COLLOQUIUM 3: Anxiety & politics: a phenomenological approach

Friday, November 18th 2022
• 5pm London time
• 18h Paris time
• 9 am San Francisco time

Bettina Bergo – About Anxiety: A Philosophical History

This presentation explores some of the challenges that philosophies of affect (and emotion) confront: empiricism versus theorization (including “transcendental” logics); the matter of naming emotions; the (unresolved/unresolvable) debate about the relationship between physical expression and felt affects — and the ‘universal’ legibility of so-called “basic affects.” After discussing these as they arise in my study, Anxiety: A Philosophical History (2021), I turn to the book’s epilogue, which concerns the thorny question of crowd formation and crowd affects (G. LeBon, Freud, F. Neumann; H. Broch), in contrast to crowd organization and crowd intelligence (in S. Reicher’s social psychology).

Dr. James Rizcoka (Durham University) will offer a response to Prof. Bergo’s work, drawing on his own expertise in the phenomenology of anxiety and the work of Merleau-Ponty.

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