The Cultural Politics of Emotion

In Chapter 3, Ahmed begins with an autobiographical excerpt from Frantz Fanon’s The Fact of Blackness in which a white child expresses fear of Fanon’s Blackness and claims that Fanon, whom he does not know, intends to eat him; the child flees for safety into his mother’s arms. Fanon’s language communicates his own feeling of being enclosed, penetrated, and distorted by the child’s fear. Ahmed comments that their mutual fear of one another functions to re-establish their separateness and produce difference during this moment of proximity. She points to the repetitive structure Fanon uses to list the stereotypes he reads in the child’s reaction to him and notes that this reflects the necessity for stereotypes to be repeated in order to “fix the meaning” of the other (Location 1493 of 6419). Such stereotypes also point to fear as another emotion that circulates in an affective economy. The child’s accusation that Fanon has cannibalistic intentions, Ahmed says, shows that fear functions by portraying the other as a threat that may consume the self. This is how fear becomes a justification for violence.

Fear is commonly distinguished from anxiety by the qualifier that fear has a specific object. Ahmed argues that there is also a temporal dimension to the object of fear: Fear relates not only to the approach of the feared object in the present but also to the anticipation of resultant injury in the future. Ironically, fear creates real discomfort in the present that results from anticipation of potential discomfort in the future. She endorses Heidegger’s concept of fear as inextricably bound to futurity and to the uncertainty of a potential threat’s arrival, but qualifies her acceptance of his ideas about anxiety: Whereas Heidegger asserts that anxiety is unattached to specific objects and seems to come from nowhere, Ahmed points out that anxiety can be seen as a particular way of attaching to objects that effectively allows it to come from everywhere.

Because the object of fear can be repressed, fear is often displaced and can stick together various objects as signs of threat. This is how Fanon, who was completely unknown to the child in his story, can become a sign of threat to the child. If the real object of fear is repressed, these stuck-together objects onto which the fear is displaced can inspire fear as they approach, but their passing by cannot truly dispel fear because the basis of the fear is left open and unresolved. Fear helps to create the borders of the self by establishing which objects the self is endangered by and must flee from. This makes its objects necessary to the self and enhances the tendency to stick objects together so that the loss of one object of fear does not threaten the boundaries of the self. Ahmed suggests that one source of repressed fear is the threat of the loss of loved objects. Returning to Fanon’s story and the child running to its mother for comfort, Ahmed asserts 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” (Location 1592 of 6419).

Ahmed turns her attention to the question of which bodies fear which other bodies, pointing out that it is not correlated with objective vulnerability. She proposes that fear increases when openness to the world is viewed as identical with vulnerability and that fear has the effect of shrinking the body and preparing it to flee from the world pressing against it. Fear shrinks bodies so that physical space aligns with social space. As an example, Ahmed returns to Fanon’s story, pointing to Fanon’s own fearful reaction and his feeling that he was being enclosed and trapped by the child’s words and behavior. She notes that this is similar to the way that women are restricted by messages that the world is a threatening place for female bodies. Women are encouraged to see public spaces as threatening and to “flee” to the alleged safety of domestic spaces; their right to occupy public spaces is thus delegitimized. Unequally distributed fear, Ahmed suggests, operates to regulate the movements of bodies in space and to claim certain spaces as the legitimate territories of some bodies but not others.

Fear is essential to the maintenance of collectives and the power structures that govern them. It is not a mere technology of the powerful deployed to preserve the status quo, however. The perception of mutual threat is what binds groups together and creates the sense of a collective in the first place. Ahmed points to the impacts of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States. She dissects comments on these attacks made by prominent political figures, noting their recognition that the impact of fear is to restrict mobility and their assurances that the government will act to make citizens secure against this threat. During this time, the proliferation of American flags as signs of cohesion demonstrated that the safe space Americans were encouraged to turn to was the national identity itself. This counteracted the shrinking and immobilizing effects of fear by allowing identification with the collective and its foray into retaliatory foreign wars. At the same time, the government gave itself sweeping new powers of detention that unequally impacted different kinds of bodies. Muslims and those of Middle-Eastern and South-Asian heritage became stuck together into a fear-object category of potential terrorists and were ejected from the collective “we” of American identity.

These events are typical of the process through which a collective invokes security as a means of creating group identity. Threatened transgressions of borders are necessary in order to define the boundaries of the collective and justify measures to secure them. Crises must be declared, and once identified, threat objects must be fought against—not simply to remove a present danger but to remove projected future dangers. This confirms the value of the status quo and links its continuity to future survival. Often, members of the collective are recruited as a kind of internal police on guard against supposed weaknesses in the collective that may contribute to its downfall. The alleged degeneration of values that is pointed to as one potential source of internal weakness is projected onto some types of bodies more frequently than others.