Theater of Anxiety in Shelley's The Cenci and Musset's Lorenzaccio - Percy Shelley, Alfred de Musset

Criticism, Wntr, 2000 by Remy Roussetzki

   The crux of the matter is the initial displacement of the anxiety reaction
   from its origin in the situation of helplessness to the anticipation of the
   latter in the danger situation. There then ensue the further displacements
   from the danger itself to that which occasions the danger.(40)

Volatile, anxiety is transferable by nature and repetitive in structure. It may flare up at the remotest possibility of a loss. One does not have to step to "the very brink" of things to become anxious. The first step on the spiralling staircase will do. One does not have to be "poor Piranesi," nor even personally witness his paintings to participate in the contagion of his anxiety. One can, as did De Quincey, catch it from a third party. But note: De Quincey enjoyed Coleridge's talk. At several "steps" removed, anxiety had become interesting! The paradox is that anxiety keeps the subject (at least) one "step" removed from its cause, in other words, that it protects and sustains the life it seems to threaten, enabling the subject to survive in the interim. No matter how minuscule and lost, Piranesi still had a figure to lose!

Like the sublime, anxiety is at once good and bad. Lethal, since originally traumatic, anxiety is also what protects, like good magic, against the trauma. Anxiety follows the flexible logic of the apotropaic.(41) Jean-Pierre Vernant gives the example of the Gorgon whose petrifying gaze had to be avoided. Painted on masks and turned against the enemy, the huge eyes of the Medusa were ordinarily used by the Greeks as protection.(42) Freud, acutely aware of the ambivalent logic of the apotropaic, comments: "What arouses horror in oneself will produce the same effect upon the enemy against whom one is seeking to defend oneself."(43) Covered with hair/snakes, it is well known that the representation of Medusa offers Freud a graphic symbol of women's castration.(44) The proliferation of snakes-penises on the severed feminine head horrifies men insofar as they work, by contrast, as a sign of the lack in women.

Ambivalence, indirection, lack, and trauma are the key terms of this Freudian analysis of anxiety Taking it for granted, Lacan nonetheless revises Freud's analysis on one major point. In his Seminaire X: L'Angoisse, he considers that it is not the eventuality of a loss, but its exact opposite, the imminence of too much presence and at too close a range, that triggers anxiety in the subject. The lack, the real absence on (or around) which human beings survive as, Shelley said, "over a chasm," is essential, not only to life and sanity, but to desire. When the "at one step removed" is removed, "si le manque vient a manquer"; if the lack is lacking, then, instead of a desire to get closer to the real there arises anxiety before its claustrophobic insistence. Lacan, taking Freud's example of the growing child, says this quite brutally:

   ce n'est pas la nostalgie du sein maternel qui engendre l'angoisse, c'est
   son imminence, c'est ce qui annonce ... qu'on va y rentrer.... Ce qu'il y a
   de plus angoissant pour l'enfant, c'est que justement ce rapport sur lequel
   il s'institue du manque qui le fait desir, ce rapport est le plus perturbe
   quand il n'y a pas de possibilite du manque, quand la mere est tout le
   temps sur son dos.

   (it is not nostalgia for the mother's breast that arouses anxiety, but its
   imminence, that's what announces ... that one is about to return to it....
   What is most anxiety-provoking to the child, is that precisely that
   relation upon which the lack is instituted that turns it into desire, this
   relation is most troubled when there is no possibility of a lack, when the
   mother is constantly on the child's back.)(45)