The Work of Culture in an Era of Terror
Located between affects and their linguistic expression as sentiments, terror is analysed as a passion that retains the energy of the affects and of their spreading power. The terror’s semantic and pragmatic association with the notion of terrorism reveals the degree to which the politics mobilizes and manipulates to its ends obscure forces in humans, as it is also itself infiltrated by the energy of the affect, always at risk to become overflowed. The facility of the terror’s diffusion in the social tissue invites to question what, in contemporary cultures, may facilitate contagion and undermine possible resistances. In his writings about civilization and its discontent, Freud evokes the Kulturarbeit, a process of transformation of basic drives that is at work on both the individual psychic and the collective scenes, and is always at risk to regress. This notion offers a guiding tread for examining the role of passions in politics. A particular attention is drown upon the forms of massification present in the culture and its correlate : the construction of the Other as a Foreigner and as an external target to a violence internal to the culture and the self.