Category Archives: Dylan Trigg

Anxiety is narcissism and narcissism is anxiety. Far from being dispersed, the anxious, ontologically insecure self not only persists but is amplified in the world. This is the strange logic of anxiety: it simultaneously fragments the unity of the self while also placing that fragmentation at the centre of things. Indeed, anxiety’s ‘threat’ to self is at the same time a vindication of the self as a centre, a fundamental commitment to the narcissism of selfhood. Because of this fragmented centre, the world of the anxious subject takes as its point of departure an exaggerated, hyper-real view of things, in which perception and attention are drawn back to the anxious subject.

— Dylan Trigg, Side Effects

I am touching the house in which I was born, but my hand passes through the place, leaving a residue of fog where the house was. This is the place where I was born. A certain longing was conceived here. Muffled and croaking, it finds its expression in the body of the nostalgic. I am here, and my hand passed through the white wall, reaching into a lacuna in space, but comprised from the boundary of my hand. It is as though something outside of this place exceeds the material presence I face, as though this place resists the very act of being touched.

— Dylan Trigg