Tracés, n°38/2020

While anxiety as a category is abundantly mobilized to designate a bodily sensation of malaise peculiar to the individual, this issue of Traces proposes to examine anxiety as a regime of experience in the face of uncertainty, using the tools no longer of psychoanalysis but of the human and social sciences. The articles in the issue thus address the logics underlying the modes of manifestation of anxiety, taking into account their dimensions, which are at once corporeal, discursive and aesthetic, in original articles, an interview and a graphic work. The editorial returns in particular to the question of the socially situated character of the expression of anguish, depending both on an institutional context and individual dispositions, but also on their gendered character. However, the analysis of the manifestations of anxiety implies first of all to question the conditions of its objectification in medical discourse but also by the human and social sciences taken in their diversity. In this history, decolonial perspectives hold a prominent place, constructing the link between the anguished decompensation of the subject and the destructuring of society. Exploring the capture of the category of anguish at the bedside of a dying woman, a member of Singapore's colonial elite, enseignant∙es and musicien∙es, a child psychiatrist confronted with the suffering of children facing sexual assignment, the issue analyzes the practical modulations of a perceptual category and their political implications. From subjective, anguish thus turns out to be an emotional regime underlying human action, shared in a given space and time. The perspectives opened up by the original contributions of this issue, beyond psychoanalysis and existentialist philosophy, thus invite us to think of anguish as the epistemic intelligence of a disturbing horizon of uncertainty. With this conception, it is indeed the subject as it is taken up by emotion, in a community of life and experience, and as the subject of action, that is given to read all the articles gathered together.