensations, the agoraphobe strives to retain absolute control over his body, and thus of his surroundings. Through a highly regulated and ritualized life, the agoraphobe’s self-control presents itself as an attempt to insulate his body from the contingences of the world.
The emphasis on the phobic reaction coming from any source (and, just as importantly, at any time) positions the locus of control out of the agoraphobe’s body and into the body of other things. While those other things might include any environmental factor such as a shift in temperature, a particular configuration of space or a certain type of lighting, where the issue of control is concerned, the body that concerns the agoraphobe the most is the body of the other person. Unlike the lighting and temperature – both factors that can influence our bodily sensations – establishing control over the thoughts and perceptions of another person’s body is not possible. Precisely for this reason is the alterity of the other’s look the focal point of anxiety – to phrase it in Levinasian terms, the look of the other resists all comprehension, and thus, in the agoraphobe’s interpretation, presents itself as a threat to identity (Levinas 1969). Here, we must confront a critical question: why should the look of the other cause the agoraphobe to lose partial control of their bodily sensations, and in turn feel their sense of self fragment? What exactly endangers the security of the agoraphobe in the face of the other? To answer this question, we must tackle the issue of the body as objectified by the look of the other.
Agoraphobia and the look
Let us return to the bus journey. Let us recall that when the bus becomes populated with passengers, a transformation takes place in the overly sensitized body. The agoraphobic person’s body tenses up before moving into an anxious state when he feels entrapped by another person. More than an issue of just being unable to escape, the presence of the other person’s body amplifies the agoraphobic person’s anxiety through reinforcing the reality of their anxiety. The other person is not a mass of materiality, and that alone. Their body is an active field of force that draws other bodies into its sphere of being. If a suitcase were placed where the fellow passenger was sitting, then instead of feeling trapped, the agoraphobe would feel both enclosed and protected by the barrier established. Likewise, on the metro, the agoraphobe feels insulated by a series of glass screens, rather than entombed. Where a human body is concerned, protection is replaced with penetration. Without even directing the visual gaze towards the agoraphobe, the other person’s body penetrates the already porous boundary of the agoraphobic person’s flesh. The presence of the other’s look attests to the reality of the agoraphobe’s sensations, and thus heightens those sensations.
FIGURE 3.2 Saint Germain des Près, Paris.
If there was any doubt that the agoraphobic person was anxious, then in the look of the other person, all doubt has been erased: the other person confers a distinct material reality upon the agoraphobe’s anxiety. It is for this reason that hostility is the natural response to the other passenger. In the prereflective interpretation of the agoraphobe, the arrival of the other is causally linked to the development of anxious sensations and is thus at least partly assigned responsibility for these sensations. In a word, for the agoraphobe, the arrival of the passenger is experienced as something external that triggers anxiety, as though anxiety was floating freely in the air, even though the ‘trigger’ belongs neither to the self nor the other, but the world between the two. Given this all-encompassing totality, the ‘look’ of the other does not mean that intersubjectivity is reducible to the visual gaze. The other is other for me, not simply through the meeting of flesh on flesh, but instead through the dynamism of his or her behaviour. The other does not depart from the world of things and become other through facing me as an autonomous entity. He encircles and surrounds me, precisely because we are both joined in our intercorporeality. To this end, at no point can we withdraw or resist the other’s being. We may experience it as strange or alarming, but it is through that response that our bond with the other is reinforced. At all times, we are in a relationship of being-with-the-other, even if the other is physically absent. Consider, as Merleau-Ponty does, how the materiality of the world is constituted by the trace of the other. In a cultural and historical sense, things sculpt themselves to the existence of other people, which are then rediscovered in their anonymity later on, as Merleau-Ponty has it:
In the cultural object, I experience the near presence of others under a veil of anonymity. One uses the pipe for smoking, the spoon for eating, or the bell for summoning, and the perception of a cultural world could be verified through the perception of a human act and of another man. (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 363)
Merleau-Ponty reminds us that the very materiality of the world is indented with the anonymous residue of others. Long before there are other people in the visual horizon, their look is felt in the instruments and objects created and defined by human engagement. At the same time, the things that populate the world are imbued with a silent anonymity, deprived of their personal presence, as he puts it: ‘An Objective Sprit inhabits these vestiges and these landscapes’ (363). Such a discovery of the other is re-enacted in our intersubjective relations, whereupon, as bodily subjects, we necessarily partake of an intercorporeal realm. That the intercorporeal realm is anonymous means that it occupies a structural rather than thematic role. Indeed, in distinction to Sartre, who, as we will see, portrays intersubjectivity as being marked by alienation and violence, Merleau-Ponty leaves us somewhat in the dark about the thematic content of the intercorporeal realm, indicating broadly that his is a philosophy of harmony and peace. The evidence for this can be sourced from his use of language. Thus, he will write of a ‘common ground’ between self and other, with each ‘inter-woven into a single fabric’, resulting in no less than a ‘being-shared-by-two [whereupon] we are collaborators for each other in a perfect reciprocity’ (370). Only as adults is the ‘perception of other people and the intersubjective world problematical’ (370). In contradistinction to the adult, the child ‘is unaware of himself, and for that matter, of others as private subjectivities’ (371). This retention of an ‘unsophisticated thinking’ means that intersubjectivity entails a commonality and tacit reciprocity.
