CHAPTER FIVE
We find these feelings so close to the ultimate vertigo unbearable.
(BATAILLE, EROTISM: DEATH AND SENSUALITY)
The plane
An artificial walkway elevated above the ground. On it, you will proceed in order to board a flight from Paris to Oslo. Those in front of you cramp together, each taking their turn to pass from the walkway to the interior of the plane. Your turn has come. As you approach the door to the plane, you look through the grilled floor of the walkway towards the concrete below. A small opening in between the walkway and the side of the plane will allow you to see the wing and the engine, the two main organs that will render this phenomenon possible. As the view passes, you enter the plane, passing through the door, which before long will be sealed shut 35,000 feet above the surface of your home planet. You exchange glances with the flight attendant, ensuring she is made aware of your anxiety by dint of the look in your eyes. Indeed, you feel it necessary to forewarn not only the staff aboard this flying vessel of your hazardous condition, but also the passengers, some of whom will have the misfortune to be seated next to you.
Able to walk, you take a seat in anticipation of the flight. This triumph of exploration is matched only by the triumph of your body, able to adapt itself to a foreign terrain that does not belong to the ground of stability. And you remain a master of your domain; remain, that is, master of your home. You look through the window of the plane; scan the world around you from this advantageous perspective. A world lit by the city lights emitting a series of sparks in the distance. Yet as the doors to the plane seal shut, the mood alters and you begin your own series of rituals. You are inside a pressurized environment, both atmospherically and affectively. The place requires that you adjust your own sensual and perceptual relationship to the world. Now, light and sound have been torn from your control. In response, you distance yourself from your surroundings by withdrawing into dark glasses, hats, scarves and headphones, as though these implements will curtail the spread of your anxiety. The less of you that is in the world of flight, the more of you that remains tied up with the Earth.
The plane is released from the departure gate and begins its slow march towards the runway. A series of craggy indentations is traversed in the taxing area between the airport and the runway. The plane makes a succession of erratic bumps on the surface of the Earth before situating itself in a queue of other planes waiting to leave. It is inevitable that the plane you are seated in will, in a few brief but painful minutes, be in the sky. There is nothing you can do to prevent this from happening. To leave one city and to arrive at another means subjecting yourself to the anxiety of flight.
FIGURE 5.1 Princess Juliana International Airport, Saint-Martin.
From nowhere, the plane surges forwards. The force pushes you back into your seat, causing you to seize the armrests around you. Then the plane begins to tilt upwards, the nose of the machine now pointing towards the skyline. The Earth that your body once belonged to is left behind, and beneath you an entire abyss opens up. When the plane banks sharply to the right, the organs of your body undergo a series of violent pulsations; each vital organ is felt to be shifting back and forth, with no centre to align them. Peering out from your dark glasses and hat, you see that a series of dense clouds is pressing down upon the plane’s body. Upon contact with the clouds, the plane responds by shifting its mass across space, striking itself against the new terrain with an unsteady force. The great machine jitters up and down, as if being torn by the clouds. At any point, you expect the structure to dissolve.
When the plane surfaces beyond the clouds, you are surprised the floating ark has survived the struggle from ground to sky. But there is no respite. Throughout the flight, you will depend upon two principal props. The first device is a half-filled water bottle that you will position on the table in front of you. Lacking trust in your perception of movement, you rely on the water bottle in order to objectively ‘measure’ the stability of the plane. Very frequently, you will stare at the bottle, as though your identity and security were contingent upon this makeshift spirit level. The surface of the water moves gently up and down inside the plastic bottle, a motion that betrays the movement you experience from within. Your relationship to the water bottle is complimented by your attention to the screen affixed to the back of the chair in front of you, which tracks the course of your flight in real time. You study the curve of this movement carefully, monitoring the specifics of the plane’s altitude, wind speed and estimated time of arrival meticulously. The visual sight of the virtual plane represented on the small screen in front of you presents you with a reality preferable to your own. With these props, your sense of time can be dissected. The first zone of time is defined when the seatbelt sign is turned off. Until then, you experience the movement of ascent as a time of tremendous uncertainty, a region in which anything is possible. You know in advance that you will have to wait about ten minutes for the plane to level out, but your ability to measure time is offset by the disorientation of your body. With the drag of time, you rely solely on the objective presentation of movement, both spatial and temporal.
Nothing deprives you more of the illusion of self-control than the encounter with turbulence. The body is broken down, gripped by something outside of itself, an uncontrollable and elemental force, which is trapped in the plane. You are buckled up, hemmed in, entrapped, but your body is sprawled out. Parts of it fall in one corner of the plane; other parts group together in another sphere of the space. To speak of panic is to speak of a lack of interiority. For there is no place to conceal oneself, no room to withdraw into and no wisdom to be gained in the failure of your rituals. Your reconstitution of your fragmented body to the unified objects around you – be it half-empty bottles of water or virtual representations of the plane’s movements on the screens in front of you – fills the gap your body can no longer endure. In the absence of your living body, those things become surrogates for a body that has otherwise been rendered a crystalline reflection of the strange formlessness that is both your own and not your own simultaneously.
When the plane jilts from side-to-side, your body loses all sense of self-possession, becoming an assemblage of fraying limbs, each of which is seized with a paroxysm of anxiety. You interpret not only the violent jolting of the plane as a signal of distress, but also the milder bumps that appear from nowhere. Indeed, so attuned are you to the plane’s turbulence, that you feel you are able to pre-empt the arrival of rough air, as if you were possessed with an awareness beyond reason and experience. Knowing all of this is the work of illusion does nothing to deter your conviction that with turbulence comes grave if not mortal danger. This dissolution of self-mastery is amplified in the face of other people, for whom none seem concerned with the instability of the plane. Precisely because of their apparent lack of concern, you experience their presence not only as a violation of your space, but also as a means of amplifying your own anxiety. Against the background of other people’s calm, your anxiety appears all the more visible, and thus renewed before the face of other people.
Eventually, the plane journeys beyond the ocean, rediscovering the land from whence it came, and thus begins its descent. As soon as the landscape regains a human scale, your anxiety lessens and your body returns to you. The landscape beneath you is foreign and unknown – indeed, nothing more than a grey, anonymous mass of space – but its very presence as a visible boundary line between yourself and the sky immediately assuages your anxiety. In sight of land, you care nothing for turbulence, so long as the Earth beneath you is situated in a relational context to your body. The plane lands and you disembark. Before you exit the gate, you return your gaze back to the shell of the plane, towards the wings that caught your attention when you first boarded. Despite your episode on the plane, it is fundamentally impossible to accept that the structure you are now looking at with your own eyes was moments before situated in the sky with you inside of it. Impossible to accept that what took place was anything less than a dream. Fundamentally impossible, moreover, to accept that the person on the plane in the grip of anxiety was in fact you.
A phenomenology of vertigo
Beyond being the pinnacle of anxiety, the experience of air flight presents us with a visceral recapitulation of the main features of our study. On the one hand, we have a broad set of themes that structure the experience of anxiety, principally: body, others, home. On the other hand, we have a set of sub-themes that constitute these broader categories: impersonality, anonymity, alienation, homesickness and so forth. Each of these features appears and reappears through the experience of anxiety, as we understand it, and assumes a pivotal place in the experience of air flight. What characterizes the anxious dimension of flight is the total effacement of boundaries, save for those artificial edges constructed through rituals and props. Beyond these devices, the interior surface of the plane unfolds in its relentless consistency as a place fundamentally lacking an outside, except for that of the infinite skies, which offers no room to gain a perspective on things. With no outside, the pressurized spatiality of the plane draws everything inwards, towards the world of the cabin in its borderless and edgeless materiality. In response, the human body has to forge its own boundaries, synthetically fabricating the image of a world that is consistent with the Earth below. The mantra of ritual serves to enact – if not conjure – a phantom world that has no place in the cabin. But while these practices operate efficiently on terra firma, in the world above, those rituals fail to domesticate the undeceivable nature of anxiety. In all this, anxiety cannot be contained. The failure to contain anxiety dismantles the image rendered of the body as being in possession of itself, and this breakage carries with it radical alienation from both one’s own body and the others who perceive that body. Other people are presented as beyond comprehension, inhabiting a world somehow estranged from anxiety. All that curtails the infinite terror of anxiety is the re-connection with the visibility of the Earth. Upon first sight, the Earth’s very presence as a zone of solid matter instantly assumes the symbolic quality of being homely, irrespective of the factual status of the ground itself, may it be the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of Colorado or the rolling heights of the English countryside.
