the uncanny body
Anxiety as Atavism
Dylan Trigg
(….)From the wilderness of prehistoric Africa to the aisles of urban supermarkets, the human’s “phylogenetically endowed” (Freud) anxieties materializes as remnants of a lost world. All that has (largely) changed from the Stone Age is the objective absence of danger: what remains in place is the body’s attunement to threat, its commitment to fight or flight in the face of a threat that is no longer there. Heidegger was right on one thing, therefore: anxiety discloses the fact that not-being-at-home is primordial. Only his neglect of the body led his reason astray. The anxious body is the principal manifestation of a body that is responsive to a phantom world, stored deep in the anonymous structure of its genetic history and thus resistant to cultural and sociological changes, yet never immediately accessible to the experiencing self. For the phobic, anxiety is an outgrowth of a response that no longer serves any strict purpose. To phrase phobia as a “pathology,” therefore, is patently absurd: it is not that the experience of phobia or panic is somehow “irrational” or “illegitimate.” Rather, if “healthy” anxiety corresponds to tangible threat, then what is “atypical” about phobic anxiety is that it corresponds to a no longer existing world. This is the uncanniness of the uncanny body: uncanny because the experience of anxiety is both of the body but simultaneously other than the body.
very familiar with this concept; bookmarking for interference-fringing of theory (cf my italics) & sourcing
