8. Integración de las publicaciones
8.3 La Figura de Dios en la Obra Poética de Concha Lagos
‘Look, a Negro!’ It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile.
‘Look, a Negro!’ It was true. It amused me.
‘Look, a Negro!’ The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement.
‘Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened! Frightened! Frightened!’ Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible. (Fanon 1986:
111–12)
What makes us frightened? Who gets afraid of whom? The above encounter shows us that it is not simply a question of some body being afraid of some body who passes by. On the contrary, the object of fear is over-determined;
here, the Negro is the object of a fear that is declared by a white child, but mediated through the memory traces of the black man. The fear announces itself through an ontological statement, a statement a self makes of itself and to itself – ‘I’m frightened.’ Such statements of fear tell the other that they are the ‘cause’ of fear, in a way that is personal: ‘Now they were beginning to be afraid of me.’ As such the fear signified through language and by the white body does not simply begin and end there: rather the fear works through and on the bodies of those who are transformed into its subjects, as well as its objects. The black body is drawn tighter; it is not just the smile that becomes tighter, and is eventually impossible, but the black body itself becomes enclosed by the fear, and comes to feel that fear as its own, such that it is felt as an impossible or inhabitable body. In this way, fear does not simply come from within and then move outwards towards objects and others (the
white child who feels afraid of the black man); rather, fear works to secure the relationship between those bodies; it brings them together and moves them apart through the shudders that are felt on the skin, on the surface that surfaces through the encounter.
And then, the story moves on:
My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning on that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look, a nigger, it’s cold, the nigger is shivering, the nigger is shivering because he is cold, the little boy is trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger is shivering with cold, that cold that goes through your bones, the handsome little boy is trembling because he thinks that the nigger is quivering with rage, the little white boy throws himself into his mother’s arms: Mama, the nigger’s going to eat me up. (Fanon 1986: 113–14)
The black body is ‘given back’ through fear only insofar as it has been taken, stolen by the very hostility of the white gaze. For the black man, fear is felt as coldness; it makes the body shiver with a cold that moves from the surface into the depths of the body, as a cold ‘that goes through your bones’.
Fear envelops the bodies that feel it, as well as constructs such bodies as enveloped, as contained by it, as if it comes from outside and moves inward.
And yet fear does not bring the bodies together, as a form of shared or fellow feeling. While signs of affect seem to pass between the bodies (the shivering of the Negro becomes the trembling of the little white boy), what passes is not the same affect, and it depends on (mis)reading the other’s feelings. The shivering of the black body is misread as a form of rage, and only then as the
‘ground’ of white fear. In other words, the other is only felt to be fearsome through a misreading, a misreading that is returned by the other through its response of fear, as a fear of the white child’s fear. This is not to say that the fear comes from the white child, as if he was the origin of that fear (or even its author); rather the fear opens up past histories of association (in the very rehearsal of childhood fantasies), which allows the white body to be con-structed as apart from the black body in the present.
We might note here that fear does something; it re-establishes distance between bodies whose difference is read off the surface, as a reading which produces the surface (shivering, recolouring). Fear involves relationships of proximity, which are crucial to establishing the ‘apartness’ of white bodies.
Such proximity involves the repetition of stereotypes. Fanon begins his reflection on the encounter with stereotypes, as fixed accounts of the other’s
being that are repeated, as if they come from nowhere: ‘the Negro is’. Stereo-types seek to fix the meaning of the other, but the very repetition that is required to enable such a fixation renders them a site of insecurity rather than security, as Homi Bhabha (1994) has suggested. Such impossible truths become compelling precisely insofar as they might be lost on the way. Fear may also work as an affective economy (see Chapter 2): it does not reside posi-tively in a particular object or sign. It is this lack of residence that allows fear to slide across signs and between bodies. This sliding becomes stuck only temporarily, in the very attachment of a sign to a body, an attachment that is taken on by the body, encircling it with a fear that becomes its own.
Crucially here, we end up with a fantasy in which the white child says to its mother: ‘Mama, the nigger’s going to eat me up.’ Such a cannibalistic fantasy, of being incorporated into the body of the other, is crucial to the politics of fear: fear works by establishing others as fearsome insofar as they threaten to take the self in. Such fantasies construct the other as a danger not only to one’s self as self, but to one’s very life, to one’s very existence as a separate being with a life of its own. Such fantasies of the other hence work to justify violence against others, whose very existence comes to be felt as a threat to the life of the white body, but which as a threat to life, may come to give rather than take life. Discourses of fear are, in R. D. Laing’s terms, con-cerned with the preservation rather than gratification of the subject (Laing 1960: 44). Fear might be concerned with the preservation not simply of ‘me’, but also ‘us’, or ‘what is’, or ‘life as we know it’, or even ‘life itself ’.