Together, these features – body, others, home – characterize central themes amplified in phobic experience, but present throughout in non-phobic experience. Seen in this broad and relational context, the phobic object does not gain its quality from its objective standing in the world. Rather, a bridge, plane or a subway serves as expressive mediums for a wider set of themes, not least the effacement of identity encountered in the face of these objects. For this reason, we are able to learn from these places, as they give form to the multidimensional nature of anxiety. Indeed, such is the methodological approach we have assumed in the course of our study. Where air flight is concerned, a phenomenological approach remains legitimate. To approach the experience in this way would mean to consider what is peculiar to a vertiginous world.
Already the issue of vertigo has appeared in the birth of agoraphobia itself. Originally thought of as a ‘common feeling of dizziness’, agoraphobia’s embryonic transition to ‘platzschwindels’ (place vertigo) is instructive (Knapp 1988, 74–75). As Danielle Quinodoz tells us in her eloquent study of vertigo, ‘[t]he word vertigo is derived from the Latin vertere, to turn; it reflects the mistaken impression that our surroundings revolve round us, but also the opposite false impression, that it is we ourselves who, having lost our balance, keep spinning involuntarily’ (Quinodoz 1997, 2). With vertigo, we have at least two illusions: the first is that the subject retains his or her place in the world, and around this fixed site, the world revolves. The Copernican reversal of this view – the second illusion – is that it is we who, having lost our egocentric stability, are the ones floating around in an otherwise stable world.
Anxiety’s presence on the stage of vertigo is evident by dint of its sheer force, a point that Freud himself noted: ‘In its mildest form [vertigo] is best described as “giddiness”; in its severer manifestations, as “attacks of vertigo” (with or without anxiety), it must be classed among the gravest symptoms of the neurosis’ (Freud 2001a, 95). As a grave symptom, vertigo announces itself as the very limit of anxiety, in which the subject feels himself to be pulled from beneath, sinking into a void, where ‘he continues to feel that he exists and that he is simply stumbling about in space or in the void’ (Quinodoz 1997, 21). This psychic impasse marks the very point at which the subject survives the onset of anxiety, but is held in a suspended impasse, no longer able to reform the image of unity necessary to keep anxiety at bay. In phenomenology, too, we find these sentiments affirmed. Thus, with Merleau-Ponty, we have seen how the ‘living experience of vertigo and nausea [is] the consciousness of, and the horror caused by, our contingency’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 265). Likewise in Sartre, vertigo is also understood as an anxiety tied up with radical contingency, such that vertigo deprives me of the borders and boundaries that normally delineate and reinforce my sense of self (Sartre 1998). Sartre writes:
I am on a narrow path – without a guard-rail – which goes along a precipice. The precipice presents itself to me as to be avoided; it represents a danger of death. At the same time I conceive of a certain number of causes, originating in universal determinism, which can transform that threat of death into reality; I can slip on a stone and fall into the abyss; the crumbling earth of the path can give way under my steps. Through these various anticipations, I am given to myself as a thing; I am passive in relation to these possibilities; they come to me from without; in so far as I am also an object in the world, subject to gravitation, they are my possibilities. (30)
This background serves to remind us of the specificity of vertigo as an essential facet of anxiety. As we see it in both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, vertigo brings us to the brink of both spatiality and to the edge of our own contingency. The borderless path upon which vertigo is experienced presents itself as both a reinforcement of selfhood as well as a confirmation of its dissolvability, as Sartre reflects: ‘I approach the precipice, and my scrutiny is searching for myself in my very depths. In terms of this moment, I play with my possibilities. My eyes, running over the abyss from top to bottom, imitate the possible fall and realize it symbolically’ (32). For agoraphobic subjects, the dizzying encounter with the precipice need not be assumed in relation to a cliff top, but instead is given voice in space more broadly. In several of the historic case studies we have considered, the response to the instability of the world is to grip to the nearest surface, as if to transform it to a makeshift centre. One of Westphal’s patients again reveals to us something essential:
Being asked what he would do if he were led to an open meadow and suddenly left alone, he deems that the thought alone is unbearable, that he could not even conceive it, that he does not know what we would do; perhaps he would throw himself face down to the ground and tightly cling to the grass with his hands. (Knapp 1988, 61)
There is much to learn from this action of place-making. Instead of playing with one’s possibilities, as Sartre has it, the agoraphobic subject refuses those possibilities, and indeed goes so far as to fuse with the ground as an object of stability. The absence of bodily boundaries is thus not a space for the novel recreation of selfhood, but instead a sinister space that threatens to dissolve selfhood. As seen in this manner, the production of place – a theme that is consistent throughout the agoraphobe’s lifeworld – is the construction of a certain kind of place. Such a place is one of insularity, circumspection and stability. We have an exemplary illustration of this in the world that is created when Westphal throws himself ‘face down to the ground and tightly cling to the grass with his hands’. If it is one thing to lie on the ground, then it is quite another to lie face down on it, tightly clinging to the earth – an action that not only veils the outside world but also prevents the onset of vertigo by attaching oneself as much as is possible to a fixed site.
Pascal’s abyss
To pull this phenomenology of vertigo deeper in the direction of an abyssal anxiety, let us reach further back in time. The case concerns a pivotal moment in the life of Pascal. In 1654, Pascal was nearly thrown into the Seine while crossing a bridge at Neuilly-sur-Seine. At this crossing, his horse bolted, leaving the carriage dangling over the river. While not physically injured, Pascal nevertheless suffered another kind of trauma. Hereafter, he was convinced that an abyss had formed on his left hand side. Such was the extent of his anxiety that for a while Pascal would require a chair beside him to feel reassurance that he was not on the verge of falling. Quite apart from the logical improbability that such an abyss was real, this near miss on the Seine set in a place a reality of Pascal’s own, and one that was entirely independent of the objective properties of the world. In a letter written we are told the following:
His friends, his confessor, and his director tried in vain to tell him that there was nothing to fear, and that his anxiety was only the alarm of an imagination exhausted by abstract and metaphysical studies. He would agree … and then, within a quarter of an hour, he would have dug for himself the terrifying precipice all over again. (cited in Vidler 2000, 20)
Pascal’s abyss is graphic evidence, as if it were needed, of what we have earlier termed ‘the discontinuous structure of the anxious self’, a structure that sets in place several modes of bodily existence, each of which fails to reconcile into a unified whole. With Pascal, we have what we might term a ‘pre-abyss and a post-abyss body’. The creation of the abyss operates from both the body and the world at once, leading Baudelaire to comment, ‘Pascal avait son gouffre, avec lui se mouvant’ (‘Pascal had his abyss, moving where he moved’) (Baudelaire 2008, 342). The formation of the abyss is an exemplary illustration of anxiety as being dialogically structured between subject and world. Circumstantially, we have a specific context and place from where Pascal’s abyss emerges. Yet the specificity of this anxiety is neither reducible to the empirical event of nearly falling into the Seine, nor is it explainable in terms of an error in perception, as though reason alone could repair the abyss. As we see in the letter above, it is one thing to agree in abstraction with the absence of a void; it is quite another thing to experience it being no longer present.
FIGURE 5.2 La Seine, Paris.