From a Merleau-Pontean view, how can we account for the agoraphobic experience of the other, given that what we seem to be faced with in this world view is a complete rupture of intercorporeality? Phrased another way, how can we retain Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on bodily intersubjectivity as occupying a transcendental relation to appearances while account for the lived experience of estrangement from that relation to appearances? Each of these questions points to the issue of whether or not Merleau-Ponty’s account of intersubjectivity allows for pathological instances of embodiment. The danger here is of falling into a dialectical account of intersubjectivity, in which the other person enters my horizon with an already determined strategy to oust or deny me. In fact, it is precisely because Merleau-Ponty grounds his account of intersubjectivity in the primacy of intercorporeality that the experience of anxiety and alienation can be accounted for.
According to Merleau-Ponty, when I am confronted with a stranger’s look, the objectification I experience is ‘unbearable only because it takes the place of possible communication’ (378). Communication is the transcendental condition of intersubjective relations, and to this end, is ontologically prior to alienation. In distinction to the Heideggerian and Sartrean model of subjectivity, Merleau-Ponty does not begin with being thrown into the world. That I have a ‘natural body and a natural world’ means, for Merleau-Ponty, that a series of ‘patterns of behaviour with which my own interweave’ is mapped out in advance (374). On this point, it is worth remembering that for Merleau-Ponty, the fact that ‘I have sensory functions, a visual, auditory and tactile field’ puts me in contact with others ‘taken as psycho-physical subjects’ (411). On this psycho-physical level, we necessarily enter into a relation with others. And yet, such a relation is strictly prepersonal and anonymous. At no point, does the relation foreground the personal ‘I’. In this respect, for Merleau-Ponty, the impersonal is at the ‘centre of subjectivity’ (414). Thus, we see a double displacement of agency: at once intracorporeal and intercorporeal.
Our previous chapter considered the bodily experience of anxiety, and demonstrated how the structure of the anxious body is organized around the shifting terrain between personal and impersonal materiality. The recession of personal boundaries brings about an instability in the image of the self as in possession of itself, and thus deprives it of its sovereignty. In the present chapter, we are witnessing this disturbance in agency from the perspective of intercorporeality. In implicating me in the field of other people – irrespective of ‘my’ own standing on the issue – the body betrays any attempt at being autonomous from other people. In what remains of the chapter, we wish to provide a phenomenological account of the destabilization of agency that occurs in the (anonymous) face of the other.
The body’s boundaries
The case of agoraphobia presents us with a special instance of intersubjectivity. If the ‘psycho-physical’ body described by Merleau-Ponty necessarily puts us in a relation with others, then for the agoraphobe this level of bodily subjectivity is problematic insofar as the natural body is beyond personal intervention. At all times, the body expresses a receptivity to other bodies. The body is porously interwoven with the world, necessarily conjoined with other bodies, each of which seeps into the intercorporeal space of the personal subject. Quite apart from the idiosyncrasies of the subject’s psychological characteristics, being a subject means being exposed to and in touch with the bodies of others. Here, we can formulate an overarching thesis: With the agoraphobic experience of anxiety, the relation between the anonymous structure of intersubjectivity and the irreducibly personal experience of intersubjectivity effectively fractures. Let us consider the different levels of this claim.
