Abstract
This chapter states that the first strategy consists of reactivating fear in order to produce its productive metamorphosis. This means accessing the awareness of the condition of vulnerability repressed both by the Prometheanism of homo creator and by the narcissistic indifference of the spectator (and consumer). Starting from the reflection of Günther Anders and Hans Jonas, the proposal is put forward to enhance the imagination as the faculty that allows us to prefigure the future: in order to think of a subject capable of feeling fear for the world and becoming liable for its future, that is, capable of becoming a responsible subject. This topic is expanded in Chap. 8.
The second part of the chapter dwells on the responses that can be given to the other pathological metamorphosis of fear (see Part II, Chap. 6), namely, the excess of fear, meant as fear of the other, and its projective-persecutory torsions. While the response to the absence of fear consists of the subject restoring his vulnerability, the response to the excess of fear implies accepting the end of (modern) immunity and becoming aware of the reality of contamination in the global age. The shift of the notion of other towards that of difference (which can neither be expelled nor assimilated), enables the idea that contamination may be given a positive connotation, in that it can prelude solidarity among different people. Vulnerability and contamination can appear as the outcomes of a virtuous metamorphosis of fear which enable the pathological torsion of unlimited individualism and endogamous communitarianism to be corrected, and respectively become the foundation of a solidaristic and a responsible subject.
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Notes
- 1.
‘By political fear,’ Robin says, ‘I mean a people’s felt apprehension of some harm to their collective well-being – the fear of terrorism, panic over crime, anxiety about moral decay – or the intimidation wielded over men and women by governments or groups.’ (Corey Robin, Fear (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 2).
- 2.
Ibid., 142ff.
- 3.
Ibid., 3.
- 4.
Ibid.
- 5.
On this see also Benjamin R. Barber, Fear’s Empire: War, Terrorism and Democracy (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003).
- 6.
See Robin, Fear, 20ff.
- 7.
Political fear, according to Robin, operates in two forms: ‘First, leaders or militants can define what is or ought to be the public’s chief object of fear.’ Second, it ‘arises from the social, political, and economic hierarchies that divide a people’ and ‘its specific purpose or function is internal intimidation, to use sanctions or the threat of sanctions to ensure that one group retains or augments its power at the expense of another.’ (Ibid., 16, 18).
- 8.
Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, I, 266.
* Translator’s note. In this section, Anders’ usage of the term ‘Angst’ has been translated using the word ‘fear’ to differentiate from the concept of anxiety used elsewhere in the book.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
Ibid., I, 242.
- 12.
This means that Anders’s diagnosis allows us to grasp a crucial passage from modernity to the global age: the emphasis on life, which Hannah Arendt had regarded as one of the negative (insofar as they were ‘impolitical’) aspects of modernity, takes on a new legitimacy due to the caesura produced by the global threat that places humankind before the spectre of self-destruction.
- 13.
On the topic of the ‘future generations’, in addition to Cerutti, Global Challenges, chap. 5, see two texts that can now be considered classics on the subject, like Richard I. Sikora and Brian Barry, Obligations to Future Generations (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978) and Giuliano Pontara, Etica e generazioni future (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1996).
- 14.
Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, I, 283–84.
- 15.
Among the recent reflections on humankind’s self-destructive capacity see Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Pour un catastrophisme éclairé. Quand l’impossible est certain (Paris: Seuil, 2002).
- 16.
Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, I, 282.
- 17.
As we will see, despite Jonas’s attention not only to the problem of survival but to a ‘genuine human life’, namely a life worthy of being lived, in several places there is an evident convergence between Jonas’s ‘apocalyptic’ tones and Anders’s diagnosis: ‘For the moment, all work on the “true” man must stand back behind the bare saving of its precondition, namely, the existence of mankind in a sufficient natural environment. (…) All this holds on the assumption made here that we live in an apocalyptic situation, that is, under the threat of a universal catastrophe if we let things take their present course.’ (Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 139–40).
- 18.
Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, I, 238.
- 19.
‘Our question is: Ought there to be man? To ask it correctly we must first answer the question of what it means to say of something whatsoever that it ought to be. This naturally leads us back to the question of whether there ought to be anything at all – rather than nothing.’ (Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 46).
- 20.
Ibid., 11.
- 21.