Pascal’s abyss is at once a lesson in phenomenology and psychoanalysis. In phenomenological terms, the abyss extends beyond the location on the bridge, and is now dispersed through the world. In this respect, if Pascal’s anxiety takes as its point of departure the event on the bridge, then it does not end with that event. This diffusion helps us to understand the dynamic quality of Pascal’s anxiety. As is reported in the letter, the causal explanation for the abyss is an exhaustion induced by too much metaphysics. Formally speaking, Pascal is in agreement with this account. Time and again, however, the abyss returns. In Pascal’s case, the justification of an abyss from a rational perspective has little impact on the anxiety that assumes a pervasive hold on his existence. Anxiety’s dissent from reason points not only to the structure of lived perception in the constitution of the world, but also to what Merleau-Ponty describes as a ‘deeper life of consciousness beneath “perception”’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 295). The deeper life of consciousness is not an occult level of perception, which can retroactively explain the phenomenology of anxiety. Rather, it is a level of perception that operates in and through consciousness itself.
In what follows, we wish to move towards this ‘deeper life’. If we have so far illustrated how anxiety can be read as being a world in its own terms, then what we need to consider is the structure of the self that embeds itself in this world. We wish to proceed beyond the thematic analysis of how the impersonal dimension of the body generates anxiety for the subject in order to consider the structural levels operating within experience. To this end, we will establish a dialogue with psychoanalysis, and more specifically, with the function of the image as it is understood from this perspective. We begin by considering the sense of self, after which we will then turn towards the body image and schema that constitutes our selfhood, and end by converging with a phenomenological and psychoanalytical account of subjectivity. Only then, will we grasp what is at stake in anxiety.
A sense of self
We carry with us a sense of self, which is grounded in a complex interface between different structures of subjectivity along with the memories, dreams, imaginations, desires, regrets and so forth, each of which generates a sense of who we are. These affective and structural dimensions are assumed on both a prereflective and reflective level. From a Merleau-Pontean perspective, it is thanks to the pre-reflectivity of the ‘intentional arc” that my existence is underpinned by a sense of global orientation. I experience myself, for the most part, as a coherent whole, and self-coherence is not something I think of in abstraction, but is instead constitutive of the prereflective self, which in turn serves as a foundation for my higher-order reflections on what it is like to be me. More than this, the sense of what it is like to be me presupposes what is often characterized as a quality of mineness. Consider how to be self-consciously aware of a given feeling – be it vertigo or euphoria – is to grasp instinctively that the feeling is my own. The feeling of vertigo is neither derived deductively nor is it inferred on the basis of what is otherwise a ‘neutral or anonymous experience’ (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, 50). The quality of mineness is thus active from the outset of perception, evident in the implicit sense that is I who am undergoing a given experience, even if I myself am not always consciously aware of this mineness of experience. Being unaware that I am the recipient of experiences does not lead to a rupture in our sense of self given that there follows a latent sense for each of us of being a singular person, which is carried with us, even in our attempts to flee that quality.
For Gallagher, this latent sense carries with it two sub-themes: a sense of self-agency and a sense of self-ownership (Gallagher 2004, 2005, 2012). Whereas self-agency indicates the sense of being ‘the source of movement or action’, a sense of ownership, on the other hand, refers to an implicit sense that it is ‘I who am experiencing the movement’ (Gallagher 2005, 173). The contrast between voluntary and involuntary movement offers a clear way to conceive the difference between agency and ownership. In drinking my cup of coffee, I do so with the sense that the action of drinking coffee not only derives from me, but it is also I who am drinking the coffee. There are variations of this experience. If I am, for some curious reason, coerced into drinking coffee, then while I may feel that I am still in possession of a sense that it is I who am coerced, I may at the same time feel deprived of my sense of agency in being forced to undergo an action against my volitional will. Here, too, we can think of involuntary memories as adhering to the same logic: a memory emerges and is recognized as my own (however loosely), but at the same time, there may still exist a vague doubt that I was the agent responsible for bringing those memories to consciousness. The sense of ownership is thus predicated on a prereflective sense of mineness, which secures the corporeal basis of subjectivity. Here, R.D. Laing provides a rich illustration:
The embodied person has a sense of being flesh and blood and bones, of being biologically alive and real: he knows himself to be substantial. To the extent that he is thoroughly ‘in’ his body, he is likely to have a sense of personal continuity in time. He will experience himself as subject to the dangers that threaten his body, the dangers of attack, mutilation, disease, decay, and death. He is implicated in bodily desire, and the gratifications and frustrations of the body. The individual thus has as his starting-point an experience of his body as a base from which he can be a person with other human beings. (Laing 1990, 67)
Laing underscores the thick involvement with the body and its multifaceted and inseparable immersion within subjectivity. The dangers and desires invoked and confronted by the subject are experienced, not as external sources of agitation or pleasure, but as taking root in the centrality of the body itself. It is from the body as both source of action and ownership that existence springs forth, allowing us to formulate the sense of what it is like to be conscious. Against this backdrop, disturbances of agency and ownership thus involve a disordering of the body. We know from everyday experience that thoughts, memories and images can appear from out-of-nowhere, without yet disturbing the overall coherence of the self. The capacity for these spontaneous thoughts to be integrated into an already-existing and more-or-less stable self means that their quality as ‘unbidden’ is soon diminished (Gallagher 2004).
In the case of schizophrenia, the situation is different, and the difference reveals to us in a clear sense the relation between agency and ownership. With the schizophrenic patient, the insertion of thoughts into consciousness is conflated with the attribution of action to another person, meaning that the patient is subjected to, ‘but not the agent of, the movement or thought’ (98). What remains intact, albeit tenuously, is the claim of ownership. It is this partial (but never absolute) effacement of the patient’s sense of self that renders the experience of alien possible. The subject feels her thoughts, actions and movements are at times controlled by another agency, yet an agency that impinges upon a still-existing sense that I am the one who is being subjected to this alien force.
On a structural level, then, we see here a correlation between the anxious subject and the schizophrenic patient. As we have phrased it in earlier chapters, the anxious experience of the body involves a partial transformation from a centre of unity and personalization to a body that is both disunited and impersonal. This movement never entirely abolishes the sense of ownership of the body, given that it is precisely such a sense that is involved in the production of anxiety. Throughout, the body is not destroyed, nor lost, but instead accented in its inseparable presence. Once more, Laing draws our attention to the affective dimension grounding this structure:
Socrates maintains that no harm can possibly be done to a good man. In this case, ‘he’ and his ‘body’ were dissociated. In such a situation he felt much less afraid than the ordinary person, because from his position he had nothing to lose that essentially belonged to him. But, on the other hand, his life was full of anxieties that do not arise for the ordinary person. The embodied person, fully implicated in his body’s desires, needs, and acts, is subject to the guilt and anxiety attendant on such desires, needs, and actions. (Laing 1990, 68)
Laing’s reflections are telling. The Cartesianism inherent in the Socratic vision of the body serves to diminish the anxiety involved in experiences of threat or instability. For anxious subjects, the loss of bodily control, not least when it involves the expulsion of one’s prima materia, is interpreted in apocalyptic terms, precisely for the reason that the body retains a central rather than incidental role in the constitution of selfhood (cf. Kamboj et al. 2015). In effect, the hyper-corporeality of the anxious subject is at odds with the Socratic or Cartesian body in the following respect: if the Socratic ‘wisdom’ in death involves a depersonalization of the body, then where anxiety is concerned, the disturbance in corporeal existence involves an impersonalization of one’s own body. This exchange between impersonalization and depersonalization is worth spelling out.
