Uncertain Spectator(s)

December 6th 2010

Kierkegaard III: uncertain salvation

The French philosopher Jacques Derrida has reflected on the Greek word ‘pharmakon’, which appears in Plato’s dialogues. The pharmakon can be either a poison or a cure. Like our English word ‘drug’, it expresses a fundamental ambivalence: drugs can be life-threatening or life-saving. The hemlock that Socrates drinks when he is put to death exemplifies this dual quality, for it is a poison that kills him but in doing so cures him of life, releasing him from bondage to the body and allowing his soul to return to the eternal truths it loves.

In Kierkegaard’s philosophy, anxiety shares with Plato’s pharmakon this ambivalence. It is both a poisoned chalice and a saving cup. Even more paradoxically, anxiety is the cure for its own suffering. Anxiety can save us from ourselves. When Martin Heidegger quotes Hölderlin in writing – this time of modern technology – that ‘Where the danger lies, there the saving power also grows’, he echoes this Kierkegaardian interpretation of anxiety.

This is why ‘learning to be anxious,’ as Kierkegaard puts it, is such a potent process. The person who confronts his anxiety, perhaps through an encounter with himself, touches a ‘saving power’ within himself:

‘Then the assaults of anxiety, even though they be terrifying, will not be such that he flees from them. For him, anxiety becomes a serving spirit that against its will leads him where he wishes to go. Then, when it announces itself, when it cunningly pretends to have invented a new instrument of torture, far more terrible than anything before, he does not shrink back, and still less does he attempt to hold it off with noise and confusion; but he bids it welcome, greets it festively, and like Socrates who raised the poisoned cup, he shuts himself up with it and says as the patient would say to the surgeon when the painful operation is about to begin: Now I am ready. Then anxiety enters his soul and searches out everything and anxiously torments everything finite and petty out of him, and then it leads him where he wants to go.’

Here, anxiety is depicted as a soul-searching, soul-purifying, soul-saving pharmakon. We might not know whether we have souls, how to find them, or even what it means to speak of the soul. This is part of anxiety’s uncertainty. But it is also part of the search that anxiety carries out.

Derrida thinks that the ambiguity and ambivalence of the pharmakon is always undecidable, essentially uncertain. In anxiety, search and uncertainty correspond to one another. For Kierkegaard, this uncertain search is where faith begins, and probably where it always remains. The adventure of anxiety is the journey of the soul.

- Clare Carlisle

Posted at 10:20pm and tagged with: anxiety, one column, kierkegaard, derrida, philosophy, existentialism, submission,.

December 3rd 2010

Kierkegaard II: learning to be anxious

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On the question of anxiety, as on other questions, Kierkegaard inclines towards the paradoxical. Although anxiety is a problem for us, the solution is not to stop the anxiety, but to be anxious. At the end of The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard writes:

‘In one of Grimm’s fairy tales there is a story of a young man who goes in search of adventure in order to learn what it is to be in anxiety… This is an adventure that every human being must go through—to learn to be anxious in order that he may not perish either by never having been in anxiety or by succumbing in anxiety. Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.’

What is the right way to be anxious? And how can we learn it?

In the state of anxiety, we do not want to be who we are, where we are, how we are. In anxiety, we do not want to be at all. We try to deny or suppress our experience of anxiety, or else we run away from ourselves and from our anxiety. This can be done with the help of alcohol, drugs (legal or illegal), cigarettes, distraction, neurosis, or various illusions of security.

The alternative to this conditioned response of fight or flight is to be anxious: to remain in anxiety, to exist within it, to feel it fully without railing against it or seeking an escape route. In this way, the human being becomes acquainted with herself, perhaps for the first time. It’s like standing outside in a storm, feeling the rain soak through to the skin, listening to the thunder, watching the lightening flash without blinking.

Learning to be anxious in this way requires two things: courage and practice. For Kierkegaard, courage is as important a spiritual virtue as humility – in fact it is probably more important. Practicing courage in the face of anxiety can take many forms. As a Christian, Kierkegaard regarded prayer as the spiritual battlefield on which anxiety is confronted. In prayer, the struggle with anxiety uses the weapons of stillness and silence, and in other religious traditions there are practices, such as meditation, that confront anxiety in similar ways.

Likewise, Uncertain Spectator is a terrain for the confrontation with anxiety. It both stages the artists’ anxious encounters, and invites others to explore their inner experiences of spiritual flight or fight.

- Clare Carlisle

Posted at 10:16am and tagged with: anxiety, one column, philosophy, kierkegaard, submission,.

