[Music]
foreign
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and welcome to my lecture on fear my
name is Michael Pickering I am a
historian of early modern ideas I'm
currently at Trinity College University
of Melbourne and in this lecture I'm
going to be talking a little bit about
fear
um some of the things that this lecture
will consider include what is fear and
how do we ultimately write its history
how is fear related to other Concepts
such as anxiety
how does Fear mediate between
individuals and society and ultimately
what does Fear do
I think that's a really key question
that approach in asking what does Fear
do is often thought of as the
instrumental approach to fear it's not a
universal approach amongst historians
there are other ideas and I hope to sort
of unpack some of that in relation to
the history of emotions
in this lecture I would like to talk
about how when we think about what fear
actually does
um how does Fear ultimately help to
Define spaces of inclusion and by
extension exclusion
uh and and how might we see this in a
geopolitical context the background to
all of this is a colleague and I
co-edited a book on fear in the
german-speaking world sixteen hundred to
two thousand just a short time span of
course
and in this text we um we what we
invited a number of approaches but we
ended up looking at this uh construction
variously no one as the Holy Roman
Empire starting around 1600 and then
moving through to 2000 of course uh it
wasn't the Holy Roman Empire for that
whole time uh it later became the
austria-hungarian Empire encompassing
many many territories that today are
indeed independent nation states such as
Czech Republic
Slovakia Hungary many of the German
territories today were part of this
entity that Voltaire famously referred
to as neither holy nor Roman nor Empire
it's a useful lens through which to
consider how fear played out in this
german-speaking geopolitical context I
think though
indeed space in this way is not just a
question of geography space is actively
constructed
invented
and what my colleague and I saw as we we
looked at the contributions to this
volume uh is that we saw that fears in
this context can manifest in a number of
ways uh cultural fears fears for example
of of magic fears of the downfall of
society
or even of civilization and of course
civilization is not an unproblematic
term whose civilization what
civilization all that sort of thing
uh some of these particular fears refer
back to anxieties of incursion or
infiltration others uh in essence refer
to fears of implosion societal implosion
so fears from outside but also fears to
do with what happens internally to
particular societies we also see in a
sense quite quite a meta sense we see
fears of History itself or more
specifically particular historical
Legacies
in essence a fear of the fear
sounds very abstract but when couched in
the context of for example uh post-world
War II diplomacy as one of the
contributions to our collection showed
this was a very real
very real impact on the
um way in which West German diplomacy
was undertaken
um in the post-war period so I'm going
to to start with a lecture to look at
very broadly at what was the year or
what is sphere how do we conceptualize
it and ultimately speaking as an
historian how do we write its history
I'd like to begin
um with a little bit of a quote from a
really I think quite
um enjoyable and interesting article by
Young planter and Benjamin Lassie the
phobic regimes of modernity
they begin by discussing fear in the
following way
I begin
it is commonly called an instinct an
emotion a symptom a neurochemical
reaction
sometimes it happens to us we are
terrorized intimidated daunted cowed
sometimes it happens in us we shiver
quiver shudder and Shake
sometimes we avoid it sometimes we
tackle it
and sometimes we name it
then further on down the page
in discussing all the many different
types of fear
forget the arachnophobes more
interesting are the ilorophobes who run
from cats or lutrophobes who cower
before the otter
or xemophobes who are haunted by the
giant mole rat
it is hard to escape the conclusion that
our compulsive attempts to name our
fears are in fact an apatropaic defense
against them from a to z or A to Z for
our North American friends to judge by a
lexicon to live is to fear to live in
fear
and then they continue all this raises
several questions
fear is everywhere and nowhere in all
things and no things how are we to make
sense of it at all
how intellectually can we cope with its
breadth and depth we habitually say that
we see fear that we smell it touch it
breathe it but how after all is said and
done do we know it
I think that's a really wonderful way to
really lead into this discussion of when
we talk about writing histories of what
any emotions really but in this context
writing the history of fear or a history
of fear what are we talking about what
