In his Seminar X, Lacan repeatedly advocates Kierkegaard’s thesis from The Concept of Anxiety according to which “woman is more anxious than man.” This claim brings us directly to the problem of the conceptual relation between anxiety and sexual difference. The aim of this talk is to show the inextricable connection between the above-mentioned claim (together with the conceptual context of Seminar X and Freud’s theory of repression) and Lacan’s discussion in Seminar XX on the so-called formulas of sexuation. For if it is possible to argue that the female anxiety is actually the anxiety of the Other since woman represents sexual difference for man, then it is also possible to link the more intense female anxiety to the fact that Lacan places the barred, inexistent Other, which stands for the inexistence of the sexual relation as such, on the female side of the formulas of sexuation. Anxiety of the Other is therefore inextricably related to the feminine mystical jouissance beyond the phallus and as such is irreducible to subjective anxiety, which is the affect of phallic jouissance.
Boštjan Nedoh is a research associate (PhD) at the Institute of Philosophy ZRC SAZU. He works at the intersection between contemporary continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, biopolitics, political theology and critical economic and social theories. Boštjan has published articles in domestic and international journal such as: Problemi, Filozofski vestnik, Časopis za kritiko znanosti, Law, Culture and the Humanities, Angelaki, Political Theology, Journal for Cultural Research and Paragraph. He is also the author of the book Ontology and Perversion: Deleuze, Agamben, Lacan (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2019), and a co-editor of the edited volumes Lacan and Deleuze: A Disjunctive Synthesis(Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and Objective Fictions: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Marxism(Edinburgh University Press, 2022). He has also delivered invited lectures at venues such as University of New Mexico (USA), University of Manchester, Lancaster University and Cardiff University.