From the Phenomenology of Horror to the Phenomenology of Anxiety: Bibikhin, Heidegger and Overcoming of Correlationism

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to construct a new phenomenology that will be able to bring us back to things themselves, as Edmund Husserl had promised to his students. Such a phenomenology seeks to reveal and describe phenomena and the conditions of givenness which presuppose a failure of the subject’s capacity for representation and therefore permits an apprehension of something that exists as radically external to the subject. Description of such phenomena paves the way to undermining correlationism from the inside, and a phenomenology of this kind therefore feeds into what is termed speculative realism. Thе paper takes as a starting point Dylan Trigg’s phenomenology of horror, although it lacks a conceptual analysis of horrifying phenomena, and brings Jean-Luc Marion’s concept of a saturated phenomenon to bear on the conceptual analysis of horrifying phenomena. In addition to a phenomenology of horror, the paper also argues for an escape from correlationism by analyzing the feeling of anxiety. By means of a critical analysis of Vladimir Bibikhin’s translation of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, the paper establishes a phenomenological distinction between anxiety and horror. The phenomenon of one’s own death is analyzed as a fundamental phenomenon of anxiety. The analysis of the phenomenon of one’s own death introduces the new concept of a perverse phenomenon, which complements Marion’s classification of all possible phenomena. The paper erects a conceptual scheme to describe feelings of horror and anxiety, further analysis of which will enable phenomenology to transition from the life of consciousness to reality-as-it-is. The paper’s concludes with an indication of the phenomena of contemporary culture that should become primary objects of a realistic phenomenology of horror and anxiety.