Fears

Why write about fear? - Aleksandra Kunce

Lucretius and Defoe. Two lessons in fear - Tadeusz Sławek

According to Epicurus, animi terrores, “fears that haunt the mind” are the typical state of being and feeling in human, whereas philosophical thinking disrupts and modifies this state. The change happens through repositioning human: before, human had been placed in the world of “untransparent” forms, the world of hard objects in unchangeable shapes; now, once the look and the thought of Epicurus have made reality transparent, the obstacles for sight have been removed, but the whole ground under our feet has been moved. The moment the philosophical observation reveals what is under our feet (sub pedibus), our fate becomes the experience of void (per inane). The dignissima vita principle does not lead to an undisturbed happiness and peace but to an existence of “divine delight and trembling awe”, divina voluptas percipit atque horror. Lucretius, however, returns to the idea, that knowledge should remove all fear (metus) from our lives. Knowledge only fulfills its goal insofar as it spreads from the sphere of knowing to the sphere of existence. It is not enough to explain “the nature of seeds”. Contenting ourselves with this stage, we would understand little about the very tissue of human existence. “Now is time”, Lucretius says, “to touch upon other things”. The fear of death is what “always prevents [us] from tasting pure joy.” If we wish to exist in full, we need to take the challenge from what threatens this existence the most; if the stakes in thinking are to restore the original brightness of being, then we need to face whatever “darkens” it. The very aim of thinking cannot be to flee this challenge; quite the opposite – thinking is a movement towards danger. The Western Culture is founded largely on sustaining anxiety.

Europe of fear - Andrzej Hejmej

The paper discusses the current condition of Europe, an “archeology” of Western thinking, of democracy based on silence, lack of involvement; it also discusses the perspectives of the humanities and humanism in the 21st century. It undertakes a polemic with, among others, Pascal Bruckner, who writes about Europe’s schizophrenia (La Tyrannie de la pénitence. Essai sur le masochisme occidental, Paris 2006), and it is a commentary on an address delivered by Julia Kristeva in Assisi on the 27th of October, 2011, titled “Some principles for the humanism of the twenty-first century”.

Between the necessary and the possible, or how culture turns the existential fear banal. The case of death - Dariusz Kulas

The paper is an attempt to reflect on the tension between the necessity of fear and its neutralization within culture, which makes them tangible and trivial. One can get rid of fear, finding allies in theology, metaphysics or ethics. In these spheres fear gains a positive dimension, has its space – these are where human existence can be purified and rid of fear. However, is this triad: theology – metaphysics – ethics enough in contemporary culture, or does fear merely confirm and seal human loneliness?

Lessons in anxiety. On a pedagogy of and derived from fear - Krzysztof Maliszewski

Fear can take many forms and invade various spheres of reality. There is existential fear (Kierkegaard, Tillich), psychological fear (Freud, Kępiński), civilizational anxiety (Bauman), and even aesthetic anxiety of influence or fiction (Bloom, Carroll). Equally varying and ambivalent are the attempts to deal with this aggressive experience. The historical and contemporary efforts in the matter extend from “pedagogy of fear” to “educating to cope with risk”, fulfilling the vertical / hierarchical pattern of personal development. Thus, fear seems to be one of the most important topoi and challenges in pedagogy.

On fear in face of a gesture of non-forgiveness - Aleksandra Kunce

The gesture of non-forgiveness is surrounded by fears. Acts of non-forgiveness and radical declarations of impossibility of forgiveness raise social fears about the existence and future of a community. The author of the paper asks how the concept of impossibility of forgiveness, which seems to constantly emerge in the public sphere, can be dealt with. Is the political and cultural correctness, which seems to favor forgiveness, a just cultural practice? Does the notion of impossibility of forgiveness destroy the image of home communities we have? Or is it so, that when we refuse to forgive, we thus contribute to building dignity of a community as a home? Can we stop fearing a refusal to forgive? The author shows how easy the group and national calls for forgiveness can be and how they should be seen as suspicious, vain and ideological. As the gesture of forgiveness becomes internationalized faster and faster, together with the ever more pervasive rhetoric of political correctness, we ought to fear it more and more. When our care is the anthropological truth, we should ask about what lies behind such a gesture. The only solution is to radicalize the notion of individualized responsibility and of a local individuality, while muting the tendencies to focus on a group. Such awareness allows us to understand fears in the space of (non) forgiveness. It also leads us to realize that our experience can only be situated in a localized space, making us responsible for a local gesture, an embodied word and a tangible movement.

