Anxiety and Lucidity Reflections on Culture in Times of Unrest Classical and Contemporary Social Theory Series

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.

Introduction 1. Angor Animi: Or, on the Culture of Anxiety 2. Identity as a Nuisance: Two Genealogies of Modern Hamartia 3. A Gladioli Postcard: Memory and Communication 4. The Memories of Childhood in a Spectral World 5. Post-communism and Culture Wars 6. The Anxiety of Intimacy: Or, on Telling the Truth in the Age of the Internet 7. The Anxiety of Politics 8. The Magical Power of Art: The Subject, the Public Sphere, and Emancipation 9. Anxieties of Community 10. "Please, Don’t Be Angry, Happiness, that I Take You as My Due": Happiness in the Age of Democratization 11. "Mortal Generations": On Two Phenomenologies of Ageing – Cicero and Améry 12. The Anxiety of Clairvoyance: Terminal Lucidity and the End of Culture

Leszek Koczanowicz is Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at the Faculty of Psychology, SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Poland. He is the author of Politics of Dialogue: Non-Consensual Democracy and Critical Community and Politics of Time: Dynamics of Identity in Post-Communist Poland and the co-editor of Democracy, Dialogue, Memory: Expression and Affect Beyond Consensus and Democracy in Dialogue, Dialogue in Democracy: The Politics of Dialogue in Theory and Practice.