Er(r)go… ,

… civilization—progress and order—as a source of fear. Paradoxically, civilization protects us from fear, eliminating threats that originate in nature, but at the same time it amplifies fear, giving birth to its own breed of threats. Having tamed the perilous forces of nature, man faces perils that come from his own works and ideology; every effort towards reaching an equilibrium generates new fractures and cracks, dense with anxiety, terror and fear.

Errgo, disorientation, instability, a spiral fall into the naked life, homo anxius between a “grim science of nature” and “creationist fear” congealed into melancholy; man as an outcast of foster-mother nature, the tender guardian of other creatures, and at the same time, a joyful celebration of Marx. Shortage and surplus, wine and Freud’s vinegar. Heidegger’s fear and dread: dread as an ontological framework of fear—“that in the face of which we fear,” “fear itself” and “fearing for.” How is the fore-structure of understanding related to Angst? Alarm, dread and terror. Being-in-the-world as an escape from the inevitability of existence into fear? Unheimlich.

Fear and anxiety, the narcissist reflex of panicking: when the object of fear is missing, fear transforms into anxiety. Thus Kierkegaard: nothingness, the source of possibility of possibility as the origin of fear – in the face of the abyss of choice. Should we, therefore, run from fear or wisely come to face it? And why do we constantly have to change masks? Is authenticity a form of a spectacle? Here appears the menacing object a. A perfect doppelganger emerges in the mirror: bliss and excremental identification; the structure of a mirror reflection as the formula of contemporary nihilism. Anxiety, castration, the castration wound, the added jouissance and the access to bliss—the doppelganger holds the key to that bliss. The necessity of bliss as the sole principle of the power of the over-Self and the resultant omnipresent fear. The crowd and raising fear—the playful vibration of community. The regimes of Führers. Adolf Hitler, enfant terrible, playing with blocks—sublime poetic moments. Utopian thinking as a perverse intellectual game of transforming fear into the semblances of collective love. Dewey’s ecology and the pastoral fears of the neopragmatists; somaaesthetics and that which is beyond human. Textuality, literature as the philosophy’s Other and the fear’s of Rorty’s liberal ironist. The fear of technology, the paranoid neo-luddism, the Apocalypse of St. John and conspiracy theories. “We are all terrorists!” ?

Zombie, zombie, zombie.

Wojciech Kalaga

Homo Anxius. Modernity, or the Exodus from Fear

Taking the anthropological conviction that fear constitutes the ultimate human quality as its point of departure, the article offers a critical analysis of the notion in question and suggests philosophical ways of overcoming its paralyzing potential. Drawing from such thinkers as Herder, Marx, Freud, Benjamin and Deleuze, the paper first introduces a semi-historical account of fear only to notice that at the dawn of Modernity it becomes significantly redefined: no longer seen in terms of divine warning, the fear, now — following Freud — referred to as Angst, evolves into an existential condition, the taming of which is only possible by locating the subject in the network of cultural institutions. This relocation, however, is further complicated by a new dichotomy of philosophical perspectives: just as for the conservative tradition angst is understood in terms of hermeneutic lack of meaning and place in the chain of existence, from the Marxist-Freudian standpoint it is considered as an energetic surplus and excess of live transcending all systematic closures.

Terror and Dread: The Significance of “The Unfamiliar”
in the Ontology of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time

The article is dedicated to the concept of fear (Furcht) as mode-of-attunement in Martin Heidegger’s ontological analysis as presented in Being and Time. Unlike the much discussed anxiety (Angst), fear for most of the time remains a marginal concept in Heideggerian studies. The article focuses specifically on fear and the three graded forms that it may assume (alarm, dread, terror) which are dependent upon the actual cause for fear. The discussion turns to the possible causes, distinguishing a fundamental polar division into the recognizable and the unfamiliar. The unfamiliar is then brought into proximity with a related concept, that of the uncanny, and both are analyzed in terms of the existential fore-structure of understanding with the intention of demonstrating the possible consequences of the unfamiliar upon Dasein’s being-in-the-world.

