Topophobia

Reviews / Votes

Topophobia is not only a vital resource for any foray into the meaning of the disquieting encounter with space, but it is furthermore a text that offers the potential for pathos and solace. * Phenomenological Reviews * Trigg's ability to bring together the philosophical, the filmic and the literary without trivialising ... makes him a writer of great importance not only to the phenomenological tradition but to contemporary thought more generally. * Epizootics * Readers will be captivated by Dylan Trigg's penetrating insights into and eloquent accounts of his experience of anxiety. They lead him into strikingly new and important ideas for psychology and philosophy. * Alphonso Lingis, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, USA * Dylan Trigg's Topophobia puts you inside the phenomenology of place-related phobias, so that you can explore the modulations of such experiences as they unfold and twist themselves into an anxiety that is without boundaries. This is a true phenomenological study of how places appear cut up and displaced, how they are darkened and blindingly lit, how they overwhelm, grab you and close in, how one's body turns against itself, freezes, and starts to drift, and how others invade and obstruct one's intentions. Trigg also draws from psychiatry and psychoanalysis to map out a detailed landscape of anxiety, delivering a deep analysis of the interweaving of the conscious and the unconscious elements that constitute the phobias related to place. He shows us that anxiety and the self are always more than, and at the same time, less than personal. * Shaun Gallagher, Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in Philosophy, University of Memphis, USA * Topophilia, our love of place and our embeddedness in it and indebtedness to it, is not the only story to tell about place. In Topophobia, Dylan Trigg brilliantly shows that topophobia is woven through our experience of place, from its most intimate to its most public. He is equal parts Virgil and J. G. Ballard: he is our guide into the anxious, uncanny, nausea-inducing, claustrophobic, and agoraphobic places we are seduced by and condemned to live in, and he is the one who puts into words that which haunts us.

But this is not an account of the macabre, nor is it a tour of the bleak spaces of post-industrial collapse. Trigg gives us a rigorous phenomenology of the gaps and fissures of everyday place, the anxieties and ambiguities of being a body that must at some level be committed to its places, and yet which does not always experience a similar commitment in return. This book should have a rightful place for anyone interested in phenomenology, place, and body. * Bruce Janz, Professor & Co-Director, Department of Philosophy and Centre for Humanities & Digital Research, University of Central Florida, USA *