Les Brigittines

Fear is a strange thing in our society. One the one hand there is too much of it, and on the other not enough. On the one hand we live in a culture of fear on the other we live in a world of hypernormality, of business as usual. On the one hand there is the politics of fear, for instance: the muscular politics of ‘armed government’ under the state of exception (army in the streets) of the war on terror, on the other the fear for climate change for instance is not real enough, it does not seem to make us act, it seems too far away, too abstract. This paradox of the contemporary configuration of fear and anxiety in the collective (un)conscious is a brainbraker, that is at the same time ‘a exercise in speechlessness’ as much as it is a ‘lesson in urgency’. This paradox (between speechlessness and urgency) itself might become in itself a paralyzing form of existential Angst.

Philosopher, art historian, writer and activist Lieven de Cauter teaches philosophy of culture at the architectural department of the KULeuven and the RITCS. He published around ten books on contemporary art, Walter Benjamin, architecture, the city and policies.