In speaking of the depersonalization of the body in the Cartesian or Socratic sense, let us think of a will-towards-dualism, in which the body is regarded as secondary if not contingent in the formation of selfhood. As seen from this perspective, stripping the body of its personal attributes does not invoke anxiety, but instead a peculiar calmness framed by the purported autonomy of the mind. To treat the body as a non-essential appendage to one’s sense of self is to depersonalize materiality. The quality of the body as being less real than the mind is carried over into the medical understanding of depersonalization as a disorder characterized by ‘loss of emotions and feelings of estrangement or detachment from … thinking, [the] body or the real world’ (Sierra 2012, 1). Only here, the detachment from the body is not a space of wisdom and calm, but of anxiety and distress.
As understood from a clinical perspective, the relation between depersonalization disorder and phobic anxiety is compelling, such that the two disorders have been conflated under the title ‘phobic-anxiety depersonalization syndrome’ (Roth 1959; cf. Sierra et al. 2012). The expansive research on depersonalization disorder and phobic anxiety corroborates what we have deduced from first-person experience: principally, that depersonalization, instead of being construed as a ‘dissociative’ disorder, is, in fact, closer to an anxiety disorder (Hunter et al. 2004). Thematically, both depersonalization and anxiety are related to a loss of control, with each disorder provoked by visual disturbances, coupled with a ‘specific intolerance to fluorescent lights … the significance and mechanism [of which] is far from understood’ (Sierra et al. 2012, 126). As we have shown, the mechanism is only mysterious if we abstract it from the context from where it emerges. For these reasons, it cannot be understood in the laboratory but must be situated within the total situation of (inter)subjective existence.
From a phenomenological perspective, the relation between depersonalization and phobic anxiety is evident in their shared symptoms, especially the disturbance of bodily ownership, disruption of agency and heightened self-observation (cf. Sierra 2012, 31). Where they differ, however, is in the loss of affect. Clinical research on depersonalization points to ‘de-affectualization’ as a major symptom, understood here as an emotional ‘numbing’, which prevents the patient from either empathizing with others or otherwise being affected by the world more broadly (32). As seen in this way, the anxiety that coexists with depersonalization exists in a strictly ‘internal’ relation, whereas discernible objects and situations in the world are reported as being less anxiety inducing given that they appear for the patient as unreal (33).
Despite these similarities between anxiety and depersonalization, we have opted to describe the anxious experience of the body in terms of being impersonal rather than depersonal. The reason for this is largely an issue of emphasis. While there is a clear symptomatic correspondence between phobic anxiety and depersonalization, in the case of anxiety the onus rests less on a process of de-personalizing the body and more on the encounter with a body that is already im-personal. The language of impersonalization, therefore, serves to underscore the structure of the body as being both personal and impersonal at once.
The question of how is it possible to conceive of an experience of the impersonal, which we posed in the previous chapters, is central to the emergence of impersonalization. Our response to this question was to employ Merleau-Ponty’s mention of an almost impersonal existence that structures personal existence, thus forging a phantom zone, in which two or more bodies occupy the same space. As we have understood it, anxiety emerges when the impersonal dimension of bodily existence disturbs the image of selfhood as being in possession of itself. The difference, then, between anxiety and depersonalization returns us to the division of affect. In the case of anxious subjectivity, the encounter with the almost impersonal level of existence leads not to a ‘de-affectualization’, but precisely towards the re-personalization of what is manifest as an impersonal presence.
This movement of re-personalization emerges as an attempt at re-integrating the body in the face(lessness) of anxiety. We can conceive of this action in specific terms. Think here of the very existence of the object of phobia. As Freud suggested, the rationalization of anxiety consists of a process of domestication, such that the object assumes the place of anxiety itself. This metamorphosis of objects gives an image to anxiety, a face that can be both denied and confronted. In response, the subject is afforded an impression of self-mastery, and so long as the object can be avoided, then so too can anxiety. In a similar way, the function of ritual is to give form to anxiety, to encircle and contain it. Thanks to the power of the prop, the world conforms to the image of stability and constancy. Finally, let us reflect on the brief moment a subject prone to spatial phobias leaves the place or encounter where their anxiety escalated. We have seen a movement of turning back, of reflecting on the doors, glancing towards the façade of a building, with each moment marked by a sense of disbelief, as though they had been dreaming. (In fact, we will discover later on that this dreamlike quality is more than a metaphor). The response of disbelief is curious and telling. To disbelieve that I was subject to this particular episode of anxiety is to forge a distance between the anxious and non-anxious self, as if it were unimaginable that the non-anxious subject could have succumb to such a disordered state. We know now that this disbelief is in fact rather disingenuous and is stipulated on the attempt to re-personalize the body in a unified image, as seen from the idealized view of a mirror.
Body image, body schema
We have in this chapter been considering a provisional phenomenology of vertigo. We have considered a sense of self in terms of ownership and agency. As we continue in this route – a route that will connect us with the figure of Lacan and the theme of the mirror – it is necessary in the first instance to interrogate the meaning of the term ‘image’, especially as it is understood in relation to the body. In a non-technical sense, we have mentioned images in previous chapters. Indeed, already we have defined anxiety as being 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. The task now is to explore just what we mean in speaking of the image of the self.
The terms ‘body image’ and ‘body schema’ have a complex history in phenomenology. In Merleau-Ponty, the French term is ‘schéma corporel’, and has been translated in English as both ‘body image’ and ‘body schema’ in the recent translations of Phenomenology of Perception. Merleau-Ponty’s choice for using the term is embedded in a complicated history, which hinges on previous research by Head and Schilder. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty’s usage of schéma corporel rather than l’image de notre corps (the image of our body) testifies to this complexity (cf. Gallagher 2005; Weiss 1999). As it is presented in Phenomenology of Perception, the term refers to an implicit awareness of one’s body, in its dimensionality, position and posture. Thus, Merleau-Ponty will suggest that knowledge of his body derives from a body schema that ‘envelops’ each of his limbs, and that responds dynamically to the environment (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 101). The unity of the body, then, does not derive from a representation of the body as understood as a bunch of associations, much less an empirical understanding of the body as occupying a certain physiological structure. Rather, the body schema takes root in the ‘global awareness of my posture in the inter-sensory world, a ‘form’ in Gestalt psychology’s sense of the word’ (102).
The Merleau-Pontean idea of body schema as belonging neither to the body nor the world in isolation, but with the reversible and dynamic moulding of the two, finds a voice in the contemporary phenomenological literature. In distinction to Merleau-Ponty, recent research on the issue of body image has sought to distinguish it from that of body schema (Gallagher 2005). The advantage of this distinction is not only to clarify the joint function of each term, but also to consider how these terms can help us understand the nature of atypical bodily experiences. Gallagher characterizes the distinction in the following terms:
A body image consists of a system of perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs pertaining to one’s own body. In contrast, a body schema is a system of sensory-motor capacities that function without awareness or the necessity of perceptual monitoring. (Gallagher 2005, 24)
As Gallagher indicates, these terms are different but closely related (24). In turn, they provide us with at least two ways to understand how the body coheres. From the perspective of the body schema, the body is understood as being able to move of its own accord, quite apart from any beliefs or attitudes we have about it. This mechanism thus involves what Gallagher and Zahavi term is ‘the close-to-automatic system of processes that constantly regulates posture and movement to serve intentional action’ (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, 146). As they see it, a body schema is a largely anonymous set of processes, which are neither intentional nor thematic, but are instead enacted through the ‘accomplishment of movement’ itself (Gallagher 2005, 24). In contrast, body image is perceptual, and is thus predicated on a ‘complex set of intentional states and dispositions … in which the intentional object is one’s own body’ (25). As perceptual, the body image is informed not only by one’s relation to their body, but also by the intersubjective sphere in which that relation takes place. The structure of a body image is thus dynamic, at times becoming visible while at other times receding into an implicit awareness of one’s bodily self. Moreover, the image we have of our bodies is manifest in divergent ways. In certain moods, localized parts of the body can be perceived and experienced as more distant than other parts. The body that has been damaged tends to split into parts, with the damaged part offsetting the surrounding area of the non-damaged parts. When damaged, the limb or part draws attention to itself, as it were. In our perception of the damaged body part, we not only have a concept of it as damaged, but also an affective relation with this experience (25). Moreover, the body can obtrude into perception before becoming experientially absent again, reshaping our relation to the environment in the process (Gallagher 1986; Leder 1990).
