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FROM ANXIETY TO BOREDOM: HEIDEGGER, FREUD, AND THE EMOTIONAL HISTORY OF SECULARIZATION by Avraham Rot A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland October 2016 Abstract While anxiety has been chiefly researched in the field of psychopathology, the phenomenon of boredom has been explored more extensively by positive and existential psychologists, behaviorists, literary critics and historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers. This disciplinary separation is both an expression of the difference between anxiety and boredom and a hindrance to the systematic study of this difference. This dissertation is an initial assessment of the significance and scope of this structural lacuna, conducted through the study of the intellectual history of the difference between anxiety and boredom. In particular, I show that Freud never worked out a theory of boredom because anxiety had been the implicit presupposition of his psychoanalytic psychology. I also demonstrate that due to the same rationale of mutual exclusion, Heidegger, who discussed both phenomena extensively, never considered them in juxtaposition. To explain the development of Freud’s and Heidegger’s thought, I draw a distinction between anxiety and boredom that is analogous to the distinction between fear and anxiety. While anxiety is fear without the perception of actual danger, boredom is anxiety without the experience of actual fear; and since there is no fear in boredom, there is no guilt in boredom. On the basis of these essential distinctions, I propose the historical hypothesis that there has been a transition from anxiety to boredom in late modernity and that this transition is the emotional aspect of the history of secularization. Thus the oft- observed and -commented upon phenomenon of the expansion of boredom is the direct product of the secularization of anxiety; and while boredom has expanded as a secularized, guiltless, and inherently non-pathological form of what used to be religious anxiety, anxiety has proliferated in the form of a diagnostic category in ii psychopathological discourse. This latter process complements the former and is but another aspect of the history of secularization, which, in antithesis to the expansion of boredom, shows how guilt and the belief in the possibility of sin have persisted in secular forms. Readers: Dr. Hent de Vries, Dr. Ruth Leys, Dr. Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Dr. Michael Williams, Dr. Samuel Moyn iii Acknowledgments For their generous guidance and unwavering support, I thank my advisors, Hent de Vries and Ruth Leys. Hent de Vries has inspired me to examine the religious origins of modern discursive and literary practices and it is by his example that I aspire in my work to the highest standards of precision, rigor, and sensitivity. Ruth Leys has shaped my thinking about the history of emotions. Through constant advice and feedback, she instilled in me the confidence to pursue this project from beginning to end. Her work on the history of the concepts of trauma and survivor guilt first drew me to apply to the Humanities Center, and her book From Guilt to Shame directly inspired this dissertation. Both have been devoted and encouraging mentors and their continuous involvement in my research played a pivotal role in bringing this project to fruition. The Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University is a unique enclave of negative entropy—aptly described as an “anomaly”—in the academic world where interdisciplinary research is made possible. Commitment to interdisciplinarity does not mean ignoring or dismissing disciplinary boundaries, but rather appreciating their significance, their historical and practical necessity, while nevertheless systematically prioritizing the demands of the subject matter and the research question over the demands that ensue from the arrangement of the sciences and the path-dependent nature of the institutional evolution of the modern educational system. Without such an appreciation, the notion of interdisciplinarity is empty, just like the freedom of indifference or whim. I am thus grateful to the Humanities Center for its true commitment to the values of interdisciplinarity and intellectual freedom; to Richard Macksey, its cofounder and longtime director; and again to Hent de Vries, its current director, who has fostered this institutional commitment, as well as an incredibly vibrant and stimulating scholarly atmosphere, making the Humanities Center what it is called and what it is. Without such a commitment, it would have been impossible to conduct this research, which engages with hermeneutic phenomenology, the history of psychiatry, and the sociology of religion and secularization. This work is therefore indebted, perhaps above all, to this institution. I owe thanks to other faculty members of the Humanities Center who supported me and gave me valuable advice at crucial junctures of my research: Orna Ophir, Yi-Ping Ong, Leonardo Lisi, Anne Eakin Moss, and Paola Marrati. I am also grateful to Yitzhak Melamed from the Philosophy Department for his ongoing support and guidance in understanding the place of the affects in Spinoza’s metaphysics. To Marva Philip, the administrative coordinator of the Humanities Center, I give special thanks for her much more than technical help, patience, and kindness. This research was facilitated by the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University. I thank Oded Fluss, my chavruta for the study of Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Deleuze, Freud, and others. The intellectual impetus of his friendship has influenced not only this work but also my entire intellectual development. I also thank Elena Fabietti, Martijn Buijs, and Tarek Dika for their friendship and generous comments on various draft chapters of this work, as well as Bahareh Moazen and Omid Mehrgan for their friendship, hospitality, and magnanimity. iv For the enjoyable and often long and intense conversations about the meaning of boredom, anxiety, and secularization, I thank my sister Bat-Sheva and my brother Yekutiel. For the no-less-insightful and pertinent conversations about language and identity and the intellectual atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, I thank my friend Marc Volovici. I am also grateful to Miguel Caballero Vázquez, Rubén Gallo, and the other members of the Psychoanalysis Reading Group at Princeton University for inspiring discussions and helpful feedback. Finally, I thank my family and especially my mother, who taught me that boredom is not a disease, as well as her mother, who taught her the same thing. Aviva, my love, I thank for her inspiration, criticism, and encouragement. I thank my father, who died almost two decades ago. As he lived his life as an orthodox Jew, I am not sure how he would appreciate the nature of this work, which is nonetheless dedicated to him. v Table of Contents Abstract .............................................................................................................................. ii Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................ iv Table of Contents ............................................................................................................. vi Abbreviations .................................................................................................................. vii Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 1 Part I: The Secularization of Kierkegaard’s Concept of Anxiety and the Transition from Anxiety to Boredom in Heidegger’s Thought ..................................................... 41 Chapter 1: The Hypothesis ..................................................................................................... 41 Chapter 2: The Secularization of Theological Concepts ...................................................... 57 (a) Secularization and Appropriation .................................................................................... 58 (b) From Sin to Guilt ............................................................................................................ 63 (c) From Guilt to Anxiety ..................................................................................................... 70 (d) From Anxiety to Boredom .............................................................................................. 78 Chapter 3: The Double Movement of Being and Time ......................................................... 94 (a) The Senses of Stimmung ................................................................................................. 95 (b) The Direction of Becoming More Profound (Richtung des Tieferwerdens): Mood (Stimmung), Determination (Bestimmung), and Affectedness (Befindlichkeit) ............ 105 (c) Between Indifference and Boredom .............................................................................. 111 (d) The Suspension of Temporality in Being and Time and the Ensuing Authentic- Inauthentic Oscillation .................................................................................................. 120 (e) The Univocity of Authenticity and the “Who” of Being and Time ............................... 134 (f) Repetition, Repetition ................................................................................................... 143 (g) Repetition by Way of Secularization ...........................................................................
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