Well. What do you know. Other people are also reading Heidegger. Glueboot says that, "When I first came across Heidegger's notion of anxiety and nothingness I felt as though someone had gripped me about the throat and started strangling me." There is a sophisticated and creative discussion in the comment box to the Heidegger post.

Over at The Poetics of Decay Dylan says that he was disappointed with Heidegger's account of anxiety in What is Metaphysics. He says:

"I am again disappointed by his lack of sensibility to the contingency of place when it comes to unearthing anxiety. Ascribing the nothing to the experience of anxiety, he thus reduces anxiety to something wholly universal, a state in which consciousness is lost ‘hovering’ in a state whose contents remain occult. Nevertheless, Heidegger is right to correlate the nothing with a sense of the uncanny through which the “repelling gesture” of being discloses itself, thereby allowing the strange facticity of Dasein to emerge. But that this should transpire through anxiety seems a misguided affectation on Heidegger’s behalf: “In the clear night of the nothing of anxiety the original openness of beings as such arises: that they are beings – and not nothing.”

And yet. There is something to the generality. The public mood of Australia is one of anxiety. It has been since the 1980s.

Can we put a finger on it?

Perhaps the effects of economic reforms to open up Australia to the global marketplace in the 1980s and 1990s. Then the whole indigenous landrights movement arising from Mabo in the 1990s Now terrorism after 2001. Looking back we can see that it a general state of anxiety in this place:a vague sense of foreboding that the country was going to the dogs.

Let me quote from a passage from a book I'm currently reading, Don Watson's Recollections of a Bleeding Heart. In it he is referring the moments after Keating ALP won the 1993 federal election agaisn the odds. Watson says that:

"Now that we had realised we had won, we also realised how profoundly we thought we must lose. The dread was in the marrow. The hand of the hangman had been stayed, but it felt more like the rope has snapped. Is it part of our design that as a sentence of death concentrates the mind so powerfully, some other part of us withers and dies. We had been in denial for so long no-one noticed that somewhere in our minds we had given up the ghost. That night it felt less like survival, than rebirth. We could have our life over again. The moment of victory was wonderful; it was also a species of trauma."

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