Anxiety and Lucidity

Leszek Koczanowicz is Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at the Faculty of Psychology, SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Poland. He is the author of Politics of Dialogue: Non-Consensual Democracy and Critical Community and Politics of Time: Dynamics of Identity in Post-Communist Poland and the co-editor of Democracy, Dialogue, Memory: Expression and Affect Beyond Consensus and Democracy in Dialogue, Dialogue in Democracy: The Politics of Dialogue in Theory and Practice.

"Anxiety may well be a hard-wired feature of the human condition, but there are certain periods that can be justly called, with a nod to W.H. Auden, a heightened ‘age of anxiety’. In this remarkable book, the distinguished Polish cultural and social theorist Leszek Koczanowicz draws on both his personal experiences and wide-ranging erudition to examine our own highly fraught era with a lucidity that, let us hope, won’t turn out to be terminal." - Martin Jay, U. of California, Berkeley"A deeply inspiring collection of culturally-rooted essays which, besides offering the pleasure of reading, produce an impression of patiently pushing the limits of darkness and mustering courage to face up to the unobvious." - Olga Tokarczuk, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018, and Winner of the Man Booker International Prize in 2018."That our modern society is one of risk and endemic anxiety has become evident in recent years, as we strain our minds to fathom a social order which appears to be both fixed and fragile, governed by immutable power structures yet liable to instantly undone by virus disease, migration, climate change, terrorism or unknown hostile forces. With Leszek Koczanowicz’s brilliant book we finally have a diagnosis to match and understand these constitutive cultural contradictions. In a suite of compelling chapters that boldly traverse history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, Koczanowicz charts a labyrinth of modernity, which the quixotic Western subject has tried to intensively penetrate and desperately escape." - Stefan Jonsson, author of A Brief History of the Masses, Crowds and Democracy and Eurafrica

• Introduction 1. Angor Animi: Or, on the Culture of Anxiety 2. Identity as a Nuisance: Two Genealogies of Modern Hamartia 3. A Gladioli Postcard: Memory and Communication 4. The Memories of Childhood in a Spectral World 5. Post-communism and Culture Wars 6. The Anxiety of Intimacy: Or, on Telling the Truth in the Age of the Internet 7. The Anxiety of Politics 8. The Magical Power of Art: The Subject, the Public Sphere, and Emancipation 9. Anxieties of Community 10. "Please, Don’t Be Angry, Happiness, that I Take You as My Due": Happiness in the Age of Democratization 11. "Mortal Generations": On Two Phenomenologies of Ageing – Cicero and Améry 12. The Anxiety of Clairvoyance: Terminal Lucidity and the End of Culture