Abstract
This chapter observes the crisis of the Hobbesian model owing to the metamorphosis of fear, since the sources and characteristics of the danger have changed substantially and fear today has become uncertain and indefinite. This appears clear if we try to define fear: fear of who, of what? In the global age we can identify two fundamental sources of danger which both have an indefinite nature: on one hand, the other, who however loses the certainty that he has in the Hobbesian paradigm since he takes on the disturbing and indecipherable outlines of the foreigner, he who is different: or rather the ‘stranger within’ (Simmel), who cannot be either expelled or assimilated, and who, as a consequence, is the permanent source of anxiety and unease (fear of contamination); on the other, the so-called global risks, produced by the development of technology and human action (such as the nuclear threat and global warming), which are difficult to outline, at times invisible and fundamentally uncontrollable, and therefore the source of a sense of impotence and anxiety. Starting from the Freudian distinction between fear and anxiety, the hypothesis is suggested that global fear no longer has the productive function of early modernity (capable of promoting the preservation of life and social and political order), but it becomes unproductive, since it results in irrational and destructive responses.
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Notes
- 1.
Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 14.
- 2.
See Beck, Risk Society.
- 3.
See Deborah Lupton, Risk (London/New York: Routledge, 1998), 5ff.; Beck, Risk Society; and Beck, “The Silence of Words. On War and Terror,” Security Dialogue 34, no. 3 (2003), originally published as Das Schweigen der Wörter. Über Terror und Krieg (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002).
- 4.
See Beck, Risk Society, 22.
- 5.
Ibid., 22.
- 6.
See Bruna De Marchi, Luigi Pellizzoni and Daniele Ungaro, Il rischio ambientale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001), 46–47.
- 7.
See Giddens, Consequences of Modernity, 9.
- 8.
See Jonas, Imperative of Responsibility.
- 9.
Risks are also brought up in part by Lupton in Risk, 13–14.
- 10.
See De Marchi, Pellizzoni and Ungaro, Il rischio ambientale, 37–38. ‘In conclusion, what seems to differentiate the two concepts is that when one speaks of danger, the focus is on the certainty of the effects, while when one speaks of risk, the stress is placed on the uncertainty of the effects.’ (Lucia Savadori and Rino Rumiati, Nuovi rischi, vecchie paure. La percezione del pericolo nella società contemporanea (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005), 29, own translation). See also Bauman, In Search of Politics, 146.
- 11.
The concept of risk, says Mary Douglas, ‘has not got much to do with probability calculations. The original connection is only indicated by arm-waving in the direction of possible science: the word risk now means danger; high risk means a lot of danger.’ (Douglas, Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1992), 24).
- 12.
Lupton, Risk, 7. ‘We will see how many of the environmental issues of more significance in the present day show a nature of indomitable uncertainty rather than of calculable risk.’ (De Marchi, Pellizzoni and Ungaro, Il rischio ambientale, 63, own translation).
- 13.
Anthony Giddens, Runaway World. How Globalisation Is Reshaping Our Lives (London: Profile Books, 1999), 25–26.
- 14.
See Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003). Originally published as Die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001).
- 15.
Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 21. Indeed Jonas wondered if we ‘have the right to do it, whether we are qualified for that creative role […] Who will be the image-makers, by what standards, and on the basis of what knowledge? Also, the question of the moral right to experiment on future human beings must be asked.’ (Ibid.).
- 16.
See Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, II, 21ff.
- 17.
‘[…] present-day cloners are attempting to modify the physiological type of the living being. Which means either concocting beings not “foreseen” by nature, so that one no longer is able to verify whether they may be counted among known species; or if they would abolish the individual’s uniqueness, given that they would be living replicas […] of other individuals.’ (Ibid., 24).
- 18.
See Habermas, The Future of Human Nature.
- 19.
Among the most interesting recent contributions, see Barbara Duden, Die Gene im Kopf – der Fötus im Bauch. Historisches zum Frauenkörper (Hanover: Offizin-Verlag, 2002).
- 20.
Franco Volpi, “Nichilismo della tecnica e responsabilità etico-politica,” Micromega, Almanacco di filosofia, no. 5 (2003): 236.
- 21.
‘All natural sciences provide us with answers to the question: what should we do if we wish to make use of technology to control life? But whether we wish, or ought, to control it through technology, and whether it ultimately makes any sense to do so, is something that we prefer to leave open or else to take as a given.’ (Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures, ed. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 18. Originally published as Politik als Beruf, Wissenschaft als Beruf (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1919)).
