Fear, Radical Democracy, and Ontological Methadone

Abstract

Given recent social and political transformations as well as our cultural landscape's dominance by narratives of threat and victimization, it is understandable that fear has occupied an ever-expanding role in our lives. Although these instabilities and insecurities have inspired a resurgence of various explanatory and mollifying fundamentalisms, radical democrats suggest that the conditions of this “postmetaphysical” age might instead facilitate unprecedented commitments to democracy. As such, radical democrats welcome the very conditions of contingency that contemporary citizen-subjects tend to find so frightening. In attacking the drive towards fundamentalism that they identify in various ideologies from Islam through liberalism, radical democrats betray an inattention to the functional consolation they offer. If fundamentalisms are opiates, radical democrats offer a prescription for addiction treatment that few have any interest in taking.