are we doing
foreign
I'd like to just talk a little bit about
ultimately how we might start to to
think about the business of writing
about fear fear as indicated in the um
section I just quoted is is ubiquitous
uh it's a common Human Experience uh we
know this I know this and and I'm sure
you know this
um
however as plumper and lazier go on to
to indicate we really should be wary of
assuming that fear can or indeed should
be situated solely within the Ambit of
Natural Sciences
it's tempting to want to speak about
fear as this thing that because we all
feel it not just humans but but animals
uh and any number of organisms on this
planet feel this that somehow it is uh
uh you know to be discussed purely
within the context of um of for example
uh brain science or or the Natural
Sciences more broadly a number of things
like that
when we start to think about writing the
history of emotions we want to be
focusing on
um really in large measure the recovery
or reconstruction
of how past societies understood the
emotion and question
in this case fear and
part of this part of this effort uh
really involves going back and looking
very very carefully at an array of
primary sources so sources from
whichever period you're studying and
I'll talk more about that in a second to
to look at these and think about how
past societies seem to have ultimately
thought about what that emotion meant
um one of the really key texts out there
that did this um that does this is
emotional lexicons it's an edited
collection and in this uh the idea was
not to examine individual emotions per
se but rather the ways in which emotions
were constructed socially regarded
debated and transformed this is a really
good jumping off point I think when uh
we start to talk about how people from
past societies
um
understood emotions I'll give you an
example
so going back to the 18th century which
is really my my area in fact 17th late
17th and early 18th century
german-speaking world is is what I do
and when we look at the encyclopediased
Johann settler
uh encyclopedias are fascinating things
to to look into because they kind of we
have this feeling that they give us a
snapshot sometimes but in fact uh they
can take decades to put together in
which time uh ideas and attitudes can
can and often do change but in any case
um turning to settlers lexicon his entry
on first
fear
it was a feeling of being unable to
achieve or fulfill something positive
or
being unable to present to prevent sorry
something negative from happening
I don't know about you
but I don't tend to think of fear in
that particular way but it gets more
interesting here first fear and of
course one of the things we often
associate with perhaps a kind of
Germanic lexicon is angst angst
we might think of that as anxiety
in zeddler's understanding
angst anxiety
in a way
was just a heightened version of fear
fear was and I'll just repeat a feeling
of being unable to achieve or fulfill
something positive or to prevent
something negative from happening and
angst was just a heightened version of
this
compare that with a much later and I
would say probably quite modern
understanding of a separation between
fear and anxiety in which fear has a
very clear object or stimulus
um that that is defined that is the
thing provoking the emotion whereas
anxiety on the other hand has an
undefined uh undefined or unclear
I might not say entirely absent but
undefined or unclear
um sort of stimulus that is provoking
this emotionally in essence anxiety
anxiety is then the subjective
experience in the absence of a stimulus
I would suggest on that question of
presence or absence it's not necessarily
a question of the presence or absence of
the thing itself that is causing fear uh
but our abilities to neutralize these
things in fact this is me in agreement
with Jonah Burke who wrote a very
interesting book on fear herself
um and I'll be talking a little bit more
about the approach that she takes uh
with regard to the instrumentalization
of fear when we when we look at Burke
for example
um she talks about how these
distinctions between fear and anxiety
May reside and I quote solely in the
social hierarchical responses in fear
States individuals are consciously able
to take measures to neutralize or flee
from the dangerous object
while purposeful activity fails
individuals whose subjective experience
is anxiety
but
the ability or inability to neutralize
or flee is a question of power relations
within historical communities not a
fundamental difference between the
object or state causing an emotional
response
it is in essence that question not of
presence or of absence but the ability
to respond or not
um the writer Sigmund Bauman are talking
about anxieties in the mid to late uh
20th century and indeed into the uh 21st
century kind of Echoes this uh sense of
well how how does anxiety manifest
socially