- 22.
Volpi, ‘Nichilismo della tecnica e responsabilità etico-politica’, 236, own translation.
- 23.
On this point see Part II, Chap. 4, Sect. 4.2.
- 24.
Translator’s note: I have chosen to coin the term ‘anxious concern’ to distinguish the slightly less emphatic Italian ‘ansia’ from ‘angoscia’, which I have translated with anxiety.
- 25.
Virilio, The Information Bomb, 14.
- 26.
Ibid., 34.
- 27.
Ibid., 25.
- 28.
Ibid., 39.
- 29.
Ibid., 118.
- 30.
Ibid., 10–11.
- 31.
See Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village. An Inventory of Some of the Current Situations That Could Be Eliminated by More Feedforward (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968).
- 32.
See Francesco Sidoti, “È la ragione una serva della paura?,” in Emozioni e sentimenti nella vita sociale, ed. Bernardo Cattarinussi (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2000), 319–21.
- 33.
See Formenti, Incantati dalla rete, 27–36, which makes reference to authors of significance on this point.
- 34.
Virilio, The Information Bomb, 134.
- 35.
On this see also Virilio and Turner, Ground Zero.
- 36.
Virilio, The Information Bomb, 134; the reference here is to the forecast of a possible IT meltdown in the year 2000.
- 37.
Ibid., 132.
- 38.
Jeremy Rifkin, The Biotech Century. Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World (New York: J.P. Tarcher, 1998).
- 39.
See Castells, Internet Galaxy, chap. 5.
- 40.
On these topics, as well as Monica Toraldo di Francia, “La sfida delle biotecnologie. Identità, conflitti e nuove forme di discriminazione,” in Epimeteo e il Golem. Riflessioni su uomo, natura e tecnica nell’età globale, ed. Daniela Belliti (Pisa: ETS, 2004), 247–88, see the important contributions by Stefano Rodotà, amongst which Tecnologie e diritti (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995).
- 41.
See Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, in particular chap. 3.
- 42.
De Marchi, Pellizzoni, Ungaro, Il rischio ambientale, 12.
- 43.
Ibid., 63, own translation.
- 44.
Ibid., 49.
- 45.
Ibid., 48–49; see Dimitri D’Andrea, “Rischi ambientali globali e aporie della modernità. Responsabilità e cura per il mondo comune,” in Epimeteo e il Golem, ed. Belliti, 25–28.
- 46.
In tracing its ‘risk profile’, Giddens recognizes this aspect as the first important characteristic: see The Consequences of Modernity, 124–31.
- 47.
In this connection, Furio Cerutti rejects the notion of global ‘risk’ as a rationally manageable possibility of a harmful event, and instead speaks of two global ‘threats’ (nuclear weapons and man-made climate change), which should be treated as global ‘challenges’ since they remain in conditions of uncertainty: see Cerutti, Global Challenges, 27–33. While taking into account this significant conceptual distinction, I nevertheless retain the sociological notion of ‘global risks’ in my line of argument since, as we shall see, it allows me to deal with the problem of risk perception and the defence strategies implemented by the subject; nonetheless, I then essentially concentrate on what Cerutti defines as the two global challenges par excellence.
- 48.
For the distinction between global and globalized risks, see D’Andrea, “Rischi ambientali globali e aporie della modernità”.
- 49.
‘In its most profound sense, the antithesis of trust is thus a state of mind which could best be summed up as existential angst or dread.’ Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 100. Note that in Giddens the word ‘angst’ is used rather than ‘anxiety’. On the loss of authority of expert knowledge, in particular in science, see Beck, Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk.
- 50.
See Gioacchino Lavanco, ed., Psicologia dei disastri. Comunità e globalizzazione della paura (Rome: Angeli, 2003), in particular Terri Mannarini, ‘Percorsi della paura. Percezione e costruzione del rischio’; see also Savadori and Rumiati, Nuovi rischi, vecchie paure.
- 51.
See Part II, Chap. 5, Sect. 5.3.
- 52.
Bobbio, “La libertà dalla paura,” 173ff.
- 53.
See Part III, Chap. 7, Sect. 7.3.
- 54.
