ABSTRACT
The notion of dread is central to this work and the idea of dread has, of course, acquired a certain ontological significance within the Western intellectual tradition generally, and in the twentieth century in particular. The sociologist Anthony Giddens has asserted that 'doubt [...] permeates into everyday life as well as philosophical consciousness, and forms a general existential dimension of the contemporary social world' (Giddens 1991: 3). The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm has considered the role of existential anxiety in the manufacture of human aggression, quoting the work of anthropologists to the effect that existential dread might in some sense be vital to the formation of human subjectivity (Fromm 1997: 308-9).l For Kierkegaard, elemental dread defines the human 'struggle of being against non-being', a struggle that is provoked, not by the prospect of biological destruction, but by the possibility of a 'subjective death' entailing 'absolute uncertainty' (Kierkegaard 1944: 99). For the psychologist Winnicott, the human child exists 'on the brink of unthinkable anxiety' (Winnicott 1965: 86). For Heidegger, the awareness of one's being and its relation to the possibility of nonbeing is fundamental to the ontological awareness of the human subject: 'What about this nothing?' he asks, 'is it an accident that we talk this way so automatically? Is it only a manner of speaking - and nothing besides?' (Heidegger 1992: 95). For Freud, who reworks certain ontological issues within the context of psychoanalysis, anxiety as to death and castration is vital to the formation of human identity (Freud 1974).