Prima facie the division between body image and body schema offers us a useful way to approach bodily pathologies, such as loss of motility and proprioception, evident in cases of Anarchic Hand Syndrome, Alien Hand Syndrome, and Unilateral Neglect (cf. Gallagher 2005; Gallagher and Zahavi 2008). Let us take the case of schizophrenia. Alongside delusions of control and disturbances in a sense of agency, schizophrenia also involves what R. D. Laing phrases an ‘unembodied’ self, and what Thomas Fuchs similarly terms ‘disembodiment’ (Fuchs 2009; Laing 1990). Fuchs speaks of the schizophrenic patient suffering from a ‘loss of automatic processing on the level of “passive syntheses”, leading to an increasing fragmentation of perceptual and motor Gestalt schemas, and to a “pathological explication” of the implicit functions of the body’ (Fuchs 2009, 553). Here, Fuchs relies on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the intentional arc, such that the global breakdown in the form of the body is understood as the fragmentation of the intentional arc. This has consequences both for the patient’s relation to others and also to their experience of spatiality: ‘This [fragmentation]’, Fuchs writes, ‘leads to a sense of artificiality and distance, both in the patient’s experience of an emotion and in the expression visible to others. Even if the emotion is felt, its meaning remains obscure to the patient’ (102). As with depersonalization, we find here a symptomatic rapport alongside a set of differences with schizophrenic in several important ways. Above all, the misattribution of agency found in the schizophrenic patient is generally not found in anxious subjects (cf. Gallagher 2004; Marks 1987). Whereas schizophrenia tends to involve a delusion of control, such that the source of action is ascribed to another person or thing, for the anxious or agoraphobic subject, the experience is not that another agent has taken control of a person’s actions, but that the body, presented as an image of unification and coherence, has fragmented. Having fragmented, the body is thus experienced as dispossessed.
Alongside this difference, schizophrenia and anxiety join in their perception of the world as a ‘phantom’, hence ‘the artificial, enigmatic, and uncanny alteration of the environment experienced especially in the early stages of [schizophrenia]’ (Fuchs 2005, 102). Yet if the anxious and schizophrenic subject experience a series of gaps marking their relation with the world, then in the case of anxious subjects, this distance tends to appear only in the extreme paroxysm of anxiety rather than as a constant state. This has significant implications for the felt sense of being a self. If the anxious subject is able to return to a non-anxious state, as is broadly the case, then a distance is afforded, which allows the subject to gain a distance on their disordered relation to things. The consistency of the schizophrenic patient’s relation to the world suggests a significantly more static body image than that of the anxious subject. Where the body image of the anxious self is marked by volatility between anxious and non-anxious states, in the case of the schizophrenic, the propensity is of a ‘consistent disturbance’ in body image (Priebe and Röhricht 2001). Fuchs offers an incisive summary:
Schizophrenic patients often speak of a split between their mind and their body, of feeling detached from their lived performance like a machine or a robot. In particular, they may experience a disintegration of habits or automatic practices, a ‘disautomation’. Instead of simply dressing, driving, walking, etc., they have to prepare and produce each single action deliberately, in a way that could be called a ‘Cartesian’ action of the mind on the body. (Fuchs 2009, 553)
On the theme of gaps in a subject’s world, consider again Pascal’s abyss. As we have seen, this episode concerns the case of a philosopher who experiences himself as being forever on the verge of falling. In the light of contemporary research, to what extent can this condition be understood as a disordering of image or schema? On the surface, the existence of an abyss in space seems tied up with the notion of a body image. Here, our focus would be on body as an object of intentional beliefs, one of these beliefs being that the body is shaped by a void. The image of the body as being shaped by a void is both a perceptual experience and an emotional attitude towards the body (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, 146). The perception of an abyss creates a hollow in the side of the body, and consequently the perception of the body is of a body on the edge of a precipice, and at all times needing a prop to support it.
But this is only one side of the story. To give an explanatory account of the abyss in terms of a disturbed body image is to overlook the constriction in movement associated with the dysfunction of the body schema. In this respect, Pascal’s abyss is exemplary. Here, we can ask a speculative question: without the chair to support himself, how does Pascal move in the world? It is worth noting that Pascal’s abyss is one that pursues him. In a report from the time, we are told that ‘afterwards [Pascal] used at times to see an imaginary precipice by his bedside, or at the foot of the chair on which he was sitting’ (cited in Vidler 2000, 19). The fact that he relies intently on the chair not only to steady his body but also to steady his anxiety means that in the absence of this prop, movement would be at best stifled, at worst impossible. From where does this inhibition of movement derive? Notably, we are presented here not only with a disturbance of the body schema by the body image but also a disturbance of the body image by the body schema. The inability to walk from one corner of a room to another without the need of prop to support oneself suggests that disturbance comes about because of a malformed body image. But given that there is a certain degree of autonomy in the body schema, it may come as a surprise to Pascal that he is unable to move freely in the world without being accompanied by the anxiety of falling. Indeed, the sense of surprise that comes in the anxiety of falling testifies to a non-possessable and uncontrollable element of the body analogous to a nervous tic or even a phantom limb.
FIGURE 5.3 Le Maïdo, La Réunion.
The recent research on body image and body schema allows us to understand the complex ways in which these two terms are both separate but also how they can become reversible. While central in helping us to understand the malleable nature of the body, the characterization of body image as being a perceptual representation of one’s body leaves to one side the function of the image as the site of an identification with a form exterior to oneself. Moreover, what remains to be said is to what extent the identification with an image outside of oneself comes with the paradoxical consequence of being alienated from oneself. We wish in the remaining part of the chapter to build upon the phenomenological understanding of the body image by connecting it with a psychoanalytical account. In turn, this rapport between the disciplines will provide us with a far richer understanding of anxiety than were we to take these methodologies in isolation from one another.
Beyond the mirror
You assume a role in life. Over time, the role hardens, in turn becoming indistinguishable from your sense of self. From nowhere, you will become a doctor, a lawyer, a father or a convict. Habits that you formed early on life will follow you through the duration of your existence, and in times of crisis, you will re-enact these rituals so as to remind you of the place where you have emerged from. You will form a social circle, where other like-minded people will gravitate. In the gaze, movements, speech patterns and inflexions of your allies, you will reaffirm a knowledge of yourself that is already familiar. The social world opens itself up to you from the zero point of your own consciousness, it is singled out as a stage upon which other people, objects, and the entire cosmos appears as a spectacle to behold. A complex layer of culture covers the entire world; it is thick and often impenetrable, but carries with it at all times an unrivalled sense of reality. Your reality is unquestioned; it is complete in itself.
At times, however, the thick patina of roles, intersubjective domains and regions of culture, each of which is given in their dominance, recede in their clarity. An anxiety, unwavering and brilliant, pierces through the atmosphere, drawing attention to a dark undercurrent sketching out a place in your existence. Before you, another existence took place. In its reappearance, it confronts you with the limits of an illusion: that self you attach yourself to is conceived through an unassailable anxiety. You are a placeholder for the roles you assume, and each of the roles is ultimately anterior to your existence, either inherited from the past or disposed towards the future. Before and after you, variants of a self you have cultivated existed or will otherwise come into existence. There is a dream of being a self, through which an unfillable gap remains vacant. In it, your dream collides with a wakefulness that occupies the same body, a black hole where selfhood comes into being.