See Cerutti, Global Challenges, which underlines the necessity to recognize ‘a new imperative or rather meta- imperative telling us to do our best for humankind’s survival’. (Ibid., 134).
- 22.
Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, I, 308.
- 23.
Of significance on the topic of social vulnerability are the works by Robert Castel, From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers: Transformation of the Social Question (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2003), originally published as Les métamorphoses de la question sociale. Une chronique du salariat (Fayard: Paris, 1995); and Castel, L’insécurité sociale. Qu’est-ce qu’être protégé? (Paris: Seuil, 2003).
- 24.
Magatti, L’Io globale, 149, own translation.
- 25.
De Marchi, Pellizzoni and Ungaro, Il rischio ambientale, 42, own translation.
- 26.
‘In this perspective, the vulnerabilities that we have singled out for the second and third worlds help to amplify the vulnerability of our “first world”, the Western, advanced, industrialized, “affluent” world.’ (Ibid., 44–45, own translation).
- 27.
See Cerutti, Global Challenges, chap. 5.
- 28.
On ‘risk’ as a potentially unifying factor, producing a ‘civic solidarity’ upon which to base new forms of political organization in the global age, see also Habermas, The Postnational Constellation.
- 29.
See Part II, Chap. 6.
- 30.
Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, I, 238.
- 31.
A similar exhortation was recently put forward again by Beck: ‘Definitions of risk, successfully asserted, are a magic political wand through which a smugly settled society learns to fear itself and, against its will, is compelled to become politically active in its core areas. The vivid symbolic staging of risks is, in this sense, an antidote to a narrow “carry on as before” mentality.’ (What Is Globalization, 100).
- 32.
‘Probably none of the generations prior to the eighteenth century, namely prior to the triumphal march of progressist theories, would have been as unprepared as we are today to deal with our present task: to feel fear.’ (Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, I, 278).
- 33.
Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 185.
- 34.
Ibid., own translation from the introduction to the Italian edition.
- 35.
Ibid., 27.
- 36.
Ibid., 26.
- 37.
Ibid., 27.
- 38.
‘We know much sooner what we do not want than what we want. Therefore, moral philosophy must consult our fears prior to our wishes to learn what we really cherish.’ (Ibid.).
- 39.
Ibid., 28.
- 40.
Ibid.
- 41.
See Part II, Chap. 4, Sect. 4.2.
- 42.
‘[…] interest or inclination or opinion can each time select, from among the possible prognoses, the one most favorable to the project anyway preferred by it and best suited to the clamor of the hour; or brush them all aside with the agnostic decree that we generally know too little to sacrifice the known for the unknown; and for the rest argue that there will still be time for corrections “en route,” when “we” (meaning those after us) will see what happens.’ (Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 30).
- 43.
Ibid., own translation from the introduction to the Italian edition.
- 44.
Ibid., 28.
- 45.
Ibid.
- 46.
Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982).
- 47.
See Part III, Chap. 9, Sect. 9.1.
- 48.
Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 28.
- 49.
Galli says that Jonas intends to reactivate the ‘productive’ fear that is at the origin of modernity: ‘Asking ourselves whether it is possible, through fear, to put a brake on the most destructive aspects of technological action. Moreover it is only in technology that today this “brake”, which would reinstate the modern cycle of fear-reason-utility, could also find its own tools. Indeed it is evident that technology alone has the resources to save nature.’ (Modernità della paura, 192, own translation).
- 50.
Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, I, 273.
- 51.
See the reference to Rilke as the person who more than all others was able to stress the necessity to ‘know how to feel’ (ibid.).
- 52.
Ibid.
- 53.
Ibid., 308.
- 54.
On the importance of literature crisis (Kafka, Beckett and Döblin) as the source inspiring this concept, which, as we will now see, runs through Anders’s work in various forms, see Pier Paolo Portinaro, Il principio disperazione. Tre studi su Günther Anders (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003).
- 55.
Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, I, 275.
- 56.
Ibid., 274.
- 57.
Ibid., 311–12.
- 58.
‘With this I intend to say,’ Anders points out, ‘that since a given world scheme has become habitual for our way of feeling, he who is used to it becomes incapable of imagining a possible alternative; or rather imagining that a different world scheme is possible or even just that one was possible.’ (Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, I, Anmerkungen, note 312, 351).
- 59.
Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, I, 311.
- 60.