The topic of the ‘scapegoat’ is recurrent in the reflection of René Girard. See in particular The Scapegoat (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), originally published as Le bouc émissaire (Paris: Grasset, 1982). On the topic of the historic-ethnological origins of the ‘other’, see Luisa Passerini, “Europe and Its Others: Is There a European Identity?,” in The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History, ed. Dan Stone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), and Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America. The Question of the Other (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999). Originally published as La conquête de l’Amérique. La question de l’autre (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982).
- 55.
See Pulcini, The Individual Without Passions, and Part I of this book.
- 56.
See Escobar, Metamorfosi della paura.
- 57.
Simmel, “The Stranger”, 402–8. On this topic see Simonetta Tabboni, ed., Vicinanza e lontananza. Modelli e figure dello straniero come categoria sociologica (Milan: Angeli, 1993).
- 58.
See Part II, Chap. 5, Sect. 5.3.
- 59.
Beck, Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk, chap. 4.
- 60.
Lupton, Risk, 65.
- 61.
See Umberto Galimberti, ‘Angoscia’ in Dizionario di psicologia (Turin: UTET, 1992), 59–63.
- 62.
Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989), 100. Originally published as Hemmung, Symptom und Angst (Leipzig: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1926).
- 63.
Ibid., 100–1. Evidently aware of the often fragile and uncertain boundary of this distinction when applied to real cases, Freud points out: ‘In some cases the characteristics of realistic anxiety and neurotic anxiety are mingled. The danger is known and real but the anxiety in regard to it is over-great, greater than seems proper to us. It is this surplus of anxiety which betrays the presence of a neurotic element.’ But, Freud adds, this does not in any way invalidate the conceptual distinction between fear and anxiety: ‘Such cases, however, introduce no new principle; for analysis shows that to the known real danger an unknown instinctual one is attached.’ (Ibid., 101).
- 64.
Note that Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety dates from 1926, and Being and Time is from 1927.
- 65.
Translator’s note: notice that the word ‘Angst’ remains in German in the translation of Heidegger, rather than being rendered with the English ‘anxiety’.
- 66.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), § 40, 174. Originally published as Sein und Zeit (Halle: Niemeyer, 1927).
- 67.
Ibid., 174.
- 68.
Ibid.
- 69.
Eugenio Borgna, “Angoscia,” in I concetti del male, ed. Pier Paolo Portinaro (Turin: Einaudi, 2001), 21, own translation.
- 70.
See Eugenio Borgna’s ‘Heideggerian’ diagnosis: ‘What is contradictory about anxiety is the fact that the terrifying (threatening) thing is not in any place: it is so close to us to be oppressive and stifle our breath, nonetheless it is nowhere […]. Every mode of attunement reveals “how we feel”, and with anxiety we feel we are in the presence of nothing and “disorientated”; but in this case feeling disorientated means “not-feeling-at-home”, namely in the dizzy state of extraneousness and noth-ing.’ (Ibid., 23, own translation).
- 71.
See Heidegger, Being and Time, § 53, 245–46.
- 72.
See Giorgio Rimondi, ed., Lo straniero che è in noi. Sulle tracce dell’Unheimliche (Cagliari: Cuec, 2006), 54–55; Marisa Fiumanò, Un sentimento che non inganna. Sguardo e angoscia in psicoanalisi (Milan: Cortina, 1991). See also Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety (1844), (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 42. ‘The concept of anxiety is almost never treated in psychology. Therefore, I must point out that it is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite, whereas anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.’ Quoted in Borgna, ‘Angoscia’, 21.
- 73.
See Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Fear (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006).
- 74.
This presupposes, as we will see in Part III, recognizing that fear can have a positive function, an aspect which in Bauman’s analysis seems to be totally absent.
- 75.
Galli, “Modernità della paura,” 188, own translation; see also Esposito, Communitas.
- 76.
In this connection the cues present in sociological reflection are rare, like in Sidoti, “È la ragione una serva della paura?,” 326, own translation: ‘The prevailing sensation of insecurity is progressively taking on very different characteristics to the past. It is becoming more indefinite (because it is no longer channelled inside the traditional containers) and in particular it is characterized by an accentuated uncertainty about the future and ourselves, up to the furthermost limit of uncertainty about our physical and mental integrity. Fear with a capital F is diminishing, while fears, anxious concern, anxiety and phenomena of panic and terror are increasing. In contemporary society the sensations of uncertainty are less regulated than in the past. This historic novelty favours regression and the re-emergence of irrational tendencies.’
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Pulcini, E. (2013). Risk Society: From Fear to Anxiety?. In: Care of the World. Studies in Global Justice, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4482-0_5
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