From Fear to Anxiety: An Exploration into a New Socio-Political Temporality

Abstract

Modern political reality is increasingly permeated with testimonies and representations of social and personal anxieties. Most often these narratives are accompanied with a desire to identify and implement a 'cure' that will either heal or eradicate the source of discomfort. In the political everyday such a 'cure' is disguised as a policy or a new law. Thus it comes as a little surprise that the term anxiety is increasingly used by politicians, policy-makers, legal and medical experts as well as scholars to explain an allegedly new social phenomenon. Relying on psychoanalysis and critical theory the contributions in this special issue tackle modern anxieties in the realms of politics and law, and in particular look into how anxiety is manifested in relation to resistance, immigration, nationalism and austerity measures. This introduction firstly, unpacks the idea of anxiety conceptually and offers different ways in which anxiety can be read politically, legally as well as theoretically; and secondly introduces the arguments put forward in individual contributions.Keywords Anxiety Á Psychoanalysis Á Jacques Lacan Á Socio-political order Á Modernity Á Identity Modern political reality is increasingly permeated with testimonies and representations of social and personal anxieties. Most often these narratives are accompanied This special issue originates in the discussions we had at a workshop organised in the Politics department at the University of Manchester in 2015 by Andreja Zevnik and Aoileann Ni Mhurchu. Since then we had on-going discussions on the role of anxiety in the modern socio-political sphere, which also drew in new contributors. The presented issue is a testimony to the discussions we have had.

The unbearable anxiety of being: Ideological fantasies of British Muslims beyond the politics of security

“…Anti-racist struggles for gender liberation are equally susceptible to such claims. Zevnik’s (2017b: 237) words are instructive here: ‘anxiety can also mobilise and support political action’; this includes support for measures targeting Muslims like so-called burqa bans or banning halal meat. As Mandelbaum suggests, congruence between state, nation and society is the fantasy that underpins logics of security/insecurity, but we have shown here how fantasies of congruence can exceed security framings.…”

“…As Mandelbaum suggests, congruence between state, nation and society is the fantasy that underpins logics of security/insecurity, but we have shown here how fantasies of congruence can exceed security framings. Congruence fantasies provide ‘an explanation accounting for the lack of a promised future’ (Mandelbaum, 2016: 188), for why this future ‘cannot be attained’ (Zevnik, 2017b: 240). British policy and media elites deploy the conceptual Muslim as a means of avoiding uncomfortable truths about British society and – temporarily, at least – negating the possibility of its transformation.…”

“…There have been important interventions that have mobilized Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts in international relations (Eklundh et al, 2017; Epstein, 2011; Mandelbaum, 2016; Zevnik, 2017a, 2017b). However, these interventions do not explicitly engage with the concept of ideology, which yields fresh critical insight by attending to the ways in which power relations and political strategies are mobilized.…”

Resisting politics of authoritarian populism during COVID-19, reclaiming democracy and narrative justice: Centering critical thinking in social work

“…Even before the outbreak of COVID-19, there has been a pervasive anti-immigrant rhetoric represented in emotionally charged terms like 'global anxiety', 'refugee crisis', and 'arising fear' against immigration as 'a threat' to national security (Alkopher, 2018;Hirvoner, 2017;Zevnik, 2017). Zevnik (2017) explains how deploying imagined and/or exaggerated threats increases anxiety inside and creates fears among people which then operate as ordering principles and subsequently any exceptional measures that are enacted, often disguised as policy or law, are legitimized and normalized as 'the place of authority' (p. 239). The role of threats is known as 'a pre-condition for the emergence of ordered populism' (Graves and Smith, 2020: 10).…”

Security in transition(s): The low-level security politics of electric vehicle range anxiety

“…This arguably relates to the security literature and its focus on the negation of threats and logics of prevention and precaution (Anderson, 2010;Massumi, 2007), and, by extension, to those activities in the present that are conducted to prevent a potential harmful future (Adey and Anderson, 2012). Furthermore, theoretically, stress links up to, among other things, the literature on emotions and security (Åhäll and Gregory, 2013;D'Aoust, 2013), the everyday experience with insecure situations (Enloe, 2014), and the politics of fear or anxiety (Zevnik, 2017). 1 Hence, it is possible to see stress, and indirectly range anxiety, as an instance of insecurity, as it represents an intermediate bodily and emotive response to uncertainty, one that people try to avoid.…”