Anxiety and Lucidity

"Anxiety may well be a hard-wired feature of the human condition, but there are certain periods that can be justly called, with a nod to W.H. Auden, a heightened ‘age of anxiety’. In this remarkable book, the distinguished Polish cultural and social theorist Leszek Koczanowicz draws on both his personal experiences and wide-ranging erudition to examine our own highly fraught era with a lucidity that, let us hope, won’t turn out to be terminal."- Martin Jay, U. of California, Berkeley

"A deeply inspiring collection of culturally-rooted essays which, besides offering the pleasure of reading, produce an impression of patiently pushing the limits of darkness and mustering courage to face up to the unobvious."- Olga Tokarczuk, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018, and Winner of the Man Booker International Prize in 2018.

"That our modern society is one of risk and endemic anxiety has become evident in recent years, as we strain our minds to fathom a social order which appears to be both fixed and fragile, governed by immutable power structures yet liable to instantly undone by virus disease, migration, climate change, terrorism or unknown hostile forces. With Leszek Koczanowicz’s brilliant book we finally have a diagnosis to match and understand these constitutive cultural contradictions. In a suite of compelling chapters that boldly traverse history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, Koczanowicz charts a labyrinth of modernity, which the quixotic Western subject has tried to intensively penetrate and desperately escape."- Stefan Jonsson, author of A Brief History of the Masses, Crowds and Democracy and Eurafrica

"Anxiety may well be a hard-wired feature of the human condition, but there are certain periods that can be justly called, with a nod to W.H. Auden, a heightened ‘age of anxiety’. In this remarkable book, the distinguished Polish cultural and social theorist Leszek Koczanowicz draws on both his personal experiences and wide-ranging erudition to examine our own highly fraught era with a lucidity that, let us hope, won’t turn out to be terminal."- Martin Jay, U. of California, Berkeley.

"A deeply inspiring collection of culturally-rooted essays which, besides offering the pleasure of reading, produce an impression of patiently pushing the limits of darkness and mustering courage to face up to the unobvious."- Olga Tokarczuk, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018, and Winner of the Man Booker International Prize in 2018.

"That our modern society is one of risk and endemic anxiety has become evident in recent years, as we strain our minds to fathom a social order which appears to be both fixed and fragile, governed by immutable power structures yet liable to be instantly undone by virus disease, migration, climate change, terrorism, or unknown hostile forces. With Leszek Koczanowicz’s brilliant book we finally have a diagnosis to match and understand these constitutive cultural contradictions. In a suite of compelling chapters that boldly traverse history, psychology, sociology, and philosophy, Koczanowicz charts a labyrinth of modernity, which the quixotic Western subject has tried to intensively penetrate and desperately escape."- Stefan Jonsson, author of A Brief History of the Masses, Crowds and Democracy and Eurafrica.