Anxiety of Beginning

Every beginning carries a burden. To begin is to act before the path ahead is fully known, to leave one condition without yet possessing another, and to expose oneself to the possibility of failure. Whether one takes up the pen, crosses a threshold, enters into relation, or attempts to bring a new world into being, the first movement is rarely unencumbered. It is met by hope and hesitation, by forms — often felt and left unstated — of fear and trembling.

This course dwells in the anxiety of beginning. We will consider, in the first half, critical accounts of the concept in modern philosophy. G. W. F. Hegel asks how thought can begin when every first principle already depends upon what precedes it. Søren Kierkegaard finds anxiety in the vertigo of possibility, the discovery that freedom requires action before its consequences can be known. Gillian Rose and Edward Said, in turn, reject the fantasy of beginning from purity, insisting that ethical and political action begins in the midst of unfinished history.

These emphatically modern accounts will be brought into conversation with the Arab and Islamic traditions. We will turn to Imruʾ al-Qays and the structure of Arabic poetics, where, in lieu of a clean departure, the poet begins with an arrest before the traces of what has been lost. In exploring the Sufi and aphoristic work of al-Ghazālī and Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh al-Iskandarī, we will consider how beginning may be less an assertion of sovereign will than a spiritual movement through intention and discipline, remembrance and return. 

Across these traditions, we will examine whether beginning belongs to an autonomous subject at all, or whether it emerges through relations to the past, to others, and to forms of life that exceed individual mastery. We will ask why we so often imagine that certainty must precede action, why the desire for a perfect beginning can become a form of postponement, and how every new movement remains entangled with a persistent inheritance, at once affective and metaphysical.

These questions have particular force in the present, when anxiety revolves around complex conditions: colonial violence and displacement, economic precarity and civic constraints, and the pressure to continually meet the demands of a fragmented life. In these conditions, beginning anew can seem both urgent and nearly impossible. We will not seek to eliminate anxiety, in this regard, but to ask what it reveals about freedom and responsibility, about our desire for control. How, then, might we begin without waiting for anxiety to be fully accounted for?