To begin, let us turn to the body’s porousness. For the agoraphobe, the porousness of the body is a problem for at least two reasons. First, the very fact that the body’s boundaries resist closure positions corporeality outside of the agoraphobe’s control. Confronted with anxiety, it is as though the body has betrayed him by allowing itself to be affected by the encroachment of the other’s body. As this movement unfolds, the agoraphobe loses control of the boundaries of his intercorporeal space and thus experiences the other as a threat to ontological security. Second, because his relation to the body is one of control (and dominance), in the experience of anxiety and panic, the agoraphobe’s body ceases to be identifiable with the personal subject and instead assumes an objectified quality, which we have explored in the previous chapter. This is no longer a body that the agoraphobe can recognize as being ‘mine’, as the world view of the agoraphobe fails to negotiate with gradients of ambiguity (relying instead on regularity and ritual). The failure to incorporate ambiguity and alterity leads to a bifurcation of the body. Either the body is controllable and thus retains a sense of ownership, or the body is beyond control and accordingly divested of a sense of ownership. When confronted with the latter option, the body of the agoraphobe presents itself as having an objectified relation not only to the surrounding world but also to the agoraphobic subject.
In both modes of bodily comportment, the structure of the natural body not only retains but also asserts its ontological primacy. The agoraphobe’s experience of being out-of-joint in the public sphere is predicated on the fact that the expression of communication has been ruptured precisely because its possibility remains intact, as Merleau-Ponty has it. Far from destroying or denying the other, the agoraphobe’s anxiety accents the lived relation to the other. That the agoraphobe undergoes a transformation in the presence of another body is evidence of a tightly wound relation to that body. The body retains a special and privileged significance. Only now, the significance has assumed a negative quality, in which the possibility of communication has become obtruded by a body maladjusted to the intersubjective realm.
Agoraphobia thus demonstrates the ambiguities and tensions in Merleau-Ponty’s account of intersubjectivity. In non-pathological embodiment, the anonymity of the body’s relations with others is that which enables us to communicate with other people, and is thus taken for granted. In pathological instances of bodily existence, where intersubjectivity is a threat rather than a source of reassurance of subjectivity, the body’s relations with others is a flashpoint for anxiety. This is especially clear in the case of the agoraphobe, where bodily existence is subject to a series of rituals and regulations, all of which strive to domesticate the body’s relation with the world of others. We see, then, that the agoraphobe’s ownership over his sensations is exasperated by the presence of others in close contact. Not only does the other person intensify the presence of anxiety, but he also strips the agoraphobe of their agency by reducing him to a thing – a material mass of raw nerves with no discernible subject to control them. All along, of course, the other person is unaware of the role he is playing in shaping the agoraphobe’s experience, and indeed, likely unaware of the agoraphobe. But for the agoraphobe, a complex and yet silent dialogue is occurring with the other person.
‘This constant uneasiness’
If the anxiety of the agoraphobe arises from a prepersonal orientation towards the other person’s body, then what happens if we begin again with another perspective, a perspective that positions us not in touch with the other but at odds with their presence? It is through Sartre that such a perspective can be sourced. As with Merleau-Ponty, Sartre begins by distinguishing the body as it is lived from the body as it is understood as an object. Understood as an object, the body can be broken down in such a way that it never reveals to me anything of my experience. The body in its interiority – the mass of organs that keeps me alive – is quite different from the body that enables me to have a meaningful relation with the body. And yet, from time to time, we see our own bodies projected on medical screens and presented to us in terms of quantifiable data. Still here, my body taken as a thing to be analysed medically is situated in the midst of other things, as Sartre writes: ‘I was apprehending a wholly constituted object as a this among other thises, and it was only be a reasoning process that I referred it back to being mine; it was much more my property than my being’ (Sartre 1998, 304). In this way, the body necessarily evades us. To apprehend the body as an object is to efface what is central to it: its experiential structure.
