At the Limits of Willing: Anticipatory Attunements and Mooded Backgrounds

ABSTRACT

This article proceeds along three interlinked pathways of thinking about the ‘will.’ First, a phenomenological analysis of willing is explored that pays special attention to what Edmund Husserl termed the background of willing – namely, the always already present existential conditions within which particular experiences of willing unfold. Second, further reflection upon the background of willing is advanced to consider how experiences of willing relate to other ongoing forms of worldly attunement, such as those that are evidenced in moods. Third, three distinct examples of despair as a mooded background of willing are analysed. These examples range from Bourdieu’s description of postwar unemployment to Bukowski’s reflections on his early working life to an exploration of despair and the limits of willing on the island of Yap, Federated States of Micronesia.

KEYWORDS:

• Heidegger
• Husserl
• mood
• phenomenology
• will

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A few notable exceptions that were published in and around the time that our initial panel first convened include Rapport 2003, Robbins 2004, and Mahmood 2001. See Murphy and Throop 2010b for a historical discussion of anthropology’s treatment of willing.

2 The experience of “I might or might not be able to” can indeed arise in a complexly layered way as an uneven embodied sedimentation. As Iris Marion Young observed in her influential discussion of feminine bodily comportment, “To the extent that feminine bodily existence is an inhibited intentionality, however, the same set of possibilities which appears coorelative [sic] to its intentions also appears as a system of frustrations correlative to its hesitancies. By repressing or withholding its own motile energy, feminine bodily existence frequently projects an ‘I can’ and an ‘I cannot’ with respect to the very same end. When the woman enters a task with inhibited intentionality, she projects the possibilities of that task, thus projects an ‘I can’ – but projects them merely as the possibilities of ‘someone,’ and not truly her possibilities – and thus projects an “I cannot” (1980: 147). In my own terminology, the phenomenological vector of “mineness” is cleft through a hybrid melding of an abstract thematization of another’s capacities with the limits of one’s own. In Young’s terminology, this results in a form inhibited intentionality (which is coupled with the ambiguous transcendence and discontinuous unity of the body (1980: 146-147).

3 According to Heidegger (1995), the other equiprimordially constitutive way that Dasein is it’s there, is understanding (Verstehen).

4 Husserl’s early engagement with moods is found in the so-called M-manuscripts which span the years of 1900-1914; Heidegger began working as Husserl’s assistant in 1919 and there is some evidence that in this capacity, he had access to Husserl’s manuscripts on mood (see Lee 1998)

5 It is in the context of the so-called M-manuscripts (1900-1914), which Husserl began working on soon after the publication of his Logical Investigations, that this intermediary property of feelings is examined again, explicitly in the context of a phenomenological analysis of moods.

6 In this respect my approach to despair is antithetical to Kierkegaard’s view of despair as ultimately representing an unrecognized but yet still “willful not wanting to be oneself” – as a turning away from salvation.

7 As an anonymous reviewer of this article suggested, Sigmund Freud’s classic work on mourning and melancholia has potential relevance for the take on despair advanced in this piece. In Freud’s view, the work of mourning slowly transforms possibilities for re-inhabiting the world through a process of letting go of the various and complex attachments to the deceased that continue to flow along even now that they are gone. The possibility for moving forward into a future without the one who has died thus rests upon the ability to reengage reality in novel ways that are not predicated upon the ways in which we once inhabited the world with the one who has died. In Freud’s language, the libido shifts to an entirely “new object of love” (1957: 244). When contrasted with melancholia, a mood in which the lost object remains largely unconscious and an unflinching self-criticism is added to the various painful experiences that it shares with mourning, such a letting go never takes place and the mood does not thus ever easily resolve. The work of melancholia in the wake of death, as contrasted with mourning, is thus founded upon its efforts to keep a hold on to the connection to the lost loved one, carrying their style of existence, as well as the pain of that loss, onward into the future even despite their death. To the extent that melancholia is responsive to the collapse of viable futures through a painful holding on to a past now gone, there are indeed important connections to be made with despair as a mooded existential disclosure of the impossibility of possibility. A tracing of the ways that melancholia and despair relate, including whether despair should be deemed pathological in the same sense that Freud deemed melancholia to be, however, would require a much more careful analysis than I am able to provide here.