Anxiety, Ambivalence and Sublimation: Ontological In/security and the World Risk Society

Abstract

* The first version of this article was presented at the EWIS 2020 (on-line) Workshop on “Anxiety in international relations” convened by Bahar Rumelili and Karl Gustafsson. I wish to thank them and the several other participants in this Workshop, for their thoughtful engagement with my paper and for the antidote to Covid-isolation offered by their own stimulating papers. In very anxious times we all negotiated “anxiety in international relations” and other settings in very creative and collaborative ways. I am especially grateful for the valuable and extensive comments on my workshop paper offered by Jakub Eberle. In revising the paper for publication, I have benefitted from further valuable comments and advice from Bahar Rumelili, in her role as editor of this special issue, and from the two anonymous reviewers, whose suggestions I found very helpful. ABSTRACT This article aims to expand the social-theoretical and psychoanalytic range of research on ontological in/ security, by exploring parallel concerns addressed by Beck, Kristeva, Butler and Zizek. These include, first, the psychic roots of othering processes and their encoding into cultural repertoires. Second, the difficulties and possibilities of displacing othering processes within national and international politics. Third, the disruptive effects of globalising processes on the symbolic efficiency of cultures and on their encoded defences against ontological insecurity. Fourth, the crucial significance for political and international relations of the qualitative characteristics of those defences against ontological insecurity that gain predominance within cultural repertoires and their variable norms of recognition. Likewise, the significance of those norms of recognition that challenge established norms and successfully reorganise cultural repertoires. we any form of big any symbolic point of reference that would serve as a safe and unproblematic moral anchor.”