Let us see how this evasion is played out for Sartre in our relation with others. Under the category ‘body-for-others’, Sartre refers to the way the other’s body appears for me as an object, just as I myself appear for the other as an object. How does the other appear for me? Sartre suggests there is an extension of sorts of the other’s body into things of the world more broadly. Thus, in an empty room where Sartre waits ‘for the master of the house’, the surrounding furniture, desks, ornaments, and even the way the light shines through the window and illuminates objects in the room, all conspire together to form a sense of the other long before the body of the other is physically present. What this means is that the body of the other is always involved in a meaningful relationship with the world. The body is not an isolated unit of space nor is it a chunk of materiality atomized from other chunks. Rather, the body presents itself ‘in terms of a total situation which indicates it’ (345). Not only this, but the body that appears does so within its own referential totality. Thus, to perceive the body of the other is not to perceive a discernible set of limbs working independently from one another, but is instead to bear witness to a total subjectivity articulated in and through the body. As if to prove this point, Sartre draws our attention to the phenomena of experiencing ‘the horror we feel if we happen to see an arm which looks “as if it did not belong to any body”’ (346). The result is a ‘disintegration of the body’, given that we take it as pregiven that a body presents itself to us as whole, and it is only within this context that it can be understood.
This disintegration becomes central in Sartre’s account of intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity, for Sartre, is not simply a reciprocal encounter between two or more similarly structured subjects, each of whom stands in a neutral or indifferent relation to one another. Rather, what happens in this encounter with the other is that I become an object for something unknowable, insofar as I am taken primarily as an object of the other’s world, the result of which is a ‘concrete collapse of my world’ (352). This alienation of my body is stipulated on the sense of it being perceived in a world ‘outside of my subjectivity, in the midst of a world which is not mine’ (353). Already in this account of my body being taken as an object for the other, Sartre sees the relevance for phobias and anxiety, writing as follows:
This constant uneasiness, which is the apprehension of my body’s alienation as irremediable, can determine psychoses such as ereuthophobia (a pathological fear of blushing); these are nothing but the horrified metaphysical apprehension of the existence of my body for the Others. (353)
Here, we face a critical aspect concerning the relation between phobia and embodiment. First, the structure of phobia is interwoven with the structure of non-phobic existence. This is clear in Sartre’s sense of ereuthophobia as ‘nothing but’ a different kind of apprehension of my relation with others. This relation is, of course, beyond transcendence, but only now presented in a metaphysical guise as horrifying. Indeed, that Sartre refers to a ‘constant uneasiness’ strengthens this bond between phobic and non-phobic existence, such that there is a continuous arc between each pole. In each case, uneasiness and horror mark two aspects of intersubjectivity, which, if there all along, are nevertheless manifest in varying ways.
Here, Sartre draws our attention to the intercorporeal structure of phobia. To experience oneself as being phobic towards a particular thing or particular affect is to be phobic in the face of the other. This is not a contingent aspect of affective existence, but is instead a structural feature of bodily subjectivity, such that we cannot conceive of the body-for-us without also considering the body-for-the-other; indeed Sartre goes as far to say that ‘the body-for-the-Other is the body-for-us’ (353). In order to demonstrate this claim, let us return to the phenomenology of agoraphobia, and, specifically, its relation to the spatiality of the look.
The case of ‘Vincent’
Our resources for this analysis come from a short document titled ‘Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim’. The author of this testimony is named simply, ‘Vincent’, and we must assume the anonymity of the text bears witness to the refusal of the subject to be seen by the other person, a point that links both the writing of agoraphobia with the body of agoraphobia (Vincent 1919). We begin at the onset of Vincent’s illness. He reports that the condition was prefaced with a ‘coldness that produced a very unusual sort of sensation, or perhaps, a lack of sensation’ (296). This confrontation with frail health at an early stage leaves our subject with a melancholic disposition and a heightened sense of danger. Around this time, Vincent encounters a tragedy. At the age of eleven, a friend of his disappears, the presupposition being that he had drowned or kidnapped (296).
