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Thy Neighbour as Thy Double: Fear as Social Link

Summary/Abstract: By showing that both contemporary models of the pursuit of authenticity (“be yourself” or “create yourself” ) have to produce the evil object evoking anxiety the way Romanticism conceived it in the figure of the double, the paper attempts to trace in “floating” fear the origin of the contemporary social link and show that both the dread of the other and the respect for the other are two sides of the same narcissistic coin, that is, two ways of accommodating the anxiety resulting from the contemporary superego injunction to enjoyment. It proposes that the only way to overcome this impasse would be to recognize that both the fearful (terrorist) and the pitiful (victim) images are in fact images of ourselves and therefore to assume them as our own.

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