***
‘The illusion of unity’, so Lacan writes, ‘in which a human being is always looking forward to self-mastery, entails a constant danger of sliding back again into the chaos from which he started; it hangs over the abyss of a dizzy Ascent in which one can perhaps see the very essence of Anxiety’ (Lacan 1953, 15). Lacan situates us at the midst of anxiety, at the very point where the self is no longer able to fend off its own fragmentation through a series of elaborate rituals, props and conjurations. We have arrived on the other side of this dupery (to invoke a Levinasian term), now faced with the vast space between the sense of being a self and the unrecoverable gap that undermines this self-presence. But how did we get to this edge, to this dissolution of form? To answer this, we will need to retrace our steps. We will need to circle Lacan in sketching the genesis of a self, from its premature beginnings to its ever-present danger before anxiety.
Lacan’s thoughts are worth pursuing for at least two reasons. One, he draws our attention to the relation between the emergence of anxiety and the effacement of one’s sense of self. In doing so, he renders anxiety a constitutional facet in the structure of the subject, rather than a fault in an otherwise stable self. Two, he formulates anxiety as the presence of pure alterity, which at no point can be employed to disclose a specious ‘wisdom’. His analysis of anxiety thus stands in contrast to the traditional (especially Heideggerian) approach to anxiety, which would treat the mood as an opportunity for the realization of the subject. At the same time, his emphasis on alterity and the partial collapse in identity converges with our own phenomenological account of anxiety, which accents the partial formlessness and impersonalization of the body. Our foray into Lacan is not an exposition of his overall thoughts on anxiety, the complexity of which exceed our present aims. Rather, we wish to a certain extent to instrumentalize Lacan (quite against his own intentions, of course) in order to forward our own cause. To narrow this aim down, our concern falls to what is left outside of the mirror image, and to what end this ‘remainder’ contributes to the production of anxiety. It is on this hinge between the specular image and its remainder that phenomenology aligns with psychoanalysis. We will begin with Lacan’s account of the mirror stage. Our engagement with this well-known lecture is driven by a desire to understand how a body image is not only a perception we have of our own corporeality, but how this relation also marks a movement of identification with an unified form exterior to oneself.
At the outset, Lacan’s account of the body image differs from the contemporary understanding in suggesting that the image functions to both unify and alienate the subject. This joint function is not circumscribed to early life alone before being integrated into adult life, but instead remains active as a structure of subjectivity itself. It is important to explicitly note that the subject one finds in Lacan is constitutionally and not contingently alienated. Despite Lacan’s non-developmental reading of the mirror stage, we begin with childhood. Childhood is the site of a genesis of the mirror image, but one that is carried with us throughout life. An infant enters the world as a set of uncoordinated motor mechanisms, each of which fails to integrate into a whole. This is what Lacan terms ‘the prematurity of birth’: a birth that arrives on the scene too soon, and long before the organism is equipped to negotiate with the world and survive alone. But then something happens in this movement: the child identifies with a visual image of him or herself. Lacan reports that when a child assumes a body image in the face of a mirror, the response is one of jubilation (Lacan 2006, 76). What is unveiled before the mirror is an identification with a specular image, an image that transforms the baby who is ‘still trapped in his motor impotence and nursling dependence’ to a primordial I (76). Lacan elaborates on the significance of this moment:
But the important point is that this form situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination, in a fictional direction that will remain irreducible for any single individual or, rather, that will only asymptotically approach the subject’s becoming, no matter how successful the dialectical synthesis by which he must resolve, as I, his discordance with reality. (76)
To look ahead, already in this passage we have the basis for Lacan’s revision of anxiety. As with Heidegger, Lacan phrases anxiety as a privileged affect, one that is not simply concerned with a localized experience of the world, but instead with the very structure of the subject. Here, we must make a distinction between what Lacan terms ‘the ego’ and the subject. The subject for Lacan is not that of the Freudian ego, much less the phenomenological ‘I’, as it would be understood in Husserlian terms. For Lacan, the ego is a product of the imaginary order, an order in which I experience myself, by way of an optical illusion, as a discrete self. Lacanian psychoanalysis, as a method of interrogating a human being, is thus not primarily concerned with the egocentric self, except as a way of delineating its imaginary structure. For him, the ego is a necessary fiction we must tell ourselves, and to this extent is described by Lacan as a ‘symptom’. ‘The ego’, he writes, ‘is structured exactly like a symptom. At the heart of the subject, it is only a privileged symptom, the human symptom par excellence, the mental illness of man’ (Lacan 1991a, 16). The subject, on the other hand, does not belong to the imaginary order in the way that the ego does. When he speaks of the subject, Lacan is not referring to a Cartesian subject as a substance. If the ego can manipulate its own image, then the subject for Lacan operates at another level. Indeed, his conception of the subject is distinct from how the term is commonly employed in a philosophical sense. The subject is largely unconscious, and while appearing through the ego (and by consequence, the body), it is nevertheless different from it.
The formation of the ego from the subject occurs as a ‘mirage’ (Lacan 2006, 76). This mirage is predicated on a méconnaissance – a misrecognition – in which the child recognizes himself or herself as the image presented in the mirror. Of course, we need not understand mirror in a strictly literal sense, but can also grasp how intersubjective relations also function to either reinforce or collapse the production of a sense of self. Indeed, Lacan will go to great lengths to explain how the irreducible unknowability of what the Other wants from me leads to profound anxiety, such that I am unable to place the image I have of myself within relation to their gaze. This structure is predicated on the function of what Lacan terms the imago – the illusion that both alienates and unites the ego, and which is compelled at all times by a ‘discordance with reality’, never left behind, but instead which remains ‘irreducible for any single individual’ (76). As structured by a ‘certain dehiscence at the very heart of the organism, a primordial Discord’, Lacan’s concept of the ego as a work of fiction thus stands in contrast to any philosophy of the self that presents the self as already given to consciousness. This opposition includes the ‘contemporary philosophy of being and nothingness [which] grasps negativity only within the limits of a self-sufficiency of consciousness’ (80). Lacan’s indictment against Sartre (and, by dint of consequence, Merleau-Ponty), frames the phenomenological account of negativity as being situated within an already established order of consciousness, framed from the outset by ‘the illusion of autonomy’ (80). What follows is a narrative of seduction and alienation.
Through being ‘caught up in the lure of spatial identification’, the individual undergoes a jubilant transformation from a ‘fragmented image of the body to what I will call an “orthopedic” form of its totality’ (78). Throughout this process, the fragmentation of the body persists in its irreducible materiality, thus forging a split between the image of unity and the persistence of disunity experienced in the body. This makeshift unity comes with a price, however: in the process of reforming the body as a whole, a ‘donned armour of alienating identity’ is produced, which carries with it a movement of self-alienation (78). In not only accepting but also jubilantly identifying with the specular image as oneself, the individual is alienated by way of this méconnaissance of what one actually is. In turn the image itself takes place of the self. There is, then, a fundamental gap in the infant, and from this gap, the question of what am I beyond the body image exacts a haunting presence in the life of the individual.
To speak in terms of an alienated identity begs the question of what the self is alienated from? Such a question is to misconstrue the place of alienation within Lacan. Once again, it is necessary to note that the mirror stage is ultimately irreducible to a linear procession of movements. There is not, to put it in terms other than Lacan’s, the experience of a fragmented body prior to its identification with the specular image. Nor is there an eventual reintegration of the body as fragmented through the image. It is only in a retroactive way that we regain and recognize (if we do so at all) the ‘primordial Discord’ that preceded identification – that is, when the discord manifests itself symptomatically, not least as anxiety. Understood in this way, the self-alienation evident in Lacan is not an alienation from one’s lived experience, as such (although, of course, this may well exist, too). Rather, the alienation is a constitutive alienation formed by the gap between what one actually is and what one sees in the mirror.