um he he has this concept he uses called
liquid fear uh which is the title of his
book as well uh very interesting idea
because in this he conceives those the
generalized fear of social implosion uh
in the late 20th and early 21st
centuries
um so Bauman argues this pervasive this
pervasive theory of a collapse of
civilization uh what he refers to as the
Titanic syndrome hinges upon an
awareness of our dependency upon the
structures of civilization itself and of
just how fragile these complex
structures are
indeed it is both a fear of quote being
evicted from a world where Elementary
Staples go on being provided and there
is a holding power that can be counted
on
so we have these kind of
conceptualizations of fear as as that
thing that we can identify and name uh
that is in one sense present we have
this idea of anxiety as that thing that
is hard to name that is difficult to
name that is pervasive and uh
potentially also on a very large scale
so when we start to think in these terms
when we start to think about okay
conceptualizing fear conceptualizing it
in relation to other emotions like
anxiety closely related
how do we actually write its history
how do we actually
um do the history of emotions what are
we trying to recover here
and I think what's really interesting to
consider is that oftentimes when we hear
history of emotions we hear you know
that fear has a history that any of the
emotions in the series have histories
what does that mean are we trying to
recover subjective individual and
personal experiences
or and I would suggest the letter
are we in fact trying to recover how
particular groups
and I use the term loosely understood
the emotion in question so are we trying
to
recover how individuals thought and felt
about fear or are we looking at really
the recovery of a kind of
inter-subjective meaning associated with
an emotion
and I as I said the latter is uh is
something that really I have focused on
in my work
I just take us through this though a
little bit
when we talk about the subjective
experience of an emotion this could be
something that is at one level
emotionally for us very very compelling
um I'm thinking here of how silicon
holder for example in her work on
um you know the fears that particular
religious communities uh during the 30
years what how how those fears were
palpable and we have documents showing
how for example uh nuns were in in
Terror of the uh the oncoming Swedish
troops and and all of this sort of thing
so so there is something that is quite
captivating uh by by looking at that
subjective experience of fear
but in another sense it's very hard to
actually recover subjectivities one
might even argue that it's almost
impossible because really when we when
we look at documents when we examine
historical sources what we're doing is
we are looking at a kind of mediation of
experience uh we are looking at how
things are represented to us we have no
real ability to go and actively speak
with that individual or somehow to
extract particular
emotional states in some kind of way
from from their particular individual
psychics
so what what does this all really mean
well in a sense
um I don't think for as an historian
whilst the individual subjectivities the
individual experience of fear uh it can
be quite emotionally compelling and
interesting in that register strictly
speaking as an historian
um I I find it less interesting than a
consideration really of
um how Collective meaning and
significance is attached to emotions
foreign
look at and how do we kind of consider
these I I don't have uh time really in
this lecture to go into any uh deep
consideration of the sort of methodology
surrounding fear but we can look at for
example
um artworks we can look at popular
literature ego documents such as Diaries
uh legal documents material culture a
very big thing at the moment so looking
at objects and items from that have
survived
and we can look at advice literature
um and and so there are lots of sources
that we can take on board but the idea
is not to to take those sources on board
to recover those individual experiences
of fear but rather to recover how
particular emotions such as fear were
understood and were themselves
constructed how how meaning certain
meanings were associated with certain
emotions and how other meanings for
example were associated with other
emotions
um and of course that question is of how
emotions change over time is is all
bound up with this
part of the question as Barbara rosenwan
has put it is though how do we move
Beyond quote scary sources to real fear
I think it's a it's a very valid one
there but I think it's also a question
of what we want to do what are we
actually trying to do as uh not just as
historians but in as particular
historians or groups of historians
working on
um on things
um so the approach that I've sort of
Taken and and I think this is
um really kind of quite characteristic