Anders talks of an ‘effort’ and a ‘violent’ invitation (ibid., 274 and 276).
- 61.
Ibid., 274 and 312.
- 62.
I will come back to this concept further on, as well as the not only representative but also transformative role of the imagination in Arendt.
- 63.
Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, I, 241.
- 64.
Günther Anders, Die atomare Drohung. Radikale Überlegungen (Munich: Beck, 1981), 98. In the Italian edition, the translator Renato Solmi underlines that the text was improvised by the author after a debate on the moral problems of the atomic age organized by a group of students from the University of West Berlin, and came out in October 1960 in the journal Das Argument – Berliner Hefte für Politik und Kultur.
- 65.
Ibid., 98.
- 66.
Against fatalism and catastrophism in the face of risks, see Douglas, Risk and Blame, chap. 14.
- 67.
See Part III, Chap. 8, Sect. 8.1.
- 68.
Jonas stresses this aspect where in the final pages of the German edition of The Imperative of Responsibility [Das Prinzip Verantwortung], 391–92, he asserts: ‘The further into the future […] and less familiar what we need to fear is, the more the imagination’s clarity and feeling’s sensitivity have to be mobilized to that end. It becomes necessary for the heuristics of fear not only to discover and depict the new object but to also sniff out and make known to itself the particular ethical interest that, as never before, it invokes.’
- 69.
Ibid., 390ff. German edition; the reference to Hobbes’s ‘selfish fear’ is in note 27, 412 of the German edition.
- 70.
See Part III, Chap. 8, Sect. 8.1.
- 71.
See Douglas, Risk and Blame.
- 72.
See ibid., 5.
- 73.
See Part II, Chap. 5, Sect. 5.2 and Chap. 6, Sect. 6.4.
- 74.
I will come back to this point in Part III, Chap. 9, Sect. 9.2.
- 75.
See Part I, Chap. 3, Sect. 3.3.
- 76.
Sen, Identity and Violence, 4.
- 77.
Francesco Remotti, Contro l’identità (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2001), 57, own translation. See also Amin Maalouf, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong (New York: Arcade Publishers, 2001). Originally published as Les identités meurtrières (Paris: Grasset, 1998).
- 78.
It is important to remember that historically the term ‘solidarity’ asserted itself starting in the nineteenth century, in correspondence with the development of industrial society, as a replacement for the word ‘fraternity’. Unlike the latter, indicating preconstituted forms of bond (based on belonging resulting from birth, race, religion), ‘solidarity’ alludes to forms of bond based on a free choice; see Mariuccia Salvati, “Solidarietà: una scheda storica,” Parolechiave, no. 2 (1993): 11–22.
- 79.
Among the most representative authors of post-colonial studies, see Kwame Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006) and Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
- 80.
Given the endless literature on ‘identity’ (in all its dimensions), various authors of which I have been able to recall during this book, I will restrict myself here to pointing out – in addition to the aforementioned Sen and Remotti – some contributions more directly oriented towards thematizing the identity-recognition nexus: Crespi, Identità e riconoscimento; Alberto Pirni, ed., Comunità, identità e sfide del riconoscimento (Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 2007) (in particular the essay by Barbara Henry, ‘Conflitti identitari e misconoscimento’) and also Giovanni Jervis, La conquista dell’identità. Essere se stessi, essere diversi (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1999).
- 81.
Jean-Loup Amselle, Logiques métisses. Anthropologie de l’identité en Afrique et ailleurs (Paris: Payot, 1990).
- 82.
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 10.
- 83.
Among the most interesting testimonies of this outlook, in the sphere of post-colonial studies, I shall quote just Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990).
- 84.
See René Gallissot, Mondher Kilani and Annamaria Rivera, L’imbroglio etnico in quattordici parole-chiave (Bari: Dedalo, 1998).
- 85.
I share the perplexities of Laura Bazzicalupo, Politica, identità, potere (Turin: Giappichelli, 2004), 158ff.
- 86.
James Clifford, “Taking Identity Politics Seriously: The Contradictory, Stony Ground,” in Without Guarantees, ed. Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg, and Angela McRobbie (London: Verso, 2000), 94–112.
- 87.
On multiculturalism as ‘coexistence’ (coesistenza) and not ‘living together’ (convivenza) see Lanzillo, Il Multiculturalismo.
- 88.
