Afterword

Abstract

Iinitially planned to write about post-1960s self-help books dealing with disorders of fear such as stress, anxiety, panic, and phobia. While I plan to return to this project, in the course of attempting to produce it I came to realize that I did not simply wish to contribute a discourse analysis of the cultural features of the subjectivity made manifest by these books. I wanted to shed light on the embodied nature of subjects’ experiences of fear as they pertain to morally normative social forces, while also accounting for subjects’ agency in this process. However, I not only lacked the conceptual tools that might allow me to make sense of the embodied nature of individual and collective forms of emotional and emotionally driven agency, but I felt that existing approaches to fear, and to emotions more generally, would not allow me to carry out the type of analysis I felt I should produce.