What one sees in mirror need not, of course, refer in concrete terms to visual mirror. More than this, the mirror is any reflective surface – above all, a human face – that either reinforces the image I identify as being me, or otherwise contests it, thus revealing the gap between ego and the subject. This understanding of the body image is manifestly at odds with an analysis of the image as deriving from an already established set of conscious beliefs and attitudes on our body. For the most part, human existence is characterized by a sense of ownership of one’s bodily existence. The body as it is lived is that which reinforces my sense of who I am in the world, and this is informed by the sense of the body image as a Gestalt. As Lacan sees it, far from a conscious set of beliefs and representations about one’s lived body, the body image is precisely that which unifies selfhood through a process of alienating identification with a fictional image.
The ‘lure’ of this movement is tied up, then, with the prematurity of birth. The contrast between the reflection of oneself as united and the perception of one’s body, by contrast, as fragmented serves only to reinforce a dependency on the image as an (illusory) means of unification. For this reason, the image can never repair or conjoin the fragmented body with the self, but only conceal the body that will appear in dreams ‘in the form of disconnected limbs or organs exoscopically represented’ (78). Yet in other expressions, the body appears in ‘bits and pieces’ (imago du corps morcelé) and elsewhere in ‘images of castration, emasculation, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body’ (Lacan 1953, 13; Lacan 2006, 85). Deprived of its overall lucidity, a series of uncanny images is unveiled, ‘trunks cut up in slices and stuffed with the most unlikely fillings, strange appendages in eccentric positions’ (Lacan 1953, 13).
FIGURE 5.4 Anse des Cascades, La Réunion.
The spectre of anxiety
With his mention of ‘strange appendages in eccentric positions’, we are returned to the ‘dizzy Ascent in which one can perhaps see the very essence of Anxiety’ (15). The ego that emerges from the mirror stage does so out of necessity. To function coherently, it becomes necessary to bring order to chaos, to reduce the irreducible to the image of having a form. Given its mandatory role in rendering oneself coherent, the ego assumes a stubborn place within the self, framed by an ‘element of inertia’ (12). Yet at certain times, and especially in moments of anxiety, the obstinacy of the human ego is exposed to the possibility of regressing back to the disintegrated and fragmented body from where it derives. Indeed, what is anxiety-inducing concerns what cannot be captured in the specular image, and is marked out in Lacan as an ‘un-imaged residue of the body’, which anxiety exposes us to (Lacan 2014, 46).
In Seminar II, Lacan gives us a striking account of this irreconcilability between anxiety and the ego. The context for this description is that of a patient of Freud’s called Irma. On the night 23 July 1895, Freud has a dream about Irma. She is unwell, with something lodged in her throat. When Freud looks in her throat, he finds evidence of ‘extensive whitish grey scabs upon some remarkable curly structures which were evidently modelled on the turbinal bones of the nose’ (Freud 2010, 132). As it turns out, Irma had been administrated an injection with a sullied syringe. Lacan presents to us his reflections on this encounter.
There is a horrendous discovery here, that of the flesh one never sees, the foundation of things, the other side of the head, of the face, the secretory glands par excellence, the flesh from which everything exudes, at the very heart of the mystery, the flesh in as much as it is suffering, is formless, in as much as form in itself is something which provokes anxiety. Spectre of anxiety, identification of anxiety, the final revelation of you are this – You are this, which is so far from you, this which is the ultimate formlessness. (Lacan 1991b, 154–155)
Lacan draws us close to the essence of uncanny anxiety. Something returns from what is ostensibly the most familiar of things: the face. Far from revealing itself in its totality, the surface of the face conceals its mysterious interior. ‘The other side of the head’ is marked in its uncanniness as the space we live alongside yet forever remain oblivious to. Upon contact with it, the threat of dissolution is made real. Formlessness is not the destruction of matter, but the confrontation with matter deprived of its image. Always out-of-view, yet always present, Lacan never strays too far from the Freudian link between anxiety and the uncanny: You are this, which is so far from you, this which is the ultimate formlessness. Lacan locates with some specificity the spectral domain of anxiety. Anxiety is there, anonymous and without form. At the same time, it remains irrecoverable and inaccessible, for as soon as it appears, it is reconstituted as an image, destined to the placelessness ‘one never sees’.
This reversal of anxiety generates a different account of its origin. Lacan’s anxiety is not a humanized anxiety that takes place at the level of an intra-psychic conflict within different aspects of the ego. Instead, anxiety is situated at the very grounds from where the ego appears. Indeed, the birth of the ego is a necessity in order for anxiety to be contained, and without this stabilizing illusion, a dissolution – even a death – of self would be the outcome. Strictly speaking, therefore, it makes questionable sense to speak of anxiety in terms of its various sub-divisions (generalized anxiety disorder, phobic anxiety, obsessive anxiety and so forth). While these categories delineate the specific expression of anxiety, for Lacan, there can only be one anxiety: an anxiety that precedes the self, and which constitutes selfhood without ever being reducible to selfhood. Anxiety emerges here not as a rupture within an already defined self, but as a ‘primordial Discord’, which is never experienced on its own terms. Given the primacy of anxiety in Lacan, subjectivity is always endangered by the possibility of falling back into a dizzying abyss from where it emerges.
Despite Lacan’s tendency to underplay the body, in his account of the relation between the genesis of self and the primordiality of anxiety, we find a series of parallels with our own analysis. As we have phrased it, anxiety is framed as an encounter with the impersonal level of existence. The impersonal level is given as a constant underside of existence, as that of Lacan’s dizzying precipice, on top of which the narrative of selfhood is constructed. In each case, anxiety is registered on the border where selfhood risks becoming effaced by its own constitution. For this reason, our alignment with Lacan is not only phrased as an anxiety concerned with the loss of self; it is also structured as a dissolution that comes from within rather than from beyond. Just as Lacan phrases anxiety’s dizzying movement as entailing a confrontation with the ‘primordial Discord … at the very heart of the organism’, so we have sought to show from a phenomenological perspective how anxiety is structured as an indirect encounter with the body’s irreducible anteriority, grasped affectively as a sense of slimy uncanniness.
Given the parallels between Lacan’s account of anxiety and our own, we can see now how the work of re-personalization is ultimately consistent with the formation of ego. As with Lacan, even when the mirror affords the infant a space of identification with an exterior, there is no actual transformation of the body: it remains fragmented. The same is true of the impersonal body: it remains impersonal throughout its ‘conversion’ to becoming one’s own. In this respect, the function of identification dovetails with the work of re-personalization: both operations seek to conceal a gap in the structure of selfhood. For Lacan, the gap is between the fragmented and unified image of oneself; whereas for us, the gap concerns the space between personal and impersonal dimensions of bodily existence. In each case, there is a leftover or remainder that cannot fit into the image of oneself, and which is marked as an object of anxiety.
Throughout this border affair, phenomenology presents us with the appearance of anxiety in a clothed form while recognizing how anxiety necessarily exceeds phenomenality, operating at a level that is only semi-accessible through the lens of the specular image. It is for these reasons, that anxiety’s locus is not, as Heidegger and Freud suggest, with the potential of absence, but instead, as Lacan sees it, with presence, albeit a presence registered as the ‘flesh one never sees’, to repeat again his formulation. If we were to formulate this invisible flesh in existentialist terms, then we could phrase it as a nothingness. Only the nothingness at stake would not be the indefinite void found in Heidegger and Sartre. Rather, the nothingness of anxiety, as we see it, is a dynamic force, plentiful and expressive in material form.
Of this distinction, Lacan writes, ‘I have opposed the psychologizing tradition that distinguishes fear from anxiety by virtue of its correlates in reality. In this I have changed things, maintaining of anxiety – it is not without an object’ (Lacan 1987, 82). Lacan is referring here to the concept of objet petit a (always in the French). An elaboration of the concept would lead us beyond our concerns, not least because his formulation undergoes a series of revisions, which do not justify pursuing presently. The fundamental idea is that for Lacan, the objet petit a is the leftover that is marked as the ‘Other’s otherness’ (Lacan 2014, 27). The object becomes bound with desire, insofar as Lacan understands desire not only as a concern with what is missing in the subject, but also with anxiety insofar as he understands anxiety as the return of that which cannot be integrated into the specular image. Notwithstanding the technicalities of the objet petit a, the formulation of anxiety as not without an object is worth stating. In fact, this formulation appears time and again in his seminar on anxiety.