Some time later, the body of the friend is found on a riverbank. But instead of being drowned, as was thought, the boy’s throat had been cut, and then dragged to the river afterwards. Vincent is traumatized by the experience, and now suffers from an anxiety in certain spatial situations, not least the crest of hills where the symptoms of agoraphobia become acute. Thereafter, he avoids hill-tops (297). In turn, this formative experience with anxiety and death spreads itself beyond hills, and now finds expression in ‘wide fields … of crowds of people, and later of wide streets and parks’ and even ‘ugly architecture’ (297). Despite being amplified by certain places and situations, the dread remains implicitly. In a chair talking with a friend, he soon finds himself ‘gripping the arm of the chair with each hand. My toes curl in my shoes, and there is a sort of tenseness all over my muscles’ (298). For all this, the anxiety is never constant, but instead fluctuates in its intensity. Moreover, at times, the anxiety is alleviated by certain things, such as darkness or a snowstorm, ‘probably because one’s view is obstructed’ (298). For the same reasons, stormy days for him ‘stand out as bright spots in my life’ (298). As for walking, it is manageable but only if he is carrying something such as a suitcase. Without such a prop, Vincent finds himself ‘suffer[ing] agony’ in the very act of walking (298). The extent of this anxiety over walking is so great that when Vincent sees ‘a man hobbling past my house on crutches, a cripple for life … I actually envy him. At times I would gladly exchange places with the humblest day-laborer who walks un-afraid across the public square or saunters tranquilly over the viaduct on his way home after the day’s work’ (299).
What is striking about Vincent’s case study is precisely the lack of reference to the other. For all his clarity, the one thing Vincent fails to touch upon is the intersubjective dimension of his anxiety. This blind spot is perhaps not by chance. Indeed, perhaps this omission is even necessary insofar as it is consistent with his refusal to incorporate the other into his existence, be it textually or corporeally. Yet if we return to his confession with a view of seeking the presence of the other, either visibly or invisibly, then we find another layer of meaning embedded in the text, a layer that reveals in terms of what is not said. Far from absent, the look of the other is there from the outset. From his fear of being alone, to the persistence of his anxiety even when in company on top of the hill, to his body recoiling when being seated in the company of the other, and then onwards to the full blown fear of crowds he develops – in all this, the anxiety of Vincent takes as its point of departure the look of the other. To appreciate this, it is necessary to insert the presence of Sartre in the midst of Vincent’s confession. Let us, then, think alongside Sartre’s phenomenological exploration of the experience of the other.
Sartre with Vincent
Sartre is in a public park. From where he is sitting, he observes another man passing by some benches. As this happens, Sartre reflects on his experience of the man as both man and object. How is this dual perception possible? It is clear that the man is not simply an object, and that alone. If that were the case, then, as Sartre suggests, his presence in the world ‘would be that of a purely additive type’ (Sartre 1998, 254). In other words, if he were to disappear, then there would be no consequences with respect to his relation to other objects. Of course, this is not the case. When we are confronted with the experience of a person entering our visual horizon, our experience of space alters, such that this new thing – the other – becomes a centre, around which my subjectivity now revolves, without at any point augmenting the objective aspects of space, as Sartre has it: ‘ … the lawn remains two yards and twenty inches from him, but it is also as a lawn bound to him in a relation which at once both transcends distance and contains it’ (254). What happens in this movement is that the presence of the other redefines the relational aspect of space: space becomes the province of another presence, and because of this intervention, ‘there is now an orientation which flees from me’ (254).
FIGURE 3.3 Jardin de l’Hôtel de Sens, Paris.
The key point that Sartre makes in this initial observation is that this reorientation of space is not affectively neutral, but instead carries with it a certain ‘element of disintegration’ (255). As the other comes into view, I experience myself as an object for them, thus altering my own experience of myself as a subject and my world. The presence of the other is the presence of another kind of spatiality, a spatiality that obligates me to re-perceive all the objects within my immediate world, including myself. Sartre’s account of intersubjectivity thus takes as its point of departure a primordial experience of the world as a world precisely for me. It is my world insofar as it derives from, belongs to and orients itself around my gaze. That the other alienates me from this world is only possible because of the special status attached to the other’s look. For Sartre, this collision of self and other is not a localized interaction, but instead attests to a ‘decentralization of the world which undermines the centralization which I am simultaneously effecting’ (255). As the other imposes their look upon my own look, so the world shifts away from me, becoming, in Sartre’s characteristic formulation, a ‘kind of drain hole in the middle of its being’ (256).
