The Poetics of Fear: A Human Response to Human Security

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"Subtlety of analysis and fearlessness in the face of complexity characterize Erickson's work: he reads poetically, seeing not just models for thought (and hence action), but also ways in which the very texts he reads complicate the matter. Erickson has a salutary awareness of metaphor, the reverberations of literary context, and the imaginative attitudes encouraged by various texts and methodologies. We rarely find in political thought such sensitivity to the deeper and more unsettling aspects of poetics, but here Erickson rejects the oversimplifications of realism' and shows how the cultural allies from the past that are enlisted on its side can themselves qualify, question, make problematic, or undermine the positions they are enlisted to support.This book compares favorably to the best of those that use Ancient Greek and Roman texts to think with and think through, in company with, e.g., the psychologist Jonathan Shay's Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, or the legal scholar James Boyd White's Heracles' Bow: Essays in the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law.In the end Erickson does come out with a clear position, but it is a position that is complex and flexible : we are often seduced by the simplicity of Realpolitik, but we can escape its unfit logic by resisting flattening and ham-fisted readings that use Classical texts to support political realism.' Erickson uses the ways in which the Shield of Achilles in the Iliad can encourage us to think of representation and mediation, in terms of a negotiated engagement with versions of the world. Erickson uses this as a springboard for careful interpretations not just of passages from the Iliad, but also Sophocles, Thucydides, Plato, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Derrida, and Baudrillard, culminating in the use the Homeric Shield of Achilles to shape an analysis of a pair of speeches, one by George W. Bush, one by Barack Obama.Such intellectually fruitful use of poetics to understand politics is as impressive as it is rare." --Dr. Andrew S. Becker, Associate Professor of Latin & Ancient Greek Languages, Literatures, & Cultures and Co-Director, Spring Semester Liberal Arts Program, Center for European Studies & Architecture, Riva San Vitale, Switzerland
In The Poetics of Fear: A Human Response to Human Security, Chris Erickson analyses how fear operates in international politics. His account constructs an unconventional juxtaposition between literary and philosophical worlds of the classics and the narratives of post-9/11 presidential speeches . . . This book will be of interest and use to those students and researchers of international affairs, who have recognised the importance of affects and emotions in foreign politics. It will also benefit those scholars, who are interested in developing more sophisticated interdisciplinary approaches to IR by bringing together the study of world politics and the theoretical humanities. -- Emilian Kavalski, University of Western Sydney * CEJISS *

Author Bio

Dr. Erickson teaches political science at the University of British Columbia, Canada. His research focuses on contemporary political thought and critical theory, as well as radicalism in international politics, and contemporary security issues.