Anxiety of Modernity: Kiarostami with Lacan

This is a lightly edited excerpt from Joan Copjec’s Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran, Kiarostami/Corbin/Lacan, published by MIT Press.

We know that modernity was founded on a definitive break with the authority of our ancestors, who were no longer conceived as the ground for our actions or beliefs. Contrary to expectations, however, supposedly malleable modern man found himself stuck to something; something tore him away from the free-flowing current of modern life. It is as if a drain hole were inexplicably opened in the modern world, lending our fleeting “temporal existence … the inexpressible flavor of the absolute” and giving rise to “an acute feeling of being held fast.”1 That this riveting or reterritorialization is a confounding fact of modern life, and no mere theoretical abstraction, is evidenced most emphatically in all the stubborn outbreaks of national, ethnic, racial, and religious loyalties at a moment when such loyalties were expected to be dissolved by the deterritorializing thrust of global capitalism.

The undermining of their authority confronted us with another difficulty; it is as if in rendering our ancestors fallible we had transformed the past from the repository of their already accomplished deeds and discovered truths into a kind of holding cell of all that was unactualized and unthought. Suddenly, it was the desire of our ancestors and thus the virtual past, the past that had never come to pass or had not yet been completed, that weighed disturbingly on us.

The theorization of this unfinished past was focused in the West around the concept of anxiety.2 If it seemed necessary to come to terms theoretically with anxiety—as it did to Kierkegaard, Freud, and Heidegger, among others—this is because this affect bore witness to an altered relation to a past now conceived as incompletely actualized. The assumption that modern man would become pliable (to market forces or even to the force of his own will) rested on the belief that the break with the authoritative past placed a zero in the denominator of our foundations, rooted us in, or attached us to—precisely nothing. But anxiety, the affect that arises in moments when radical breaks in the continuity of existence occur, belies this assumption; rather, subjects find themselves to be “not without roots,” which is significantly different from feeling rooted in the past, to a race or ethnicity that is transparent to us. For what is affirmed in the experience of being riveted is nothing that can be objectified or personalized as one’s own.3 On the contrary, it is the experience of being attached to a “prehistoric Other that it is impossible to forget,” even if—in being without attributes—it offers us nothing to remember.4

It has been observed that anxiety often overtakes revolutionaries immediately after revolutions and seems not to free but to paralyze the hand that would draft a new constitution. What accounts for this curious phenomenon? While many psychoanalysts were insisting that anxiety was an affective response to loss or abandonment, Freud reasoned that this could not be so, since the proper response to loss would be mourning, not anxiety. Like Freud, the philosophers mentioned maintained that anxiety does not depend on any actual condition, albeit one of loss, but rather on “a condition that is not.” Kierkegaard offers a clarifying illustration of the difference: the feeling of anxiety is not captured, he says, by the complaint “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” but rather by the entreaty “Whatever you are going to do, do quickly!”5 Anxiety is not the experience of a loss that has occurred; it is the experience of some impending event, the anticipation of something that, while connected to what precedes us, has not yet happened. It is the looming of the unknown, the awakening of a possibility whose contours are indiscernible.

In other words, the break instituted by modernity did not render the past totally dead to us. It did not abandon us to a solitary present divorced from the past but handed us over to a present that felt overpopulated—not, as is usually said, because of the increasing density of cities or our bombardment by an increasing number of new stimuli but because we seemed to be parasitized by an excess that refused to disclose itself to us. Anxiety is the feeling of being stuck to an excess which we can neither separate ourselves from nor lay claim to, of being tied to a past that, not having happened, cannot be shed. Our implication in the past thus took on a different complexion. For while formerly a subject’s ties to her past may have seemed rigidly binding, they were experienced as external, as of the order of simple constraint. One had to submit to a destiny one did not elect and often experienced as unjust. But one could—like Job or the heroes and heroines of classical tragedies—rail against one’s destiny, curse one’s fate.

With modernity, this is no longer possible. The “God of destiny” is now dead, and we no longer inherit the debts of our ancestors but become that debt. We cannot distance ourselves sufficiently from the desire of our ancestors to curse the fate it hands us but must, as Lacan put it, “bear as jouissance the injustice that horrifies us.”6 “Jouissance”—roughly equivalent to Freud’s libido—names a capacity to alter our destiny. And yet this is not a capacity we can possess. It is something horrifying; a monstrous otherness not at our disposal but something to be suffered.