In this chapter, I consider fear as an ‘affective politics’, which ‘preserves’
only through announcing a threat to life itself. First, I consider the relation between fear, anxiety and the loss or ‘passing by’ of an object. Second, I examine the relationship between fear and the alignment of bodily and social space, in particular, by considering how fear shrinks bodily space and how this shrinkage involves the restriction of bodily mobility in social space. And finally, I reflect on the role of fear in the conservation of power, by consid-ering how narratives of crisis work to secure social norms in the present, with specific reference to the figure of the international terrorist.
The difference between fear and anxiety is most often represented in terms of the status of the object. Indeed, fear has often been contrasted with anxiety insofar as fear has an object. For example, Rachman argues that anxiety can be described as the ‘tense anticipation of a threatening but vague event’, or a feeling of ‘uneasy suspense’, while fear is described as an emotional reac-tion ‘to a threat that is identifiable’ (Rachman 1998: 2–3, see also Fischer
In this chapter, I consider fear as an ‘affective politics’, which preserves
1970). I want to question this model by suggesting that fear is linked to the
‘passing by’ of the object, even if the absence of the object in fear creates a different impression from the impression it creates in anxiety.
Fear’s relation to the object has an important temporal dimension: we fear an object that approaches us. Fear, like pain, is felt as an unpleasant form of intensity. But while the lived experience of fear may be unpleasant in the present, the unpleasantness of fear also relates to the future. Fear involves an anticipation of hurt or injury. Fear projects us from the present into a future.
But the feeling of fear presses us into that future as an intense bodily experience in the present. One sweats, one’s heart races, one’s whole body becomes a space of unpleasant intensity, an impression that overwhelms us and pushes us back with the force of its negation, which may sometimes involve taking flight, and other times may involve paralysis. So the object that we fear is not simply before us, or in front of us, but impresses upon us in the present, as an anticipated pain in the future.1
Indeed, Heidegger argues that fear is felt in the absence of the object that approaches. As he suggests:
That which is detrimental, as something that threatens us, is not yet within striking distance, but it is coming close. . . . As it draws close, this ‘it can, and yet in the end it may not’ becomes aggravated. We say, ‘It is fearsome’. This implies that what is detrimental as coming-close coming-close by carries with it the patent possibility that it may stay away and pass us by; but instead of lessening or extinguishing our fearing, this enhances it. (Heidegger 1962: 179–80)
Crucially, Heidegger relates fear to that which is not in the present, in either the spatial or temporal sense of ‘the here and the now’. Fear responds to what is approaching rather than already here. It is the futurity of fear which makes it possible that the object of fear, rather than arriving, might pass us by. But the passing by of the object of fear does not mean the over-coming of fear: rather, the possibility of the loss of the object makes what is fearsome all the more fearsome. If fear had an object, then fear could be con-tained by the object. When the object of fear threatens to pass by, then fear can no longer be contained by an object. Fear in its very relationship to an object, in the very intensity of its directedness towards that object, is inten-sified by the loss of its object. We could characterise this absence as about being not quite present rather than, as with anxiety, being nowhere at all.
But is anxiety nowhere?2When Heidegger discusses anxiety he emphasises how it comes from nowhere: ‘Accordingly, when something threatening brings itself close, anxiety does not “see” any definite “here” or “yonder”
from which it comes. That in the face of which one has anxiety is
charac-
terised by the fact that what threatens is nowhere’ (Heidegger 1962: 231). Or we could consider how anxiety becomes attached to particular objects, which come to life not as the cause of anxiety, but as an effect of its travels. In anxiety, one’s thoughts often move quickly between different objects, a move-ment which works to intensify the sense of anxiety. One thinks of more and more ‘things’ to be anxious about; the detachment from a given object allows anxiety to accumulate through gathering more and more objects, until it over-whelms other possible affective relations to the world. One becomes anxious as a mode of attachment to objects. In other words, anxiety tends to stick to objects, even when the objects pass by.3Anxiety becomes an approach to objects rather than, as with fear, being produced by an object’s approach. This slide between fear and anxiety is affected by the passing by of the object.
Furthermore, fear’s relationship to the potential disappearance of an object is more profound than simply a relationship to the object of fear. In other words, it is not just fear that is at stake in fear. For Freud, fears them-selves may function as symptoms, as mechanisms for the defence of the ego against danger. In his paper, ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety’, Freud (1964d) returns to the Little Hans case. Hans had a phobic relationship to horses. Freud argues that this fear is itself a symptom that has been ‘put in the place’ of another fear, one that much more profoundly threatens the ego: the fear of castration as a fear of the father. Hans can ‘manage’ his fear of horses through avoidance, in a way in which he could not manage his fear of the father. We might remember that in Freud’s model of unconscious emo-tions, the affect itself is not repressed: rather what is repressed is the idea to which the affect was attached (Freud 1964a: 177; see Chapter 2). The affect of fear is sustained, or is even intensified, through the displacement between objects.
The displacement between objects works to link those objects together.