For all his emphasis on the view of the other, Sartre’s account of the look does not reduce itself to a study of ‘the convergence of two ocular globes in my direction’, nor even to a straightforward account of intersubjectivity (257). If the look has a sensible or material expression to it, then this does not mean it requires an ocular gaze to instantiate it, less even an actual person. In an important move, and one that has a direct impact on our study of agoraphobia, Sartre extends the look beyond that boundaries of the body itself, writing how: ‘The look will be given just as well on occasion when there is a rustling of branches, or the sound of a footstep followed by silence, or the slight opening of a shutter, or a light movement of a curtain’ (257).
How is it that the material world can embody the look of the other, even if the other him- or herself is physically absent? When we are confronted with a lone house on top of a hill at dusk, the chill we might experience is not simply due to a certain set of contingent dimensions conspiring together to produce a ghoulish atmosphere. Rather, the impression of being looked at stems from a probability that embeds itself in the materiality of the house, a probability that cannot be reduced to the empirical situation in and of itself but instead attests to an invariant structure of intersubjectivity, whereby we must make a distinction between the look as something belonging to the eye and the eye that is represented in things other than itself, as Sartre has it: ‘the eye is not at first apprehended as a sensible organ of vision but as the support for the look’ (258). In other words, because the look is ontologically primary to the eye as an organ, it thus becomes possible to detach the look from the eye, establishing in theory a look without eyes. That the look is not reducible to the eyes means, therefore, the same eyes are organs of expression among other such organs, be it abandoned houses or dense forests. In this respect, the question of the other for Sartre is not defined simply as a relation between myself and another person. It is also a question of my relation to an alterity that can embed itself in things more broadly, thus assuming a pervasive and all-encompassing status, which is not only a presence in the world, but also an ‘omnipresence’ (353).
In all this, there are significant implications for our study. We see already that Sartre’s account of the look is marked by at least two central features. One, the look is not neutral, but instead inscribed with value. To perceive the other is to experience oneself being looked at by the other, be it the other as another person or the other as an ambiguous if not unknowable presence lurking in the world more broadly. Moreover, to be looked at is to experience oneself in a particular way: no longer a subject of perception, but instead a perceived object, and thereby to recognize that ‘I am vulnerable, that I have a body which can be hurt, that I occupy a place and that I can not in any case escape from the space in which I am without defense – in short, that I am seen’ (259). To be seen is to be seen from a perspective outside of myself, a perspective whose spatiality, perception, and values do not simply disorient me, but actually disintegrate my experience of being a subject. In this sense, to be seen is to necessarily experience myself as a stranger to myself, to which I have no control over, and, in the case of agoraphobia, respond to with anxiety.
Let us return to Vincent’s blind spot. Vincent is there, reflecting on his anxiety, calm and poised. On first glance, it looks as though he is more or less an autonomous subject, reflecting on his relation to his own anxiety, as if it were a thing of the world. Throughout, there is a tendency to reduce his anxiety to something to be understood solely in physical terms (to be cured at times by a ‘vigorous rubbing of my body with rough towels’, or, to provide an explanatory context for the condition in terms of something predestined: ‘I was born with an active, nervous temperament’ [Vincent 1919, 296]). As we have also seen, aside from this objectification of his anxiety, the complimentary tendency is to situate his disorder in a narrative. But such explanations, although valuable, provide only half the picture so long as we overlook the role others play in the structure of Vincent’s anxiety.
By situating the Sartrean framework in the context of our study of agoraphobia, we can see how certain idiosyncratic aspects in Vincent’s report gain a thematic clarity when considered from the perspective of the look and the accompanying desire to conceal the look. Let us consider two examples, each of which demonstrates in an especially vivid way the structure of the look:
Later, perhaps a year or so, I commenced having a dread of wide fields, especially when the fields consisted of pasture land and were level, with the grass cropped short like the grass on a well-kept lawn. (297)
I dread going out on water in a boat, especially if the surface is smooth; I much prefer to have the waves rolling high. (298)
From land to sea, we follow Vincent in his melancholy journey from a horizon of smooth space to a landscape marked by edges and rolling heights. Given his nervous temperament, why would he prefer being out at sea in stormy waves to smooth sailing? Why, for that matter, would a level and maintained field induce anxiety whereas a field of uncut grass would not? In each of these situations, we have to position ourselves in the place of Vincent. In this gesture of placing ourselves within a visual horizon, we see a certain commonality between the seascape and the field. Namely, both are spaces of exposure that present themselves as fundamentally homogeneous in their character. Without the presence of an object to break the homogeneity of the view – be it in the form of a lone tree or in the form of a tumultuous wave – space assumes the impression of being infinite, while the subject in the midst of that world becomes the centre of a look that cannot yet be placed other than in the form(lessness) of anxiety. Because of this lack of definite features, much less a place to conceal oneself in, there is no place to position oneself in relation to and thus in opposition to.
