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April 20, 2004
Dylan over at The Poetics of Decay makes the following comment. He says that he has:
"...criticised Heidegger’s notion that anxiety discloses the nothing on account of the absence of self involved. From my own perspective, an element of ambiguity must arise so that consciousness can simultaneously hold itself out into nothingness whilst still retaining the reflective faculty of self-consciousness in order to gratify itself through gradual negation. I mistrust Heidegger’s reading of anxiety for the reason that he used it as a mantelpiece to extol his fixation on being qua being. There the desire to disclose the ‘totality’ of being through anxiety takes precedence. When Heidegger therefore speaks of the dormant groundlessness of being, then whilst taking Hegel’s “Pure Being and pure Nothing are the same thing” to its logical conclusion, it is quite possible that the term giddiness would have served better, a term which the Existentialists would later use to emphasize the indeterminacy of freedom to their own merit."
The significance of the account of anxiety I gave in the previous post is that subjectivity was one of being overwhelmed.
Those in the Keating Government were overwhelmed by the dread of the hangman's rope.
We ordinary folk felt passive and helpless as global forces swept through the country transforming our way of life and leaving many of us stranded without jobs.
The working poor were overwhelmed by the grind of poverty as the price of essential services went up from privatisation, people could only obtain casual/seasonal jobs at best and they were able to put less and less food on the table during the recession of the early 1990s.
Subjectivity was caught up in this overall general anxiety that had no name and so it was akin to a nothing. The self is swept along by both the global economic forces that had been unleashed by opening Australia to the global economy, and the political reaction to those forces from being forced to carry the adjustment burden of microeconomic reform.
If you remember during that decade of reform the pointy head economists talked about restructuring and adjustment of the economy nonstop. The economy was the main game. For this puritan economic ethic it was about getting the economic essentials right. Everything else was decoration.
Little consideration was given to the human experience of it all. That was dismissed as bleeding heart psychology. So Heidegger fills the vacuum.
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