Fear and the Illusion of Autonomy

Abstract

This essay reads Hobbes’s account of the complexity of causation in conjunction with his materialist analysis of the way that fear orients the subject in time in order to argue that, for Hobbes, fear is both a response to, and a disavowal of, the impossibility of self-sovereignty. The essay argues that the movements of memory and anticipation that Hobbes depicts as central to the passion of fear transform the causal field for the subject in such a way as to give her a sense of possible mastery both over herself and over the world around her. In suggesting that fear fosters an illusion of autonomous agency in individuals, Hobbes points to the possibility that the immense and fearsome power attributed to the sovereign is not simply a response to the need to quell unruliness and disorder but is also a condition for each individual’s sense of her own self-sovereignty.