Anxieties unleashed

It's anxiety day. Or a day of over-sharing. At any rate, the physicality of other people unnerves me. I hate it when I go into a bathroom and can smell the previous occupant. I don't mean the product of the other person. I mean their bodily aroma. Closely linked to this is the warm seat. Both mark the presence of another physical person in the space.

I don't get how masseurs, trainers, and yoga instructors can touch other people. How they can stretch them or bend them or massage them without getting overwhelmed by the physicality of the other. (I'm also not particularly huggy and loathe being touched by strangers and acquaintances; I do get a massage from time to time, so I'm inconsistent on that score.)

I don't know what's at stake here. Is it a sense that touching or being touched by one with whom one is not intimate seems a kind of disrespect, a violation of their autonomy and physical space? These aren't usually categories that I understand as informing my thinking. I don't think it has to do with the other's jouissance.

But, perhaps it has to do with my own. Joan Copjec, in her contribution to Lacan: The Silent Partners, writes:

It is our own jouissance which cannot be escaped, got rid of, even though we never manage to claim it as our own. It is jouissance that not only singularizes us, but also doubles and suffocates us.

And, she connects this to anxiety:

This sense of being overburdened and doubled by jouissance, of an embarrassed enchainment to an excessive body, or (once again) of being 'enclosed in a tight circle that smothers,' is the automatic result of the encounter with our own jouissance, with jouissance in its status--we can now state--as the object-cause of our desire.

And,

The edge on which anxiety touches is that of the unrealized, the 'thrust-aside" powers of the past that might have caused my personal history or history tout court--and thus me--to be otherwise.

So perhaps my anxiety marks a sense of shame regarding my specificity, the specificity of my enjoyment, an enjoyment that, as that part of me that I can never know, that is not precisely mine, separates me from an other. The embodied other confronts me with this, forcing a confrontation with my contigency, the fact that I could have been otherwise--which is also the fact that if I were otherwise, I would not be.

Comments

[hugh]

My feelings along those lines are linked to a sense of possible contagion, related to an sense of the porosity of one's boundaries (physical and mental). I feel like I have heard a more psychoanalytic reading of this, which I can't remember right now (for some reason...).

[graham lister]

get some fucking therapy for fuck's sake

[Jodi]

that's not very nice at all.