of people who do history of emotions is
that individual experiences of fear uh
may be obscured but it's socially
emergent consequences and its impact on
History can be meaningfully studied
so in essence then fear uh we can
understand as an object of knowledge
through which we can in a way refract
deeper latent social political uh and
indeed even cultural issues
there's also this question of how fear
changes over time and again this is one
of the things that when we think of it
from that sort of more Natural Sciences
perspective while fear is just fear it
just exists and it always has and it
always will so long as there are you
know sentient creatures on the planet
but when we dig into what you might
think of as a more constructivist way of
looking at emotions we understand that
emotions or meanings associated with
those emotions can and do change again
the example of of Settler's
understanding of fear
um and clearly in in the modern context
or the later modern context
um there is is a very different meaning
associated with that or a different set
of meanings associated with it than in
the 18th sort of early to mid 18th
century German context
so this question of really how
um how fear changes over time
um is is really key to writers such as
zigmund Bauman and Jean dulamore
um when we consider them the interest uh
in the diachronic transformations of
emotions more generally from uh medieval
to early modern Europe so from the
Middle Ages through to the period again
roughly defined one could say 1500 to
1750 1500 to 1800 late
1400s through to 1800 it's a very very
flexible area but that that shift from
the Middle Ages so roughly roughly
pre-1500 into early modern so 1500s uh
1600
1700s what what sort of changes do we
actually see and how not only were ideas
um about emotions different but also
this question of what was
an appropriate form of emotional
expression so in a sense to what extent
can we really speak of qualitative
differences in terms of what was feared
for example the intensity of such fears
and the nature of fear itself in the
pre-modern in modern eras respectively
indeed dilemma's pioneering study on the
emergence of a western Guild culture
premised as he sees it on the
development of the doctrine of
contemptuous Mundi takes as its starting
point a medieval World filled with both
external and internal fears a
nightmarish Easter that would only
really start to diminish in the 18th
century
in essence then the story of modernity
in the West becomes in part a shift away
from such all-pervasive fears
part of this is the thesis of Norbert
Elias in his famous text the civilizing
process
in Elias's book penned while he was in
Exile in Britain in the 1930s as
effectively Jewish men fleeing the Nazis
the shift from pre-modern to Modern was
marked by an increasing emotional
restraint or a sort of
for those of you who enjoy hearing the
the German expression indeed when I was
working through this text I I did the
eminently purest thing of going and
Consulting the German
um so so that's that's why that's there
so this transformation this this kind of
uh emotional restraint from medieval to
Modern according to Elias
um this transformation purportedly began
within the centralizing early modern
courts and Via a process of
socialization and social control
eventually entered into the Bourgeois
social media
building upon this conceptual framework
some historians have argued that there
are important differences between
pre-modern and modern emotional
Expressions others have however rejected
such a division or grand narrative this
is not to suggest that some historians
argue emotions just don't change it's
that the change doesn't happen within
this Grand narrative
for example Barbara rosenwine has argued
for a focus on that Which social
communities quote Define and assess as
valuable or harmful to them the
evaluations that they make about others
emotions the nature of the effective
bonds between people that they recognize
and the uh
the aspects of emotional expression that
they expect encourage tolerate and
deplore
so these Rose and wine refers to as
emotional communities
so in this section I hope to have
sketched out a little bit uh of the sort
of baggage in a sense associated with
fear uh in terms of what what are we
really sort of talking about what is the
object of our inquiry as historians
um how do we understand it in a kind of
a long Dura perspective over a
considerable period of time and in the
next section I'm going to talk a little
bit more deeply about
how fear mediates or can mediate between
society and individuals and and really
in service to this question what does
Fear actually do and I'm going to take
us through some hopefully reasonably
interesting case studies that help to
illustrate some of these points
so as we have looked at so far
one of the key aspects of the history of
