Bodies Coming Apart and Bodies Becoming Parts: Widening, Deepening, and Embodying Ontological (In)Security in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

This article widens and deepens the notion of ontological security and therefore both the scope of ontological security studies (OSS) within the discipline of international relations (IR) and ontological security theory (OST) writ large by introducing and explaining the implications of (re/dis)embodiment—the continually contested social–political process through which bodies come to be or not be and upon which everybody existentially and ontologically depends. Understood as both a source of and a threat to individual and collective bodies’ ontological security, in this article I explain how taking the process of (re/dis)embodiment into account entails widening and deepening OSS to allow for the consideration and appreciation of how individual and collective bodies are continually, simultaneously, materially, and ideationally contested. As a primarily theoretical contribution, this is done through an interdisciplinary approach bringing Achille Mbembe's necropolitical theory into conversation with Sara Ahmed's theses on willfulness and use and is illustrated through discussions on the body politics of the COVID-19 pandemic. In short, I argue that, under conditions of contemporary global necropolitics, individuals’ ontological security as bodies becomes increasingly threatened according to raced, classed, and gendered local–global hierarchies which determine the reduction and use of individuals to the status of parts within collectives that are themselves embodied and increasingly unfit for the purpose of healthy living, especially in a time of pandemic.

Stimmung and ontological security: anxiety, euphoria, and emerging political subjectivities during the 2015 ‘border opening’ in Germany

“…There are some inherent tensions between Deleuze-inspired affect research and ontological security theory, a framework that privileges anxiety over other affective experiences and furthermore posits assumptions of how subjects deal with it. In contrast, affect researchers often quote Spinoza who pointed out that '[n]o one has yet determined what the body can do' (cited in Gregg and Seigworth 2010: 3) to emphasise the potentiality, ambiguity and creativity of affect, and OSS scholars need to be careful not to essentialise how the 'self-in-the-body' (see Krickel-Choi 2022a; see also Purnell 2021) experiences and manages anxiety. Nevertheless, whilst affect research can serve as a reminder to OSS that anxiety is always ambiguous in its implications, focusing on anxiety might render some affective dynamics more visible and explorable than others.…”

Perpetual ontological crisis: national division, enduring anxieties and South Korea’s discursive relationship with Japan

“…By extension, particularly in states where nationalist ideology is most intense, nation/state incongruence may be extremely troubling. Such a phenomenon has clear relevance for ontological security, with IR scholarship in this area increasingly recognising spatial parameters, and a more general reassessment of the physical, as fruitful areas for exploration (Della Sala, 2017; Ejdus, 2020; Krickel-Choi, 2022a; Mitzen, 2018; Purnell, 2021). Krickel-Choi, for example, has highlighted Laing’s position that ontological security depends on experiencing the Self as ‘whole’ and ‘spatially coextensive with the body’ (Krickel-Choi, 2022a: 8; Laing, 1990 [1960]: 41, 65).…”