Sławomir Masłoń

Thy Neighbour as Thy Double: Fear as Social Link

By showing that both contemporary models of the pursuit of authenticity (“be yourself” or “create yourself” ) have to produce the evil object evoking anxiety the way Romanticism conceived it in the figure of the double, the paper attempts to trace in “floating” fear the origin of the contemporary social link and show that both the dread of the other and the respect for the other are two sides of the same narcissistic coin, that is, two ways of accommodating the anxiety resulting from the contemporary superego injunction to enjoyment. It proposes that the only way to overcome this impasse would be to recognize that both the fearful (terrorist) and the pitiful (victim) images are in fact images of ourselves and therefore to assume them as our own.

Maciej Nowak

Führer and his Island of Fears.
Utopia as a Deadly Danger “which never comes” 

The essay looks at what it calls an utopian imagination, as a universal, psychological as well as  political, fantasy, which has always helped man and mankind to keep their mind away from fear and anxiety. The author assumes that anxiety, and the fear of Others “we know not of” (to play upon a Shakespearean note) are inherent to human nature, if only for reasons known to all readers of Freud. One of the ways in which “civilisation” helps individual subjects to deal with fear is that it keeps on updating utopian schemes “on offer,” which usually comes as a visionary text authored by a charismatic dreamer, a prominent writer of his age, or a Führer (a term read Freud-wise) of a group, a  collective body, a whole nation. There are fairly “safe” utopian, or near-utopian narratives, whose character is clearly fictitious; for example the classic utopias (of Plato, Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare.) But there are truly perilous visions of “no-places” which in their time made a tremendous impact on minds of multitudes, and seem to have very seriously messed with “real” history. Among the notorious utopias we find  Adolf Hitler’s vision of (post-Nazi) Germany of course, but also ones proper to the, quite authorless, ideological appeals of the 21^st century.

Alina Mitek-Dziemba

The Decline of Experience? Pastoral Fears of (Neo)Pragmatism

The Ironist’s Fear.
The Human Self in Richard Rorty’s Literary Culture.

Build on the anti-essentialist foundations that were raised by Nietzsche and Derrida, Richard Rorty’s post-metaphysical vision of literary culture entails two crucial concepts: irony and solidarity. The present article intends to highlight the presence of a third, less perceptible key idea: fear. The ironist’s description(s) of the world, involve(s) ever-changing vocabularies, adaptable according to the demands of new situations and emerging different forms of otherness, vocabularies which are shaped and reshaped by encounters with the ever-extending line of literary works, with the awareness of the inability to find or settle for the “final vocabulary.” It is precisely this awareness, which may, under certain circumstances, be seen as evoking a possibility of fear that concerns not only the stability of one’s identity, but also the inability of a complete and satisfactory expression. This fear, however, does not necessarily has to have a stunting effect – it may be responsible for the stimulation of one of man’s most powerful qualities: creativity.

Michał Różycki

Conspiracy of Science.
Technophobia in Contemporary American Conspiracy Theories

The goal of the paper is to outline the notion of the fear of technology and mistrust of the scientific establishment present in 21^st century American conspiracy theories. It argues that such negative connotations are invariably tied to the so-called New World Order (NWO) conspiracy theory. The text opens with a brief outline of the origins of the belief in the NWO, starting with the late 18^th century theories about the Bavarian Illuminati, and culminating with the influence of the Cold War mentality. What the fear of technology stands for in conspiracy theory narratives, the text argues, is the fear of the loss of personal agency. This loss is caused by overreliance on technology which is controlled by a nefarious conspiracy. The text relies on primary sources in the form of works of an American conspiracy theorist, radio host and political activist, Alex Jones.

Mikołaj Marcela

Death Becomes Them:
Living Dead at the End of the 20th Century

Marzena Kubisz's review of "Culture of the Slow. Social Deceleration in an Accelerated World" edited by Nick Osbaldiston (2013)

Critical notes on books

Summaries of the feature texts of the issue.

Er(r)go stylesheet and policies of submission

Colophon