Anxiety and the Contradictions of Culture

A Lacanian Approach to Gaze, Sex, Race, and Social Change

Anxiety and the Contradictions of Culture explores anxiety from the perspective of Lacan’s claim that anxiety is a “signal of the Real.” Showing how our relationship with anxiety is intertwined with our fantasies, Felder unpacks how anxiety is related to the gaze, sex, race, and our capacity for social change.

Anxiety as not only a feeling of dread, but a feeling that we dread is widely considered by both philosophical and psychoanalytic thinkers as an important signal related to our experience of the cultural and intersubjective world. Stephen Felder explores the experience of anxiety through the writings of the existentialist, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic traditions, especially Jacques Lacan, to make sense out of this dreadful experience. Working from Lacan’s claim that the structure of anxiety and fantasy are the same, Felder shows that anxiety is a signal of the Lacanian Real and thus provides us with a point of view from which to critique the cultural world by clarifying how we experience ourselves and others. The chapters examine the implications of this insight for how we think about the visual field, sex, race, consumerism, and what Stuart Hall called the “contradictions of culture” in our attempts to live more vibrant lives and create more emancipatory practices in the twenty-first century.

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