ABSTRACT

This book explores the nature of modern culture as a culture of anxiety, analyzing the modes in which such anxiety presents itself. Drawing on sociological and philosophical concepts of modernity, the author builds on the work of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud to offer an understanding of modern anxiety culture as the reverse side of risk culture, which stabilizes itself by concealing or making familiar the social phenomena of risk society. Through explorations of memory, politics, art, clairvoyance, notions of national community, and identity, this volume sheds light on the fissures in our culture where anxiety appears, thus revealing its underlying volatility. A study of the ruptures in our modern culture, Anxiety and Lucidity will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory, anthropology, and philosophy with interests in late modern culture.

chapter |2 pages

Introduction

chapter 1|13 pages

Angor animi

Or, on the culture of anxiety

chapter 2|15 pages

Identity as a nuisance

Two genealogies of modern hamartia

chapter 3|6 pages

A gladioli postcard

Memory and communication

chapter 5|12 pages

Post-communism and culture wars

chapter 6|12 pages

The anxiety of intimacy

Or, on telling the truth in the age of the Internet

chapter 7|15 pages

The anxiety of politics

chapter 8|14 pages

The magical power of art

The subject, the public sphere, and emancipation

chapter 9|10 pages

Anxieties of community

chapter 10|10 pages

“Please, don’t be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due”

Happiness in the age of democratization

chapter 11|13 pages

“Mortal generations”

On two phenomenologies of ageing – Cicero and Améry

chapter 12|36 pages

The anxiety of clairvoyance

Terminal lucidity and the end of culture