emotions in this context looking at fear
I mean there's that question of Are We
interested in in individual and
subjective fears cheerfully or are we
more focused on uh how particular
emotions were constructed and understood
in essence uh the approach here is not
so much who was afraid and how do we
know this but rather how was fear
constructed invented represented and
what did this do
so this leads us into a different sort
of area where we look at how fear was or
could be but still can be of course
instrumentalized
emotions are never entirely politically
neutral I would argue uh and fear is a
particularly apt example of this whether
one speaks of high politics for example
or social power dynamics more generally
as Joanna Burke has noted reframing the
discussion in terms of instrumentality
shifts the focus of any analysis of fear
to its political dimensions and I quote
Burke here where she says quote
crucially
emotions such as fear do not belong only
to individuals or social groups
they mediate between the individual and
the social they are about power
relations emotions lead to a negotiation
of the boundaries between self and other
or one community and another
they align individuals with communities
so in this sense then when we consider
communities even imagined ones as being
linked to space
this opens up I think a broader
discussion about how fear and power and
indeed space intersect
and I think a really good example of of
what I'm getting at here
is in a chapter uh in the edited
collection that a colleague and I put
together on fear and the the chapter is
by Kirsten Cooper who was looking at uh
really the walls of aggression by uh
Louis XIV against various uh States in
Europe at that time and
um as as Cooper points out largely a
dynastic conflict
um but in this particular instance we
see something something else a different
Dynamic here than you might initially
expect so Cooper's chapter is titled the
danger of becoming French
and her Central argument is really that
uh fear on the part of the Holy Roman
Emperor leppold II
um this sort of fear of French military
aggression under Louis XIV was in a
period of uneasy peace in the 1680s
transformed
into a threat of French cultural
incursion
indeed as Cooper States and I quote
anti-french pamphleteers did not simply
exploit existing anxieties of military
defeat but also invented a new threat
the danger of becoming French
the conflicts of Louis xiv's Reign uh
were undeniably dynastic in nature
German pamphleteers however
Imperial pamphletiers turned uh the this
crisis into a danger of French
infiltration occurring right under the
noses of unsuspecting Germans
by speaking French consuming French
Commodities and adopting French ways
these pamphleteers argued Imperial
subjects were aiding Louis XIV in his
cultural and therefore his military
Warfare
so far from representing an actual
threat this danger or or fear of
becoming French was actively constructed
by Imperial pamphleteers as a means of
advancing geopolitical ends uh one of
the outcomes Cooper argues was really a
solidification of political support for
the emperor across very complicated
confessional or religious lines the Holy
Roman Empire
was really not any kind of unified
structure by this point in the sense
that it wasn't uh you know that really
it was was chiefly about these kind of
political negotiations between Emperor
and other political uh heavyweights
within this Patchwork of things
um that that really wasn't a kind of a
unified empire in uh shall we say in
earlier medieval sense of of what it was
or
uh you know or when we consider other
other centralized kind of powers like
the the Frankish Empire for instance the
Holy Roman Empire itself was by the late
17th and into the 18th century
um although dominated by the Austrian
Habsburg family nonetheless was
ultimately
um this kind of Patchwork of of
negotiations and and uh and and other
states as well
so
when we consider this way in which the
cultivation of a sort of fear a cultural
fear of frenchness
was developed
um
Cooper States this fear the the danger
of becoming French appealed to a
projected sense of cultural and
linguistic germanness that was
inextricably linked with the future of
the Empire as a political system end
quote so in this sense what did fear do
well I mean it helped the uh The
Establishment the political
establishment based in Vienna against uh
really these military threats and that
there were definite geopolitical
interests at at played here you know as
we see space can be readily imagined not
only as a domain of political and
Military hegemony
but also a sphere of cultural influence
and identity
in this way questions of inclusion and
exclusion can be bound up
with the cultivation of particular fears
I should also add here that
where we see in Cooper's chapter in that
poly Roman Empire this construction of
fear
um we can also see generalized