At first, he declares that ‘this object is not properly speaking the object of anxiety’, in that the object is not a direct correlative with anxiety (Lacan 2014, 89). At the same time, to posit the existence of an object of anxiety is not to suggest that this object appears in a clear and distinct way: ‘This relation of being not without having doesn’t mean that one knows which object is involved. When I say, He isn’t without resources, He isn’t without cunning, that means, at least for me, that his resources are obscure, his cunning isn’t run of the mill’ (89). The obscurity confuses the presence of the object, positioning it in a non-place, which precludes it from being readily available before our eyes as a discernible phenomenon, much less to be analysed scientifically. Indeed, to approach the object of anxiety from the perspective of ‘scientific discourse … would be yet another way of getting rid of anxiety’ (131). To eliminate anxiety would mean superimposing a stationary image upon it, or otherwise to reduce it to a set of predetermined characteristics. As we know, however, this domestication falls short of its aims, and in the gaps where the superimposition of form comes undone, anxiety reappears in another guise.
Nowhere is this return of anxiety clearer than in the encounter with voids puncturing the reflective surface of the mirror, be it an actual mirror or another person. When we return to the mirror, then we do so with caution, knowing that the specular image is impregnated with a double, which will appear from time-to-time as that imageless body that articulates itself as anxiety. At times, the void in the mirror becomes visible. A stranger turns to us, their face unreadable, with a gaze full of questions. When confronted with their face, the look demands something of us that is nowhere to be found. As a result, misrecognition ensues. One of Stanley Hall’s patients ‘[w]as long frightened at the eyes of a picture hung on the wall, which followed her to every corner till fright yielded to anger’ (Hall 1897, 211). Another ‘had long played with a dog till one day he gazed into its eye and caught a panic, which made him shun it for weeks’ (211). Illustrations such as this underscore the agency of the reflective surface. The eye not only glares out from the face, it also registers what it sees thanks to its expressive power. Under such circumstances, the specular image also becomes a spectral image, a ‘mirage’ that recedes the more we enclose upon it (Lacan 2006, 76).
In Merleau-Ponty’s own reading of the mirror stage, this rapport between the specular image and that of a phantom occupying that image is reinforced (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 128). The uncanniness of the mirror image derives from the fact that the ego occupies two places at the same time, without those two places (and egos) being strictly identifiable with one another. Rather, they come into contact with one another ‘in a bizarre way’, as in the case of ‘certain hypnotic states, and in drowning people’, where we assume the body image of the drowning or dying person is reconstituted (129). Merleau-Ponty singles out a certain strangeness located in the mirror image. If the mirror image is like me, then there is something nevertheless omitted in this image, around which I approach cautiously, never entirely confident that what appears for me does so as a reflection or a gesture of repulsion.
With this strangeness, Merleau-Ponty invites us to consider the significance attached to images: ‘In a singular way the image incarnates and makes appear the person represented in it, as spirits are made to appear at a séance. Even an adult will hesitate to step on an image or photograph; if he does, it will be with aggressive intent’ (132). There is something in the image that cannot be tied down to appearances, a hidden – indeed, imageless – dimension that obligates us to step with hesitation in the face of a shadow that vision alone cannot frame. Even as adults, Merleau-Ponty reminds us, when the prematurity of our birth has been rationalized to a discrete episode in our narrative, this spectre still haunts us. The image seen in the mirror retains its uncanny ability to spook us, retaining a presence in our dreams long after we have stepped away from the mirror.
What haunts us is not simply the doubt and uncertainty that lurks within the mirror, but the anxious prospect that the mirror will dissolve the image constructed of ourselves, as Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘we never completely eliminate the corporeal condition that gives us, in the presence of a mirror, the impression of finding in it something of ourselves … this magic belief … never truly disappears’ (138). As with Lacan, Merleau-Ponty suggests that the self-alienation structuring subjectivity is neither contingent nor resolved into maturity. A dimension of ourselves remains outside cognition: ‘If the comprehension of the specular image were solely a matter of cognition, then once the phenomenon was understood its past would be completely reassimilated’ (138). Of course, this reassimilation never occurs, and despite an abstract apprehension that the mirror image is only an approximation of reality, the mirror stage continues to exist on the ‘threshold of the visible world’ (Lacan 2006, 77).
To think of this threshold in specific terms, turn towards the gaze that can never be captured by the specular image.
Even in the experience of the mirror, a moment can come about when the image we believe we abide by undergoes modification. If this specular image we have facing us, which is our stature, our face, our two eyes, allows the dimension of our gaze to emerge, the value of the image starts to change – above all if there’s a moment when this gaze that appears in the mirror starts not to look at us any more. There’s an initium, an aura, a dawning sense of uncanniness which leaves the door open to anxiety. (88)
We have arrived at the kernel of anxiety, at the point in which the mirror betrays us. A gap appears, small enough to go unnoticed, but visible enough to force a collapse in the structure of self-identification. What escapes us is the irreducible remainder, that which exceeds both the frame of the mirror and the materiality of the body as a visible thing. For Lacan, it is the gaze that is always present but never fully visible to experience, and thus incarnates the object of anxiety. Before the mirror, the gaze makes itself available to scrutiny. But to see it as we would an object means freezing it. What then emerges is something inhuman if not monstrous, a gaze that is dislocated from its body now reduced to the status of being a still-life: ‘The gaze, my gaze, is insufficient when it comes to capturing everything that stands to be absorbed from the outside’ (189). The gaze remains as an impossible object, a literal blind spot, which we can never apprehend or reduce to perception, but which has a life of its own, outside of us.
‘My body’, so Merleau-Ponty writes in concordance with Lacan, ‘escapes observation and presents itself as a simulacrum of my tactile body’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964a, 94). Against this evasion, anxiety appears in the place where the mirror should fill the frame. What is reflected back is not the gaze of another subjectivity, but instead the absolute presence of impersonal existence. The crack in reality is potent enough to ‘leave the door open to anxiety’, and to fill this void left open an attempt is made to restore the mirror image back to the illusion of being unified and plentiful. One need only think of the fragmented identity of Roquentin and his attempt to frame anxiety by fixing his eyes upon things, given that ‘as long as I could stare at things nothing would happen’ (Sartre 1964, 78). Let us also think of the incidents we have encountered throughout our study: namely, the premature experience of waking up in one’s home and catching sight of the other side of the intimacy and dwelling as fundamentally alien; the anxiety that leads us to experience our limbs as foreign vessels, both a part of us and also remote from us; the experience of other people as anonymous and beyond comprehension; the sense of being lost, both specifically and ontologically; and, finally, the experience of one’s sense of self undergoing a radical dissolution, such that what remains intact is the minimal sense that it is I who am undergoing these experiences, while the I that is the origin of memories, desire, values, beliefs, proceeds to disband. In each of these cases, personal existence – what Lacan calls the ego and what is otherwise termed ‘the narrative self’ – is betrayed by what lies beyond the mirror: that which is formless and abyssal, outside of reach, and yet at all times the nearest thing to us. To turn away from the mirror only to return towards it is to reattempt a restoration of the mirror’s broken surface. But all along, the attempt at re-personalizing things only reinforces the fundamental incompletion that belongs to the mirror, not as an accident in perception, but as an inscribable structure of its very existence. That which escapes the mirror is what also escapes our sense of self; namely that blind spot, taken up in the invisible gaze of the body, which can never catch sight of itself as a whole, given that there was never a unified whole to begin with.