I was lucky enough to visit the Philip Guston retrospective at Tate Modern last autumn. We made our way past Guston’s early work and through the abstract expressionist paintings that earned him acclaim in the 1950s and 60s before the exhibition bottlenecked into a black-painted hallway, inscribed with a quote from the artist: “The war [in Vietnam], what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I … sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything – and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?” We stepped from the dark hallway into a large, light gallery filled with Guston’s paintings of Ku Klux Klan members. The grammar of the imagery is that of the cartoon; we see his hooded men living out the banality of evil. Guston’s “frustrated fury” had found absurdist expression.
What I loved about the show (besides, of course, the paintings) was the way it left a literal space for his black anger, which here is seen as a kind of creative force, spurring Guston toward his greatest work. In All the Rage, the psychoanalyst Josh Cohen concludes with a coda devoted to this same Guston exhibition. He writes: “These are certainly paintings to make you feel angry, but they will make you feel a lot of other things as well. Anger is most rigid when it’s angry to the exclusion of other feelings, and most alive and creative where it dares to make contact with other feelings.”
This feels like advice, but isn’t, quite, and that’s characteristic of Cohen. The coda follows the final chapter, Usable Rage. I confess I was hoping for some guidance here: I would absolutely love to use my rage. But that’s not exactly what’s going on in this book. All the Rage is not a how-to: after all, the subtitle promises the why of anger, not the how of dealing with it. The tension between these two modes – observation and prescription – makes this a strangely unsettled and unsettling work.
Cohen opens with the kind of rationale with which nonfiction so often clears its throat: “For at least the last decade, and perhaps especially since 2016, with its flashpoints of Donald Trump’s election victory and the vote for Brexit, anger has felt like the defining colour and tone of our daily social and political lives, giving rise to a pervasive atmosphere of mutual fear, suspicion and accusation, in which any perception of difference – cultural, ideological, racial, sexual, class – shades quickly into the assumption of enmity.” He goes on to develop his concept of anger, which he differentiates from aggression. In tandem, the two amount to an insoluble human problem. Anger is the feeling, aggression is the drive, “and it is in the nature of the drive, Freud says, never to achieve full satisfaction. We may enjoy the passing sense that a given action has blown off enough steam or ‘raged us out’, but anger has a strange habit of regenerating itself.”
I’m no Freudian – just an extremely furious and otherwise pretty ordinary woman – but I found Cohen to be very good on anatomising both the feeling and the drive, using examples from his own life and from the consulting room. There are moments in the text that I have vigorously underlined, as when he talks about the timelessness of rage, and the way we collapse into our earliest selves when confronted with, say, a maddening sibling.
Where the book gets a bit odd is in its discussion of climate change. In fact, climate catastrophe haunts this book. If we are awake and angry, in a political sense, our anger must inevitably find its object in those who are imperilling humanity’s continuing existence. As Cohen says, part of the problem is that it’s impossible to pin down who, exactly, deserves the gift of our anger: “If climate anger has an object … it is sublimely diffuse, scattered everywhere and nowhere.” Cohen writes that our climate anger, in pursuit of its object, can “become melancholic, mired in its own despair”.
He confesses his own inaction and impotence on this front, and then moves on from climate to continue his tour of different kinds of anger, be they political or personal. But as stated at the start, he is writing a book in response to a given moment, and climate anger has a special status in this moment. Look, I realise it’s bad form to review the book you wish the author had written, but I couldn’t help but hope that Cohen would turn away from his landscape survey, no matter how brilliantly done, and take us more deeply into the experience we are all sharing, like it or not: the dawning realisation of our own disappearance, and the fury that arises therefrom.
As I read, I kept returning to the idea of usable rage: what it would look like, how it would work, how it would be received. Guston’s KKK paintings were met, at first, with dismay and mockery. Before this, Guston – a white, male, American, well reviewed, well collected abstractionist – had been a painter-king of the 20th century. He gave all that up to give expression to his rage – a sacrifice that amounted to a kind of death. He said, “What if I had died? I’m in the history books. What would I paint if I came back? You know, you have to die for a rebirth.” It was his anger that brought Guston back to life, that re-birthed him. What I want to know is: how can the rest of us do that too?
• All the Rage: Why Anger Drives the World by Josh Cohen is published by Granta (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