geopolitical anxieties in fact downplay
or suppress fears particularly emergent
fears and so a contribution that I made
to to this book that uh a colleague and
I brought out
was uh looking at the early 18th century
Habsburg monarchy or poly Roman Empire
but focusing on the the southern uh
Southern periphery of this in Serbia so
early 18th century we are now under the
emperor Charles VI Carl VI
um and it concerns the so-called cases
of vampirism in Serbia yes vampires and
if anyone ever asks you where vampires
come from well I mean it's not a perfect
answer by any stretch but one of the the
big scandals uh around this historically
started in the 1720s and actually really
took off more in the 1730s in the Holy
Roman Empire
so what we see is this uh by way of
brief background is a number of people
falling ill in this Village of medvedia
in Serbia on the Habsburg side but up
until relatively recently had actually
been on uh on the ottoman side people
falling ill from some strange
um some strange disease and and dying
and then others claim that these people
returned from the dead to attack the
living and in so doing uh continue this
contagion
well in my piece
um look I I really suggested that
anxieties uh hear
were on the part of the the authorities
the Habsburg authorities
um chiefly concerned territorial
integrity
that's what we're looking at in a way
here that's the lens through which the
authorities I suggest we're looking at
it and I I don't think that's such a
difficult leap
um so the generalized anxieties here in
a sense concerned territorial Integrity
um this time in the face of the Ottoman
Empire rather than uh the French under
Louis XIV
um and this kind of these generalized
anxieties intersected with the real
threat of pestilence which was Rife On
the Border at this time and the newly
discovered magical threat of infection
and decimation by hordes of the undead
I mean I love the fact that my research
allows me to say things like that
vampires here were thus externalized as
chiefly a threat from the ottoman side
and an incursion into the ordered
Habsburg space when people were when you
read through the archival materials you
see for example people referring to the
fact that when they lived on the ottoman
side
they had done X Y and Z and it was there
that they became either somehow
um stalked by some vampire that then
eventually turned them into one or in
fact when they were on the ottoman side
they took part in some kind of blood
ritual to some aperture paig ritual
designed to stop them from becoming
vampires which ultimately uh didn't
really work and they became vampires
after death
um so there's this narrative about how
we are now on the Habsburg side but when
we were on the ottoman side uh this is
where where vampires range strongly and
um and this this idea of a kind of
incursion into Habsburg space bringing
with it a sort of magical contagion was
something that I I think was really
quite interesting to look at in the
archival sources
um I suggest very strongly here that
um you know the on the ground Witnesses
representatives of the Habsburg
Administration military surgeons and so
forth were genuinely befuddled by what
they had seen uh they the Habsburg
authorities sent in a special diseases
uh person a contagious diseases
specialist a physician who basically
didn't know what he was looking at he
said it's people are dying of this
febrile Illness but it doesn't uh here
to the the sort of um you know etiology
and other things of of of knowing
illnesses
um uh after this inconclusive report was
submitted which is really that the key
Source material that we look at uh we
see a surgeon being sent to the military
surgeon who could actually uh of course
physicians in this time intended not to
um you know physically manipulate the
bodies they tended not to to cut and all
that sort of thing whereas surgeons of
course could and did and so a military
surgeon by the name of Johann fleekinger
was sent in
um and he performed autopsies on these
so-called vampire bodies that were
exhumed and and the bodies of suspected
vampires uh appeared in one sense
similar to the bodies of of Catholic
saints they were uncorrupted they they
did not give off a bad smell they they
looked fresh the limbs were pliable
um there was fluid blood in the bodies
and fluking a
um performed in uh or performed
autopsies on on about 10 cadavers
um after which they were at the behest
of people the the denizens of medvideo
these cadavers were incinerated
so how in one sense did it then uh
transcend the individual I I suggest
looking at these archival sources people
were genuinely a Afraid on the ground
they had no idea what they were really
looking at
but these cases were taken up through
the Habsburg bureaucracy they entered
into learner discourse and at that
particular time what we see is
ultimately the medicalization of the
vampire incidents
um ostensibly at the behest of Emperor