If we think once more of the revolutionary whose hand is paralyzed by anxiety, we will see how closely Lacan’s account hews to Freud’s account of anxiety. If, stricken by anxiety, my hand goes on strike, refuses to write, this is because it has become saturated with libido, gripped by jouissance. My hand behaves, Freud explains, like a maid who, having begun a love affair with her master, refuses to continue doing her household chores.7 In the moment of anxiety, one loses one’s taste for ordinary, routinized life: cooking, cleaning, all practical interests. It is this automatic way of life that is paralyzed by anxiety. However, this analogy is, as Freud himself says, “rather absurd,” insofar as it fails to account for the real situation of the maid, who, while torn away from her mundane duties, is now bound to a terrible, inscrutable master: her own libido, or potentiality. Elsewhere, Freud will dispense with the analogy and define anxiety more straightforwardly as fear of one’s own libido.8 As with Melville’s Bartleby—the scrivener who goes on strike, refuses to write—we are struck by the involuted refusal “I would prefer not to,” a flash of potentiality that will not unfold itself but manifests itself only in paralysis.

Abbas Kiarostami’s protagonists exhibit a paralysis of this kind, one occasioned by their inability to comprehend the desire of their ancestors and thus their own place in the very culture to which they nevertheless maintain a feeling of anonymous belonging. One of the primary locations in The Wind Will Carry Us is a cemetery to which Behzad continuously repairs to pick up a stronger cell phone signal and where Youssef, a gravedigger, continuously digs, remaining thus underground and invisible throughout most of the film. We surmise that the purpose of his efforts is ultimately the installation of a telecommunications tower, but since Mrs. Malek is on the verge of death, the digging simultaneously hints at preparations for her funeral. That a burial ground would become the site of telecommunication efforts bespeaks an anxiety attendant upon the loss of any clear signals issuing from a past that remains inscrutable.

Eventually, the earth caves in on Youssef, who must be dug out.

The unsteadiness of the ground is not unique to this film; it is a constant in Kiarostami’s work, where the salient characteristic of the earth is its unsteadiness: it is always caving in, buckling, quaking.9 The ground in many of his films is ungrounded, hollowed out—or more precisely, made to resemble catacombs. While earthquakes are a difficult geographical fact of life in Iran, Kiarostami’s continuous reference to this datum in many of his films turns it into a fact of another order. No longer just an uncompromising truth of the terrain, it becomes a cultural fact whose meaning cannot be unearthed. Like the past buried in it, the ground turns out in Kiarostami’s world to be active and shifting, an unsettled affair. It is as if the past itself were under construction in his films.

In The Wind Will Carry Us, it is not only Youssef who remains invisible to us throughout the film; several characters—eleven by Kiarostami’s count—remain out of frame and thus unseen. Asked by an interviewer what these curiously insistent visual absences signified, Kiarostami replied that the film was about “beings without being.”10 In Where Is the Friend’s House? (1986), “being without being”—that is, being that is not but which, remaining unrealized, perplexes characters by affixing itself to them—assumes the form of a notebook that a young schoolboy is certain is not his own, though it appears in all particulars exactly like his. He spends most of the film trying unsuccessfully to return it, mysteriously deciding in the end not to give it back to its ostensible owner. Effectively, the notebook has no exclusive owner but becomes the bond between the two students.

In Taste of Cherry (1997), the anxiety-provoking element fails to take the form of a putative object and instead infuses the film with a perplexing textual opacity. The film follows a middle-aged man, Mr. Badii, who has no discernible reason for discontent (far from it) and yet spends the entire film trying to find an accomplice to his suicide, one who will promise to cover him with twenty shovelfuls of dirt and double-check to make sure he is really and truly dead. From this, we suspect that Mr. Badii is bothered by a fear of being buried alive. It is as if he were trying not simply to kill himself but to extinguish some surplus of self that does not respond to his wishes and thus impresses him as capable of surviving even his death.

Speaking in an interview about Taste of Cherry, Kiarostami offered this comment: “The choice of death is the only prerogative possible … because everything in our lives has been imposed by birth … our parents, our home, our nationality, our build, the color of our skin, our culture.”11 Though Mr. Badii has no personal complaint, the thick presence of militia, the oppressive evidence of poverty, and the dust of industrialization visible in the urban perimeter through which he drives suggest choking. His suicide is thus readable as an attempt to escape the suffocation brought on by a world where one’s identity is laid down by authorities who leave no room for freedom, no chance to choose what form one’s life will take. And yet, if that which is imposed on us by birth is as enigmatic as Kiarostami’s films tell us it is, then the rigidity of a life laid out by law must be read as a means of dodging a more primary experience, that of anxiety, which is stirred in us by an encounter with our capacity to break from this rigidity.12 What Mr. Badii cannot abide is being riveted to the inscrutable desire of his ancestors, imposed on him by his birth into a culture that appears radically heteroclite. It is the incomprehensibility of “unrealized being,” of his own potentiality, which suffocates him. He seeks through suicide to escape not the actual restrictions his culture imposes, but the overcrowded space in which he finds himself bound to its unreadable imperative.