Pyramid Film & Video, Butterflies, 1990

Alexander Tkachev
Guitar, clock and cat
2002

Fear, [Heidegger] argued, is different from angst, because fear is a response to a definite, identifiable threat...But angst is the response to an indefinite threat; the danger is nowhere in particular and yet everywhere [...] Angst doesn’t make me aware of a particular threat, but draws me out of my ordinary utilitarian ways of operating in the day-to-day world and makes me aware of my existential quandary: Who and what am I? 'Being- anxious,' Heidegger says, 'discloses, primordially and directly, the world as world.' It places human beings into a face-to-face crisis with their own authentic potentiality. Angst is that unsettling philosophical sense that you, and every other thing in the world, are just dust in the wind.

Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears