Haunting sovereignty and the neurotic subject: contemporary constellations of fear, anxiety and uncertainty

ABSTRACT

Debates about a politics of fear have endured in Euro-Atlantic societies for many years, and even decades. Recently, they have reached a new peak in the face of right-wing populism. While some scholarship claims that populist politics have especially been successful in instrumentalizing fear, this paper offers a different reading. The author argues that politics of fear and anxiety should be understood as an expression of the erosion of sovereignty, apparent both in the nation-state and in a new mode of subjectivation. It is a ghostly sovereignty that finds both a form and an addressee in the neurotic subject.

KEYWORDS:

• Nation state
• sovereignty
• neurotic citizen
• fear and anxiety
• affective politics
• subjectivation

Acknowledgment

I have had the chance to discuss the topic of this paper at different occasions over the last years. Here, I would especially like to thank Claudia Brunner, Gundula Ludwig, Birgit Sauer, and Dorthe Staunæs for their helpful comments and questions. I would also like to thank the reviewers of this paper and editors of the journal for challenging me to make the paper stronger as well as Erika Doucette for her careful English proof-reading.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Speaking of Europe, I refer to what Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) calls an ‘imaginary figure’ (4) as well as to Stuart Hall (2007 [1992], 57) who considers ‘“the West” (…) as much an idea as a fact of geography’. I employ these notions in an effort to acknowledge the particularity of these powerful constructs and to avoid what Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1986), among others, has coined ‘methodological universalism.’

2. The idea of the social contract, however, is exclusive because it is restricted to white able-bodied bourgeois men. I return to this aspect and to the question of gendered and racialized passions later.

3. Succinctly put, of course, it is a liberal autonomous, male, bourgeois, able-bodied, white citizen.

4. In Brown’s (2019) conclusion of the Ruins of Neoliberalism), she urges us to conceive of neoliberalism as more than ‘political rationality’ in order to be able to ‘grasp the new formations of subjectivity and politics’ that are, as she emphasizes, ‘in good part, neoliberal effects’ (182).

5. Isin (2004) invents the neologism ‘neuroliberalism’ to emphasize this new mode of neoliberal governing. Here, I take his insights on neurotic subjectivation as a modality specific to the neoliberal subject.

Additional information

Funding

This article received financial support from the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Vienna, and the Research Area Political Theory, History of Ideas, and Political Culture at Kiel University.

Notes on contributors

Brigitte Bargetz

Brigitte Bargetz is post doc researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences/Political Science at Kiel University and co-editor of Femina Politica. Journal of Feminist Political Science. Her research interests lie at the intersection of affect studies, political theory, feminist theory, and critical theories of the everyday. Over the last years, she has been engaging with theorizing affective politics between anxiety, solidarity, and sentimentality. Amongst her recent publications is: A Sentimental Contract: Ambivalences of Affective Politics and Publics. In: Public Spheres of Resonance: Constellations of Affect and Language, edited by A. Fleig/C. von Scheve, 63-80. London/New York: Routledge, 2019.