Such linkages are not created by fear, but may already be in place within the social imaginary. In the Freudian model, the movement between objects is intra-psychic, and goes backwards; it refers back to the primary fear of cas-tration. Or, to be more specific, the sideways movement between objects (in this case, between the horse and the father) is itself explained as determined by a repression of the idea to which the affect was originally attached (the threat of castration).4I would suggest that the sideways movement between objects, which works to stick objects together as signs of threat, is shaped by multiple histories. The movement between signs does not have its origin in the psyche, but is a trace of how such histories remain alive in the present.
We could see this in the encounter described by Fanon. The production of the black man as the object of fear depends on past histories of association:
Negro, animal, bad, mean, ugly. The movement of fear between signs is what allows the object of fear to be generated in the present (the Negro is an
animal, bad, mean, ugly). The movement between signs allows others to be attributed with emotional value, as ‘being fearsome’.
Fanon’s encounter allows us to explore the links between the displacement of objects of fear and the passing by of the object. In this encounter, fear does become contained in an object: the black body. And yet the containment of fear in an object remains provisional: insofar as the black man is the object of fear, then he may pass by. Indeed, the physicality of this ‘passing by’ can be associated with the passing of fear between signs: it is the movement that intensifies the affect. The black man becomes even more threatening if he passes by: his proximity is imagined then as the possibility of future injury.
As such, the economy of fear works to contain the bodies of others, a con-tainment whose ‘success’ relies on its failure, as it must keep open the very grounds of fear.
The sideways movement of fear (where we have a metonymic and sticky relation between signs) is also a backwards movement: objects of fear become substituted for each other over time. This displacement of objects also involves the passing by of the objects from which the subject seems to flee.
Fear creates the very effect of ‘that which I am not’, through running away from an object, which nevertheless threatens as it passes by or is displaced. To this extent, fear does not involve the defence of borders that already exist;
rather fear makes those borders, by establishing objects from which the subject, in fearing, can flee. Through fear not only is the very border between self and other affected, but the relation between the objects that are feared (rather than simply the relation between the subject and its objects) is shaped by histories that ‘stick’, making some objects more than others seem fearsome.
Such a model suggests that fear is bound up with more than the loss of the object of fear. Fear is bound up with the loss of the object, as such. For Freud, fear is indeed part of the story of loss in that one also fears the loss of the object of love. As I examined in the previous chapter, Freud, in his analysis of the fort da game, shows how the child performs the departure and return of the mother in an attempt to master the impossibility of her love (Freud 1964c: 15–16). Perhaps then anxiety comes in part from love (for the (m)other), as a love that can be taken away, as the taking away of that which secures the subject’s relation to the world. Anxiety is then an effect of the impossibility of love; an impossibility that returns in the diminishment of what it is possible to be. The anxiety about the possibility of loss becomes displaced onto objects of fear, which seem to present themselves from the outside as dangers that could be avoided, and as obstacles to the fulfilment of love itself.
Returning to Fanon’s encounter, we might note how the white boy’s flight from the object of fear, an object that passes him by, takes him into the arms
of the mother, which signify a protective and safe form of enclosure, or a transformation of the world into home (being-at-home). In other words, the turning away from the object of fear also involves turning towards the object of love, who becomes a defence against the death that is apparently threat-ened by the object of fear. In this way, we can see that fear is that which keeps alive the fantasy of love as the preservation of life, but paradoxically only by announcing the possibility of death. The necessity of the fantasy (‘Mama, the nigger’s going to eat me up’) makes clear that the passing by of the feared object also involves moving towards the loved object, through the forming of a home or enclosure. However, if the flight of fright moves the subject towards the loved other, whose arms provide a second skin, then that enclo-sure keeps open the possibility of loss. Rather than fear getting in the way of love, we can see that fear allows the subject to get closer to the loved object, though the distance is never quite abolished, and the object of love as well as fear may yet pass by. Indeed, it is the fear of passing by as a passing away that seems crucial to the ‘turning’ that constitutes the subject in the first
of the mother, which signify a protective and safe form of enclosure, or a transformation of the world into home (being-at-home). In other words, the turning away from the object of fear also involves turning towards the object of love, who becomes a defence against the death that is apparently threat-ened by the object of fear. In this way, we can see that fear is that which keeps alive the fantasy of love as the preservation of life, but paradoxically only by announcing the possibility of death. The necessity of the fantasy (‘Mama, the nigger’s going to eat me up’) makes clear that the passing by of the feared object also involves moving towards the loved object, through the forming of a home or enclosure. However, if the flight of fright moves the subject towards the loved other, whose arms provide a second skin, then that enclo-sure keeps open the possibility of loss. Rather than fear getting in the way of love, we can see that fear allows the subject to get closer to the loved object, though the distance is never quite abolished, and the object of love as well as fear may yet pass by. Indeed, it is the fear of passing by as a passing away that seems crucial to the ‘turning’ that constitutes the subject in the first