Charles VI himself he wanted to
understand how these could be rationally
clarified rationally explained we don't
really have a lot of evidence showing
directly that he requested this but we
do have indirect evidence that strongly
suggested that that was the context of
this later so-called vampire debate in
the german-speaking world in the 1730s
we've looked at in this lecture some
approaches to how we might consider fear
uh as as part of the history of emotions
with we've looked at well really what do
we kind of mean by fear uh how do we
then write its history
um in one sense then how is fear related
to other Concepts such as anxiety Powers
fear culturally and historically
contingent
um what does Fear do
how does it help to mediate between
individuals and Society or between
different uh Collective groups so this
particular instrumentalist approach that
we've taken indebted hugely to the work
of Joanna Burke
um is is something that then leads us on
to a consideration uh of really how fear
uh can in one sense help to Define
boundaries and borders whether those
boundaries and borders are literal
whether they are figurative whether they
are political whether they are cultural
um fear helps us to in a sense
articulate space demarcate space as well
as the inclusion and exclusion uh
inclusion in this space and exclusion
from the space and I think when we
situated in a particular geopolitical
context in this instance the case
studies from the 18th Century Holy Roman
Empire I think that helps to put it into
strong
um relief
so to conclude this lecture I think a
few questions uh that have that arise
from it a few questions for further
thought and discussion that are germane
to the field
um first question on the list how might
we understand fear as socially
constructed does this in fact write off
biological and neurological dimensions
of the emotion and how indeed might we
Bridge these areas this is something
that plumper and lazier in the reading
list with this this is something that
they have really grappled with how do we
bring these areas together in a
meaningful sort of way so a key thing
not just with respect to fear but also
more generally with the history of
emotions
um
second question can we ever really
recover individual subjective
experiences of fear
if so to what extent are they useful for
writing history of emotions
I should not uh suggest here that all
historians of emotions are all doing the
same thing I hope through the course of
this lecture to have made it clear that
uh it's really a question of what what
we think we're doing in some sense
individually in some sense working with
colleagues in various departments what
what are we trying to do here and so in
a sense what we try to recover is about
what we want to do and you know what
what place might individual
subjectivities fit here I suggest that
this is
um you know It's tricky to navigate
and maybe not necessarily what uh is the
most fruitful Way Forward but I think
there's definitely lots of room to
discuss that
um third question here not 20 questions
I promise just four third question to
what extent does Fear connect to and
intersect with cultural understandings
of space
um I think this whole idea of space is
is an interesting one because I've
spoken about it on a very very Grand
sort of scale we can think also quite
literally fearsal or phobias relating to
space claustrophobia agoraphobia to come
back to a list really that I read out
citing a quoting in fact
um
at the beginning of this lecture
so to what extent uh can we link fear in
a way with considerations of space
um
fourth question
is an instrumentalist approach only
really relevant to fear
or are all emotions somehow connected to
power and therefore amenable to such an
approach and I think I think that's an
interesting one obviously I have taken a
particular stance or I've sided with
particular arguments here in this
lecture but I think that really is a
very open you know a very open question
some people might not think that that
necessarily leads us down particularly
fruitful paths but I I nonetheless think
it's something but we we would do well
to to always include at the very least
in the background of discussions uh that
we have around the history of emotions
uh you can find references as I
mentioned before to various works that I
have discussed in this lecture you can
find these uh references on
um on the next slide uh but basically
um I would suggest that a really good
place to start would be
um looking at for example Jonah bug's
book on fear I think this really is an
excellent
um examination and and is something that
really leads us into a consideration of
that that last question so thank you
very much for your time uh for your
attention it's been a great pleasure to
speak with you today on fear in the
history of emotions
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