L'angoisse de penser

International audienceWe formulate the hypothesis that anxiety may be the passageway into writing in many modern texts, whether they be philosophical or literary. Whether we consider the im-power that Blanchot and Derrida explore, the vertigo of knowing "how to begin" that Beckett and Foucault evoke, the "abject experience" of psychoanalysis according to Lacan, or Levinas's shapeless swarming of being, it would seem that thinking in the 20th century was one of the forms of anxiety. Here, anxiety does not possess the familiarity of our intimate fears, as violent as they may be. These are nevertheless the same territories that writers and philosophers explore, that of the creative power of negativity - deconstruction (Derrida), disaster and "désoeuvrement" (Blanchot), dédit (Levinas), uncreation (Beckett), Lacan's litany of "There is no . . .", the end of man (Foucault). The following studies try to understand the experience of jubilant desubjectivization that the anxiety of thinking opens up - the ecstasy of "thinking outside of oneself"