Fear in art - Maria Popczyk

In this article the author follows different types of aesthetic fear, that is an anxiety induced by a work of art, from aesthetic and anthropological perspectives. The author is interested in how fear and pleasure are related in the catharsis, in Edmund Burke’s notion of the sublime, in Goya’s Black Paintings, as well as in the thought of Paul Virilio. The aesthetic fear appears together with other feelings (such as pity or sadness), and primarily together with pleasure, which then is either autonomous or is born from a fascination with evil.

Fear and trembling, or a trauma in a new setting - Roman Lewandowski

The paper focuses on artistic practices and strategies, which undertake the task of defining, understanding and neutralizing the existential fears troubling the modern man. Starting with the diagnosis formulated by Hal Foster who said that the modern artist decides “to possess the obscene vitality of the wound and […] to occupy the radical nihility of the corpse”, I suggest that trauma and insecurity can contribute to constituting the project of identity. Irony and melancholy are then tools which deconstruct the sphere of individual (and group) memory and which reconstruct the trauma. Paradoxically, the process of finding truth and meaning is accomplished within the traumatized body of a subject.

Pragmatics of fear (trying to move beyond the cynicism of physiology) - Łukasz Michalski

If we try to see the “reverse” of the so called terror management theory (TMT) developed in the United States in the 1970’s and 1980’s, we end up with a vision, in which it is the very existence of culture that necessitates fear. In the diction of Lacan’s psychoanalysis it can be said that the Symbolic has to remain halfclosed, so that the Real – the untamable anxiety without which the Symbolic disappears too – can be visible through it. In this view culture is no longer the buffer protecting from the vision of death and from biological lowliness. Quite the opposite: it is an autonomous space thriving on fear. If in his analyses Lech Witkowski calls for shrugging off an axiological sluggishness, for reawakening the anxiety of fringes, for restoring the sense of lack, and all this in the name of human ability to feed on the symbolic, is he not, then, suggesting a vision of culture which requires fear?

Territories of fear. Representing the Afghan conflict in the National Army Museum in London - Olga Topol

The article tackles the issue of how the National Army Museum in London mediates the armed conflict in Afghanistan. The paper analyzes the narrative provided by the institution which mediates the horrors of war and inscribes them into the reality of contemporary London. The experience of war as a phenomenon inextricably related to human existence has often been an object of interest for artists and scholars. In the age of total omnipresence of information, we constantly exist in the midst of an ocean of data and images of world events. We are constantly in a state of alertness, of anticipation, of the Heideggerian Angst. Even though the Afghan conflict is to us, as Mary Favret put it, “a war at a distance,” it is also present to us through innumerable channels of communication and, thus, it enters our mental sphere. Moreover, the image of war is filtered for us through the radio, television, Internet, the press, as well as through institutions such as museums. Depending on their individual profiles, they can be places of entertainment, of knowledge or of memory and mourning. This study locates areas which are incorporated into the narrative structure of representation and reveals areas of conscious or subconscious exclusions, which form a broader structure, allowing us to see the fears characterizing particular social groups and cultures. The strategy underlying the exhibition in the National Army Museum reflects the fears of the British society. This paper aims to contextualize and deconstruct the theoretical foundations of the museum in order to expose the controversial areas of anxiety, which are overshadowed by the institutionalized narrative.

The old fears and the new class. Between revitalization and gentrification - Jadwiga Zimpel

While revitalization is fundamentally supposed to be a grass-roots social process restoring individual agency in executing people’s right to a city, the strategy of gentrification is basically a market-regulated resettling of inhabitants in parts of cities which are pervaded with values embraced by the new middle class. Despite clear differences between these two strategies of reinterpreting the space, in Polish cities we observe processes of smooth transitions from revitalizing initiatives to gentrifying ones. This paper suggests that one of the reasons for this tendency, detrimental as it is for a city, is the status anxiety of the new middle class, which takes the form of a fear of contagion, so wellknown from city histories.

Warring images? Media strategies and the society of fear - Tomasz Bielak

The rapid development of social networks has opened new fields of action for their users. Some of us have chosen to stick to these areas of the Internet which only provide us with information, while others found the very meaning of their functioning online in delegating their avatar into the space of Facebook or YouTube. The opposition between these two models, while still visible, is slowly becoming blurry, and the mixed model (information + partial life fulfillment) becomes more and more popular. Who am I, if I have no Facebook profile? Am I excluded, if I have not seen a popular YouTube clip or if I do not understand a popular meme? The answers do not seem all that obvious. The problems of social media as means of verifying information provided by traditional media seem equally important. This model induces the users to replicate the patterns of conspiracy theories, customs or stereotypes replete in the Polish media discourse of the recent years.

