Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the flickering nature of modernity through essays which in their various ways foreground one of the signature features of the modern era – anxiety. It is anxiety that emerges from the kaleidoscopic configurations as organizing the Gestalt of modernity. The book addresses the prophecies of fall and radical change as a latent expression of rudimentary anxiety. Modernity simultaneously craves and fears clairvoyance; it wants to see itself in a chain of onward-moving cultural and social stages, but at the same time it dreads losing its identity and, thus, its uniqueness. Therefore moments of lucidity have a double role in the culture of modernity. Endemic in modernity, cultural anxiety defies any direct reading, yet it has been discerned in numerous philosophical concepts.