Anxiety

Bettina Bergo is Professor of Philosophy at the Université de Montréal, and author of Levinas between Ethics and Politics (Springer, 1999) and co-editor of several collections, including Levinas and Nietzsche: After the Death of a Certain God (Columbia University Press, 2008). She has translated works from Emmanuel Levinas, Marlène Zarader, and Didier Franck, among others. She is the author of numerous articles on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, the history of psychology, and in critical race theory.

• Introduction: The Ambiguities of Anxiety: Select History of a Theme in 19th century and 20th Century Philosophy and PsychologyChapter 1. The New Philosophy: Kant's Transcendental Revolution and the Fate of Emotions in German PhilosophyExcursus I. From Kant to Hegel via Philippe PinelChapter 2. Anxiety, Freedom, and Evil: Schelling and Groundless LifeChapter 3. The Dialectics of Affect: Anxiety and Despair in KierkegaardExcursus II. The Universality of Emotions? Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)Chapter 4. Schopenhauer, Life, and the Affects of the Noumenal Chapter 5. Nietzsche and the Intensification of the Dialectic of Anxiety: Mourning and TransvaluationChapter 6. Freud and the Three AnxietiesExcursus III: Husserl: The Problem of Affective Forces, Einfühlung, and a Phenomenological Un-consciousChapter 7. Heidegger I: Angst in Heidegger's Fundamental Ontology: The Debts to Husserl and KierkegaardChapter 8. Heidegger II Angst, the Temporalization of Dasein, and the Temporality of "Life" Chapter 9. Emmanuel Levinas and the Anxiety of Intersubjective OriginsGeneral Conclusion

...what stands out is [Bergo's] capacity to inflect familiar material with uncanny resonances, without much editorial prodding. The Nietzsche we encounter here, for example, is one concerned with 'two pairs of anxiety': embodied pathos and reactive resentment, as well as mourning the death of God and rendering it the 'ultimate transvaluation' through eternal recurrence. The result is a demystified, non-reductive picture of Nietzsche that is theologically unavoidable and plausibly resonant with current conceptions of emergent consciousness. Later in the book, it is refreshing to see Husserl's work on time consciousness and passive synthesis described so clearly and with such a suggestive eye toward the theme of affect. In Bergo's account, we get a convincing sense both of his setting a 'new formal groundwork for psychology,' and of his role as a target for subsequent deformalizing dismantlings.