Lacking a place to be concealed in, the other is both everywhere and nowhere. Indeed, the absence of the other in Vincent’s text, and more specifically in these two spatial illustrations, is entirely consistent with the omnipresence of the other. In both the seascape and the open field, the anxiety at stake concerns the non-localizable look of the other. In the absence of a place to hide, the other is permeated through the world, and spatiality itself becomes the medium through which this permeation of otherness takes place. In and through space, the agoraphobe defines his relation to the other (as Vincent says disingenuously but nevertheless tellingly: ‘Ugly architecture greatly intensifies the fear’, as if ugliness were something that belonged to the building and not to his relation with the others who inhabit space [297]).
Here, it is not a question of homogeneous space as being the site of a multiplicity of looks, as if Vincent were contending with several different eyes gazing at him from nowhere. What is exposed is not the possibility of other human beings empirically lurking within the sea and the field, with each of those beings directing their attention to the solitude of our agoraphobe. Vincent’s anxiety on the calm seas and in the open field concerns an inability to integrate alterity and ambiguity into his bodily subjectivity. In both examples, the phenomenon of homogeneous space expresses an all-consuming threat to the stability of the agoraphobe. The other is everywhere, embedded not only in regions of the world that render the agoraphobe ill-at-home in the world, embedded even less in the visual gaze of another person, but now constitutive of the totality of the world itself. Without darkness and without division – without a place to hide behind and within – the spatiality of the world becomes expressive of the otherness of the other.
More than an incidental gesture, this theme of concealment, darkness and shadows runs throughout the confession, with each illustration attesting to Vincent’s desire to constrict the look of the other. We are told, for example, how he feels better ‘in the evening … partly because the darkness seems to have a quieting effect on me’ (298). As we have also seen, for him, snowstorms and storms produce a paradoxically calming effect precisely because ‘one’s view is obstructed’ (298). In fact, despite his professed love of storms and waves, his ideal place is ‘a wood, where there is much variety in the trees and plenty of underbrush, with here and there low hills and little valleys, and especially along a winding brook’ (298). These rich examples serve as a compressed overview of the agoraphobe’s relationship to spatiality. The view obstructed is not simply that of empty space, nor is it an anxiety directed towards the objective properties of space itself, as if those properties could be detached from the other that inhabits space. Rather, the look of the other is always already embedded in the world, but nevertheless revealing itself in altering ways depending on the particular way in which spatiality appears for the subject. This is why the expressive role of space is never an incidental aspect of our relation to the other, be it for the agoraphobe or the non-agoraphobe. In each case, there is a specificity in our relation to space that reveals the place and the absence of the other.
Thus, if there were waves for Vincent to hide in or grass to position himself in relation to, the other would find their place. Whether or not the other would still inspire a sense of anxiety is less important than the fact that the other has a place in the first instance. Once in place, Vincent is able to establish a relationship with the world, such that he is able to ‘conceal … the disease … most cunningly’ (299). This insistence on concealing his anxiety, as if it were an accident in an otherwise prosperous existence, is not only manifest during anxiety itself, but also possesses him throughout his life, such that by the end of his confession, Vincent is seeking a way to justify himself according to contingent social values: ‘My credit is good at the banks. But I have deliberately told lies to avoid embarrassing situations and have even changed my plans to have my lies “come true” … I have never been refused a policy by any life insurance company’ (299). This final attempt at normalizing his existence in accordance with an imagined set of social values marks the natural extension of Vincent’s concealment of the other person as other by filling the gap of the unknowability of the look with the knowability of a defined set of values. As we have seen in this chapter, this veiling of the other serves to contain and constrict the anxiety accompanying the ‘decentralization of the world’ central to both phobic and non-phobic subjects alike (Sartre 1998, 255).