Lorenzo Chiesa: Anxiety. Absence as a Presence, Elsewhere

Lecture as part of the Interdisciplinary symposium "Absence" at the Sigmund Freud Museum, 12.10.2024
Jacques Lacan has a detailed theory of anxiety, which spans at least three Seminars and culminates in Seminar X, Anxiety. He deals with phenomenological, structural, and ontological, if not ethical and political, aspects of anxiety. In this paper, I will mostly focus on the phenomenological aspect. What do we experience when we are anxious? This mundane question obviously has direct implications on the clinic of psychoanalysis, in terms of both how the analyst understands phenomena such as depersonalisation and how anxiety is constructively leveraged upon in the psychoanalytic treatment. Lacan claims that “anxiety emerges when something appears at the place of absence”. This is the place that constitutes, in self-consciousness, the subject of demand, and the object demanded as always lacking. Commentators tend to read this in a twofold manner. First, if in anxiety something appears in the place of absence, then anxiety amounts to the absence of absence as something. Second, anxiety would therefore stand for a “catastrophic reaction” that fixes absence and leads to de-subjectivation. I will argue that my stance on this is quite the opposite. First, in anxiety, “absence reveals itself for what it is” qua absence, and therefore cannot be reduced to something resulting from an absence of absence. Rather, what absence is “reveals itself [as a] presence elsewhere”, namely, the presence, elsewhere, of what Lacan calls object a. In anxiety, the subject sees itself elsewhere as an object seeing the subject back. This is for Lacan what Freud called Unheimlich, which is epitomised by the Wolf-Man dream. Second, anxiety is thus not a fixation of absence. It amounts on the contrary, in a still Freudian fashion, to a “’DANGER! signal” and thus a fundamental subjective defence. Absence is instead catastrophically fixed in the so-called passage-to-the-act, as epitomised by Freud’s case of the young homosexual woman, and her attempted suicide.
Lorenzo Chiesa is a philosopher who has published and taught extensively on psychoanalysis. His books on psychoanalysis include Subjectivity and Otherness (MIT Press, 2007); Lacan and Philosophy (Re.press, 2014); The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan (MIT Press, 2016); and The Virtual Point of Freedom (Northwestern University Press, 2016). He recently completed a new book (co-authored with Adrian Johnston), titled God Is Undead. Psychoanalysis for Unbelievers. He is currently writing a monograph on Lacan and Badiou, their formalised ontologies and psychoanalysis as a truth-procedure, tentatively titled Letter and Event. Lacan, Badiou, and the Future of Psychoanalysis. Presently, he is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Newcastle University, where he is also serving as co-convenor of the Faculty Research Group in Critical Theory and Practice. He was previously Professor of Modern European Thought at the University of Kent, where he founded and directed the Centre for Critical Thought. He held visiting positions at institutions in the UK, continental Europe, the US, and Asia, including The Freud Museum in London and The Freud’s Dream Museum in Saint Petersburg.