Civilisation and Fear: Anxiety and the Writing of the Subject

Wojciech Kalaga · Agnieszka Kliś

Mar 2012 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

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350

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About this ebook

Paradoxically, if nature has always been a source of fear, civilisation – its other and at the same time the epitome of progress and order – has not only doubled fear itself, but also added its new sister, anxiety. In effect, the notions of civilisation, fear and anxiety can hardly be separated. Fear – either linked with anxiety or distinct from it – lies at the foundation of civilisation, which as much promises to shelter us from these afflictions as it does proliferate them. Confronted no longer with the adversary powers of nature, humans have to face now the adversary powers produced by their own endeavours and ideologies. Each effort aimed at attaining an equilibrium results in new, unexpected rifts and breaches into which fear and anxiety grow. Out of the games played between fear and civilisation there emerge new versions of the human subject: homo anxious, homo civilis, homo rationalis.

This volume represents a collection of papers devoted to the many various relations between fear and society, culture and civilisation – both Western and Eastern, contemporary and past. The articles collected here approach the relationship of civilisation, fear, anxiety and the subject from multiple perspectives. Relating to modern critical thought, including that of Kant, Freud, Derrida, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, they investigate the objects, causes and effects of fear: reality, nature, reason, libidinal excess, atheism, critical discourse, technological advances, conspiracy, terrorism, capital punishment, the diversity of cultures, and the breakdown of civilisation as a whole: most of all, however, they explore the various shades of fear itself.

About the author

Wojciech H. Kalaga is Professor of Literary Theory and English Literature, and Director of the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures at the University of Silesia, Poland. He has lectured and conducted research at many universities, including Yale University, the University of Mannheim, the University of Queensland, and Murdoch University, where he was Chair of English and Comparative Literature. His books include The Mental Landscape (on Beckett’s fiction), The Literary Sign, and Nebulae of Discourse: Interpretation, Textuality and the Subject, as well as numerous articles on literary/cultural theory and semiotics. He is the editor of several collective volumes, including Memory – Remembering – Forgetting, Simulacra and the Real, Exile: Displacements and Misplacements, Cartographies of Culture, Mapping Literary Space(s), Repetition and Recycling, Multicultural Dilemmas, and Narrating the Other, and is editor-in-chief of the literary periodical Er(r)go: Teoria – Literatura – Kultura. At present he is vice-chair of the Committee on Literature Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences and General Editor of the Literary and Cultural Theory series, published by Lang Verlag.

Agnieszka Kliś is a PhD candidate at the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures at the University of Silesia, Poland. She has published articles on Gothicism and Gothic criticism. Her research interests include literary studies and cultural theory, interpretation theory, the history of literary criticism, the thought of Michel Foucault, and Gothic fiction.

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