November 30th 2010

Kierkegaard I: finite and infinite

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In 1844 Søren Kierkegaard wrote a book called The Concept of Anxiety, where he suggests that the experience of anxiety isn’t just a response to external circumstances, but rooted in the very nature of the human being. We exist, therefore we are anxious. Even when there’s nothing to worry about.

Why might this be? According to Kierkegaard, the human being is a spiritual being: not just a mind and a body, but a being who is self-aware and self-desiring. We take up a relationship to ourselves, a relationship of consciousness and desire. This is what Kierkegaard means by spirit. We reflect on ourselves and seek to know ourselves, or we ignore ourselves. We want to be ourselves, or we do not want to be ourselves – we might want to be someone else, or perhaps no-one at all.

In The Concept of Anxiety Kierkegaard also writes that the human being is a synthesis of the finite and the infinite. We are finite, limited by our bodies and other material circumstances. We are limited by space and time: we cannot do or be everything at once. We are limited by our past, which shapes each present moment and cannot be altered. But we are also infinite, unlimited: our minds, and particularly our imaginations, can go anywhere and do anything. We live partly in the dimension of what Kierkegaard calls ‘possibility’. However much the past may shape us, we face an open future, an indefinite space and time of possibilities.

Kierkegaard’s psychology, and in particular his concept of anxiety, is based on this finite/infinite structure of the human spirit. Most of us, for the most part, he claims, do not want to be who we are. (This is an interpretation of the Christian doctrine of sin.) Insofar as we are finite, we rebel against our limitations, refusing to be confined. In tradition theology, this is understood as the sin of pride or self-assertion: St. Augustine saw this as the main sin that conditions all the others. Insofar as we are infinite, however, we shrink back from the open spaces, fleeing in the face of our freedom. This response is anxiety, and in Kierkegaard’s theology it joins pride as the second fundamental form of sin.

Kierkegaard thinks that we are, spiritually speaking, both agoraphobic and claustrophobic. We want boundaries, we want to transgress boundaries. We don’t want to be put in a box, we don’t want to climb out of the box. We do not want to be free, we do not want to be unfree. We do not want to be who we are.

- Clare Carlisle

Posted at 4:27pm and tagged with: anxiety, one column, kierkegaard, philosophy, psychology, submission,.

November 30th 2010

This Week’s Guest Blogger: Clare Carlisle

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We are please to announce our guest blogger for this week, Clare Carlisle. Clare Carlisle is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, UK, where she teaches courses in the philosophy of religion, ethics, and the history of philosophy. She is the author of three books on Kierkegaard, and the co-translator of Felix Ravaisson’s ‘Of Habit.’ She is currently working on her own book on the philosophy of habit, which will be published by Routledge in 2013.

Posted at 1:43pm and tagged with: anxiety, one column, kierkegaard, scholar, blogger, submission,.

November 12th 2010

The Anxiety of Curating

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I find myself in the paradoxical position of being anxious while realizing an exhibition whose subject is anxiety. Kierkegaard maintained that anxiety arose in the face of possibility; his now famous image of anxiety is that of a man standing at the edge of a precipice who is terrified by the fact that he could choose to throw himself over it. In keeping with this spirit of Kierkegaard’s thought, the artworks included in Uncertain Spectator look forward into potential futures, provoke possibility, and confront the sense of angst that may emerge as a result of that encounter.

Anxiety is not only the topic of Uncertain Spectator but is also an integral part of the curatorial process that led to its realization. At the core of curating exhibitions is a confrontation of potential: a process of resolving the contours of a conceptual framework, and the constellations of work that might be understood to fall within its purview. The act of selecting that forms the foundation of the curatorial process is a weighing of options, a coming to terms with potential meanings.

Leading up to the exhibition, the curator is in the position of advocating for something which is not yet seen, only envisioned. Beyond this there are the countless worries about the practical logistics of the exhibition (will the artworks make it through customs in time?) and its eventual reception by an audience (is the framework communicated effectively?).

As we enter into the last week of installation before the opening of Uncertain Spectator on Thursday, November 18th, these prospects loom large on the horizon, holding within themselves any number of potential futures.

- Emily Zimmerman, Assistant Curator

Shawn Snow installing Claire Fontaine’s Change (2006) as part of Uncertain Spectator at EMPAC.

Marie Sester’s commissioned work Fear prior to installation

Installation for Jesper Just’s A Vicious Undertow (2007)

Posted at 6:16pm and tagged with: anxiety, curating, one column, exhibition, Kierkegaard, installation, worry, submission,.