ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to systematize and elaborate on the notion of modern fear as such. Modern fear involves two distinct, yet complementary, components: an anxiety that springs from the perception that a particular cultural formation is coming to an end and a phantasmal anxiety that, paradoxically, offers a refuge against the disclosure of truth about our cultural and social situation. Describing the former, I build on the medical concept of angor animi. Angor animi is a sensation of actually dying – the patient telling the doctor that s/he is dying at this very moment. The deep conviction that what is going on is, in fact, the process of dying is the axial symptom of the syndrome. It distinguishes angor animi from the fear of death and a death wish. Removed from the medical context and transplanted onto the social one, angor animi metaphorically renders a particular social situation characterized by the belief in imminent obliteration. This certainty of death may haunt not only individuals, but also cultures, societies, and communities. They may all experience a sense of smothering agony, constriction, and tension relievable only by death. The latter kind of modern fear is usefully intimated in Henry James’s novella The Beast in the Jungle, whose protagonist lives in constant anxiety that a terrible thing is bound to happen to him. The only person in whom he confides is a woman who deeply loves him. As years go by, nothing changes in their lives until the woman dies. At this point, the protagonist belatedly realizes that he has squandered his life in delusional anxiety, which has effectively prevented him from confronting reality. The recognition of the erroneousness of his life heralds, at the same time, its end – angor animi. Angor animi is a moment of truth, a clash with reality which comes to pass at the price of annihilation. The failure is caused by misjudging one’s situation – the sense of being “out of place” that pervades modernity.