When in fear, god is dear? On the possibility of a postsecular reading of culture (the case of Lars von Trier) - Piotr Bogalecki

When on the 14th of September, 2001, in a lecture titled “To believe and to know”, which is seen to have inaugurated the postsecular turn, Jürgen Habermas introduced the notion of “postsecular society”, the task of rethinking the enlightened, secular reason, that he called for, seemed particularly urgent and needed. Here, I would like to suggest interpreting the postsecular thought, born from the fear of “God’s revenge” allegedly fulfilled by religious fundamentalist, as both an attempt at conceptualizing the fears of the modern society, and a response to a simplified articulation of the secular thesis and political theology which cause these fears. Both the threat of religiously motivated terrorism and the context of the so called ethical turn within the humanities seem to suggest that the currently popular postsecular trend is in fact a promise of overcoming such eschatological and theological anxieties. Trying to diagnose, describe and interpret them, I shall juxtapose these statements with the films of Lars von Trier, and in particular with Dogville (2003), The Antichrist (2009) and Melancholy (2011). Applying postsecularist tools in my analysis, I intend to broaden their existing interpretations (as attempted objectifications of the director’s individual obsessions), in order to include the social-cultural and the philosophical-theological dimensions. This way the films can be seen as trying to diagnose the “cryptotheology” of the modern “postsecular societies”, and its constitutive links between fear and trauma on one side, and spirituality and theology on the other.

“Careful with that axe, Eugene,” or what is “the 21st century schizoid man” afraid of? - Jacek Kurek

The first part of the title of this paper refers to one of the songs of Pink Floyd from Ummagumma (1969), while the other is a reference to the famous cover of the first album of King Crimson (In The Court Of Crimson King An Observation By King Crimson, 1969) and to the first song there, 21st Century Schizoid man. The cover, the song and the album all have a cult status nowadays. In this paper I focus on the sources and the symptoms of fear in rock music of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. It reveals unhealed World War II obsessions, a deep disappointment with the Euro-Atlantic civilization, a sense of estrangement. It also allows for reaching the deep sources of these states: the belle époque – the period when Munch created his Scream, the twin image of the King Crimson album cover. This in turn leads to questions about how real these old fears are in the contemporary culture.

Fear of open spaces – spaces of freedom. Mapping “non- -normative desire” in contemporary Polish literature - Wojciech Śmieja

The scholars of homosexuality (H. Bech, D. Eribon, G. Chauncey, R. Norton, J. Boswell) have shown that there have existed spaces which homosexuals, surrounded by hostility elsewhere, would find for themselves in particular areas of big cities. These spaces have become objects of literary descriptions (for example in the works of Jean Genet). In the Polish cultural situation such areas have hardly developed at all. This paper discusses secure spaces created in the midst of unfavorable majority by the homosexual characters in the works of Marek Nowakowski, Grzegorz Musiał, Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki. The author of this article juxtaposes the works of these writers of the 1980’s and 1990’s with the most recent literature (by authors such as Bartosz Żurawiecki, or Izabela Filipiak), in which the fear-inducing space has been relocated. It is now the intimate, close space of the family home, while its opposite is the virtual space, which so often makes the fulfillment of identity and sexual projections possible.

The future (of film) is blue. Blu-ray as “the ultimate” post-cinematic experience. Attempting to sketch theory basing on the case of the ”Alien” collection - Tomasz Żaglewski

Discussing the history of film outside the media context does not allow to see the complexity of the film experience, which is equally defined by the textual structure, and by the medium through which this structure is transmitted. The aim of this paper is to expand the media theory of film to include the new area of Blu-ray – the yet another innovative platform of film distribution. The author of the paper analyzes the technical, aesthetic and marketing dimensions of Blu-ray’s functioning, in order to show its fundamental role in shaping a new way of participating in the multimedia film culture. Focusing on the chosen case – the collection of four films of “Alien” series – the author shows that Blu-ray is an extremely interesting area of study and a part of a long history of transformations of the nature of film as a medium.

Mime’s body, Medusa’s head and Disney’s fantasies - Barbara Kita

Tomasz Majewski, Dialektyczne feerie. Szkoła frankfurcka i kultura popularna, Wydawnictwo Officyna, Łódź 2012.

Obstacle marathon - Ariel Łukasz Lisowski

Wojciech Lipoński, Historia sportu na tle rozwoju kultury fizycznej, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warszawa 2012.

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