‘Contagion’, ‘wound’ and the subject putting himself at stake are the terms that Bataille puts to use in all of his reflection in order to allude to a relationship that assumes a transformation, the subject’s exposure to the other. See for example the following passage: ‘“Communication” cannot proceed from one full and intact individual to another. It requires individuals whose separate existence in themselves is risked, placed at the limit of death and nothingness; the moral summit is the moment of risk taking, it is a being suspended in the beyond of oneself, at the limit of nothingness.’ (On Nietzsche, 19).
- 89.
See Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in Studies in Parapsychology (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1963), 19–60. Originally published as ‘Das Unheimliche’, Imago 5, nos. 5–6 (1919): 297–324.
- 90.
Habermas, “Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State”, 130 and 132.
- 91.
See Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1988). Originally published as La communauté inavouable (Paris: Minuit, 1983).
- 92.
Marramao, Passaggio a Occidente, 215.
- 93.
See Elena Pulcini, The Contaminated Subject: Passions, Power and Care, http://www.travellingconcepts.net/pulciniI.html
- 94.
On the reappraisal of conflict, see Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition; and Alessandro Ferrara, “Introduction” to the Italian edition of Honneth, Identity and Disrespect.
- 95.
As Pier Paolo Portinaro quite rightly observes, while underlining a distinction – between solidarity among similar people and solidarity among different people – that does not always receive due attention: ‘There is no doubt that it is much easier to be solidaristic with someone who is similar to us (namely who is none other than a needy one of ‘us’) rather than with someone who is different and foreign, and who perhaps finds themselves defending their own identity while rejecting the normative models that are imposed upon them or proposed to them to make inclusion easier’ (own translation) in the introduction to Kurt Bayertz and Michael Baurmann, L’interesse e il dono. Questioni di solidarietà, ed. Pier Paolo Portinaro (Turin: Edizioni di Comunità, 2002), XXXIV, the Italian edition of Solidarität. Begriff und Problem (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998). Translated into English as Solidarity (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999).
- 96.
Peter Sloterdijk gets a good grasp on the pathos that inspires recognition dynamics in Rage and Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), originally published as Zorn und Zeit. Politisch-psychologischer Versuch (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2006). He sees ‘thymotic emotions’ and the ‘rage’ that sums them all up as the source prompting a legitimate demand by the excluded and oppressed for their own dignity and value and a claim to justice. Sloterdijk opposes the erotic passions, upon which modernity founded its wretched anthropology of deficiency and self-preservation, with the passions of pride, self-assertion and rage which arise from thymos. However, he denounces the current lack of aspirations, in particular political aspirations, to channel the revolutionary potential of rage. Although it is extremely interesting, in my opinion Sloterdijk’s proposal is limited in that it does not distinguish the passions (or emotions to use the term he adopts) from their pathological drifts.
- 97.
Jürgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, ed. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo de Greif (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), originally published as Die Einbeziehung des Anderen: Studien zur politischen Teorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996). See Honneth’s critique of Habermas, brought up by Massimo Rosati, “La solidarietà nelle società complesse,” in Solidarietà in questione, ed. Franco Crespi and Serge Moscovici (Rome: Meltemi, 2001), 40–41. But Honneth himself does not thematize the problem of solidarity among different peoples in the face of the problem of identity absolutism.
- 98.
For this definition see Rosati, La solidarietà nelle società complesse; Crespi, Identità e riconoscimento, chap. 6.
- 99.
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 192. On non-humiliation as the precondition for a ‘decent society’ see also Margalit, The Decent Society.
- 100.
See Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 89ff.
- 101.
See Adam B. Seligman, Modernity’s Wager (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 13ff.
- 102.
See Franco Crespi, Imparare ad esistere (Rome: Donzelli, 1994).
- 103.
Ibid., 120, own translation.
- 104.
Crespi, Identità e riconoscimento, 101ff.
- 105.
Judith Butler stresses recognition as a dynamic causing constant transformation of the subject in Giving an Account of Oneself, where she defines it as ‘the process by which I become other than what I was and so cease to be able to return to what I was’. (Ibid., 27).
- 106.
I will come back to this in Part III, Chap. 9, Sect. 9.2.
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Pulcini, E. (2013). Actors: Relearning to Fear. In: Care of the World. Studies in Global Justice, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4482-0_7
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