Angst

As empirical research in neuro- and life sciences is aimed at the core of humanities, they adopt those formulas of pathos like “intention”, “mind”, “identity” or “consciousness” which, after all, have long been analysed with regard to their symbol-theoretical and media-anthropological principles. Meanwhile, cultural as well as media sciences have established themselves – beyond the contrasting ‘two cultures’ – as a kind of third culture of knowledge and thus connect to traditions of thought like, for instance, Freud’s theory of subjects or Benjamin’s theory of media.

The varied reception history of Victor Hugo’s novel L’Homme qui rit (1869) is outlined in the context of exemplary historicisations of the “laughing face”-character. This reconstruction deals with the interplay of aesthetics and passion, on the one hand, and with the effects of intermedia encounters of literature, photography and film, on the other. Not only the traditional naturalisation of medieval penalty practices (by defacing) is investigated, but also the modern media history of celebrities.

In 1747, a dispute arises amongst the scholars of Halle and Berlin as to whether that which is ghostlike does or does not force philosophical schemes of thought to open up systematically. In the course of this, accounts of apparitions without tangible reason connect freely with the acoustic and visual sensations accompanying the emergence of experimental physics. Now, as herolds of electricity, even ghosts become determinable as elementary foundations of issues in the history of civilization and technology.

This essay considers the theoretical attention that recent social theories show for wayward object relations and inquires as to how this adjusts to the philosophical occupation with the status of “things”. For while we find, at least since the 18th century and most notably with regard to epistemology, the dismissal of “the thing” as an ontological entity, this new attention, with its interest in material matters, seems, at first glance, to contradict that tradition.

Da das bis zu einem gewissen Punkt die Reflexion bestätigt, durch die ich meinen Diskurs eingeführt habe, die Reflexion von einem, der mir nahe steht in unserer psychoanalytischen Gesellschaft, scheint die Angst somit nicht das zu sein, was Ihnen den Atem nimmt, ich meine als Psychoanalytiker. Und doch ist es keine Übertreibung zu behaupten, dass es das sollte. Es liegt nämlich in der Logik der Dinge, das heißt der Beziehung, die Sie mit Ihrem Patienten haben. Zu spüren, was das Subjekt an Angst ertragen kann, stellt Sie jeden Augenblick auf die Probe. Es ist daher anzunehmen, dass zumindest für diejenigen unter Ihnen, die in der Technik ausgebildet sind, die Sache am Ende von Ihnen zu regeln sein wird, was am wenigsten erkannt wird, man muss es schon so sagen. […]

Es ist nicht unbedingt eine ›amüsante‹ Szene, die Lacan zu Beginn seines Seminars im Jahr 1962/63 heraufbeschwört. Ein Zauberer mit einer Tiermaske aus einer Höhle aus dem Mittleren Magdalénien1 tanzt vor einer riesenhaften mantis religiosa. Es ist unumgänglich, in diesem Apolog zum Seminar über die Angst die Wiederkehr von Motiven zu erkennen, die aus Texten von Georges Bataille, Salva dor Dalí oder Roger Caillois stammen – Motive, die den Kontext der speziellen Spielart des Surrealismus wachrufen, in dem sich Lacans frühe Texte in den dreißiger Jahren bewegt haben.[…]

From his earliest writings until into his old age, Freud was constantly occupied with the problem of fear. First, he tried to integrate fear as the recurrence of repressed memories into his framework. Subsequently to Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he revised his approach to fear which, then, he de ned as a reaction of the self to a danger. However, if fear is no longer under- stood as a consequence, but rather as a cause of repression, then fear appears as an uncanny “boundary creature“ (“Grenzwesen”, Freud) of psychoanalytic theory: intimate, though still alien in its intimacy.

Fear occurs in various forms: existential, pathological, physical and mental. This article gives a general survey of Freud’s and Lacan’s conceptions. While the founder of psychoanalysis conceives of fear mainly as a corporeal fear of castration, Lacan emphasises the more extended dimension of symbolic castration which is, through the concept of scarcity, directly connected with desire and fear. The pathological side of fear becomes apparent in the defence against existential fear, in phobias, that replace the unfathomable object of fear by a manageable one.

This essay deals with the question which kind of fear it is that terror plays with, or which kind of fear terror tries to generate. First of all, the classically philosophical distinction of “Angst” and “Furcht” in Heidegger and Kierkegaard is surveyed in order to, then, in distinction from these forms of fear and following Hobbes, identify the specifically political form of fear, namely that of terror. In the foreground of this identification stand the residues of political theology which nourish political terror.

Starting from the hypothesis that we are faced with pictures as dynamic entities and as actions, this article investigates scenes of (political) conflict and of fight in Pasolini’s films. Priority is given to the rhythmic quality of Pasolini’s vital realism, which also characterises his application of montage as a procedure of contamination. Abigioia – that abysmal joy, which is based on the fear of and the longing for the lost life – here determines the poetics of anachronistic and impure sacredness

Swarms are capable of informing the conceptual eld of ‘fear’ in two ways: Firstly, as space-dissolving diversities that create specific forms of fear and dread; secondly, as space- generating collectives whose dynamics become possible only through a fear-induced ‘density’. The modes of determination in this eld transform themselves from psychological to kineto-physical. And thus, an epistemic alignment is constituted, along which the relations of swarms to spaces facilitate new approaches of media to the conceptual eld of ‘fear’.

In retrospect of the scandal caused by the first performance of peeping tom in 1960, the “project” of Michael Powell’s prototypal se- rial killer is analysed from a media theoretical viewpoint. Mark Lewis kills women, because he wants to see their horrified expression in the moment of death and capture it on celluloid, employing an apparatus made of camera, stiletto and concave mirror. What exactly does Lewis want to spot in his victims’ eyes? And how would that involve the issue of voyeurism at the cinema?

Hideo Nakata’s film version of the ring sets up a remarkable constellation of technical and spiritualist media that has re-established the genre of psycho-horror films. The lm is not just about a ghost story but, unlike the novels by Kôji Suzuki, about a primeval scene of the fear of media that initiates the eventuation of a “video curse”, thereby raising the issue of the technology of fear as a history of media.

Present-day Science-Fiction films repeatedly describe an obliteration of boundaries be- tween human and other beings, and technical artefacts, which includes a threat to the human species. This motif relates to an anthropological fear of transformation of the human species due to advances in technology. This fear does not primarily refer to an invasion by extraterrestrial enemies, but to the anthropo-technization of man.