Mediated Anxieties, Anxious Mediations

Catalog description

What is anxiety? Far from constituting merely a fleeting feeling, a negative emotion, or a “minor affect” (Ngai), anxiety lies at the very foundation of modernity’s structures of spectatorship, theories of subjectivity, and interpretive methods. Bridging the history and philosophy of medicine, film studies, and digital media theory, this course will take anxiety as a conceptual lens through which to examine current debates in media studies and critical theory. We will ask: is anxiety particular to current subject formations and media ecologies within what is called ‘modernity’ and its afterlives, or is it a transhistorical phenomenon constitutive of subjectivity itself? How does anxiety emerge from and destabilize ideological formations? We will engage theoretical and cinematic texts as well as paintings, photographs, and digital platforms. Authors covered include Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Simmel, Heidegger, Lacan, Fanon, Barthes, Bazin, Derrida, Sedgwick, Kornbluh.