The Demonic Secret

Abstract

In contrast with many other aspects of emotional life, anxiety seems to bear a peculiarly tortured relationship with speech and language. Without our ever quite understanding how or why, it generates a sort of thick, affective clog that chokes us off from any means of articulating whatever it is that’s eating away at us. Why is this exactly? What is it about anxiety in particular that makes it so difficult for language to metabolize and work over the affect symbolically? Would it perhaps be helpful, for instance, to see it as a dimension of subjective life that somehow exists apart from, or independently of, language—something too radically individual and subjective to find expression in language’s universal, symbolic medium? One glaring shortcoming with such an approach would clearly be its failure to account for the way in which anxiety’s affect produces a split within the subject him-or herself, and not simply between the subject and a larger, symbolic community. In other words, the problem has much less to do with the fact that anxiety cuts me off from others than that it generates a sort of “extimate” opacity deep within me (Lacan 2006, 249), like a dark, sealed-up double of my own heart. Rather than a radically private aspect of my affective life that I fail to articulate, ‘my’ anxiety constitutes something that is “private [even] to me” (Visker 2008, 235, Visker’s italics), buried deep within me like a toxic foreign body that I struggle desperately to ‘spit out.’