Ugly Feelings by Sianne Ngai

Author:Sianne Ngai [Ngai, Sianne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2005-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 12

The Phenomenologist

The doubly projective nature of anxiety in Vertigo—an anxiety instigated by an encounter with negativity from which the male analyst, in what begins as a hermeneutic quest for knowledge about a woman, withdraws and veers away as thrown—comes very close to the nature of the anxiety linked to the demonstrative pronoun “there” [Da] in Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), where anxiety’s consubstantiality with a projective displacement elevates it to “a distinctive way in which Dasein [Being-there] is disclosed.” More specifically, this disclosure is that of Dasein’s “‘thrownness’ . . . into its ‘there’; indeed, it is thrown in such a way that . . . it is the ‘there.’ The expression ‘thrownness’ is meant to suggest the facticity of its being delivered over” (BT, 174). For Heidegger, all moods or statesof-mind—anxiety in particular—“disclose Dasein in its thrownness,” but do so primarily “in the manner of an evasive turning away” (BT, 175). The projective nature of Scottie’s anxiety thus bears a striking resemblance to the aversive trajectory Heidegger attributes to a mood (Stimmung) in general—as a mode of discovery based on self-distanciation: “In a state-of-mind Dasein is always brought before itself, and has always found itself, not in the sense of coming across itself by perceiving itself, but in the sense of finding itself in the mood that it has . . . in a way of finding which arises not so much from a direct seeking, as rather from a fleeing. The way in which the mood discloses is not one in which we look at thrownness, but one in which we [predominantly] turn away” (BT, 174).

For Heidegger, thrownness not only “has the character of throwing and of movement” (BT, 223) but entails a form of surrender to the holistic complex of “the world,” revealing its nature as a totality of contexts or involvements to which Dasein finds itself always already consigned, and hence “something by which [it] can be threatened.” “A state-of-mind not only discloses Dasein in its thrownness and its submission to that world which is disclosed with its own Being; it is itself the existential kind of Being in which Dasein constantly surrenders itself to the ‘world,’ and lets the ‘world’ ‘matter’ to it in such a way that somehow Dasein evades its very self” (BT, 178). We can thus find the affective organization of Scottie’s intellectual quest paralleled in what Pierre Bourdieu calls the “philosophically stylized pathos” of Heidegger’s analytic (PO, 10),28 insofar as both trajectories insist on and proceed from the externalizing structure of moods. As Charles Guignon observes, “for Heidegger moods are not ‘subjective” or ‘psychic’ in any sense”; neither are they “fleeting experiences which ‘color’ one’s whole ‘mental attitude.’”29 As such, moods cannot be grasped by turning “inward”: “Having a mood is not related to the psychical in the first instance, and is not itself an inner condition which then reaches forth in an enigmatical way and puts its mark on Things and persons.”30 Contrary to the widespread understanding of feeling,

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