Towards a general formula for contemporary fear. We have every reason to be afraid. All the reasons, or almost all of them. Tomorrow – and this is pretty much the only certainty − holds its share of horrors, its regiment of corpses, its flood of threats. Tomorrow will be worse, or almost worse, for almost everyone, almost everywhere. Worse for the environment, worse for physical and mental health, for public services, for education, for democracy, for peace. We can try to summarize this in a formula, which would be the general formula for contemporary fear: the fear that there is no future, except that of a burning ecosphere, torn apart by war, monitored by AI-powered drones in the hands of techno-billionaires helping dictatorial regimes perpetuate the power of a minority (white, if possible). This is a dreadful situation, to say the least; how can we survive it, psychologically? And how can we escape the politics of fear − the phobopolitics that perpetuates this situation − in order not only to survive, but to hope for a better, fairer, and more beautiful life?

Not even the end of the world. One could argue, however, that this so-called ‘dreadful situation’ does not describe something truly contemporary. Isn’t this just an updated version of the fear of the end of the world? Nothing new, one might say. The apocalypse has a déjà vu feel to it, one might add, so why worry? Better to rewatch the good old dystopian films and seek comfort in them: ‘It’s already happened’, we whisper in front of our screens. I believe, however, that what we are dealing with today is a different phenomenon − even more so if, instead of a screen (a cinema screen or that of a smartphone), we see the hole left by a bomb. Some people seem to think that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism; but today it is becoming possible to imagine the end of capitalism without this changing much in terms of our emotions, as if fear − invasive and affecting all aspects of reality, all populations but to varying degrees and according to regimes of reality yet to be identified − had become resistant to any political dissolution. After all, the end of capitalism as we know it could give way to an even more oppressive, technologically repressive, and genocidal economy of death. Everything may well end, and we will end up with nothing, we tell ourselves.

Hell and vision. This could be a vision of hell. But it is the hell of vision that illuminates this endless world, this world that is collapsing quickly here but far too slowly there. It is the hell of the images that reach us from Palestine, from Lebanon. And from Haiti, and from Ukraine. Images and descriptions of the cruelty of human beings who seem incapable of seeing that they can see. Algorithmic hallucinations that disfigure the world with their mediocrity (AI slop). The hell of seeing and knowing what is happening and being unable to do anything about it, of telling oneself that nothing can be done while trying to do something, and adding that one could have done something else, that one could still act, perhaps, if, if...

Fear and angst. If only we know what is happening − and what isn’t happening − with widespread fear, if only we know what dread hides and reveals. Everything seems confusing, and this is one of the effects captured by the general formula of contemporary fear. So, let’s try to produce some conceptual clarity. Let’s take things as calmly as possible, without feeling guilty for taking the time to think when everything is going so badly, when everything is burning, because that guilt will only add fuel to the fire. Let’s start by distinguishing between angst and fear with the help of psychoanalysis and existential philosophy. Let’s simply say that fear has an object, we can identify the danger that causes it, the evil it seeks to avoid; but following Freud and Heidegger, we can define angst as that which has no object: angst arises when words fail us, because something cannot be said or symbolized, and suddenly we feel that we no longer have any ground beneath us, or that the ground is shaking beneath us. Fear always conjures up images, even where there is nothing: in the darkness of the staircase leading up from the basement, I imagine monsters, the same as I can see in horror movies; but angst arises from the lack of images, when the imagination, understood as a fabric of meaning, as an ecology of relationships, as a material, ontological continuum, fails. Fear is characteristic of living beings, who are threatened by death as an interruption of the continuum of life; but this threat paradoxically covers up the fact that another interruption has already taken place, the generative interruption of existence.

Defection of being, shaky ground. The generative interruption of existence is not death that ends life, but the very origin of existence. Indeed, individuals only exist in a form of ontological independence, of autonomy, whereby the cell closes in on itself, taking within itself the natural outside that constitutes it. For a cell, a plant, or a sci-fi planet (think of Ursula Le Guin’s short story, Vaster than Empires and More Slow), to be alive is necessarily to experience a separation − a detachment and a shift from the non-Self − and it is through this abyss, this contested ground, that communication will be established with others, whether they are present or deceased, visible or invisible. There is angst, not fear, every time this defection of being, this shaky ground, is experienced as such, without any external reason; every time, therefore, that the trauma of the generative interruption of existence is reactivated, which is the price that every being pays for truly being − and not just being by protecting oneself in a narcissistic, armored, warlike bubble, denying the non-Self in order to avoid confronting themselves. We can then understand one of the phobopolitical functions of fear: to cover up the condition of existence that disturbs the living and makes them prey to nothing.

Dehumanizing dread. But such an analysis seems to generalize differences, one might say, thereby masking very distinct regimes of reality that are resistant to generalization: angst, one might argue, is for those who are lucky enough not to be bombarded day and night by terrorist states that have lost all soul, all empathy, all humanity. When the police beat someone with batons, the object of fear and pain is tangible. That is true, but let us turn this argument around: what if the problem with this world is that it produces a formula of fear that prevents part of humanity from experiencing itself as human, even in the ordeal of angst? This dehumanizing dread is the core of phobopolitics.

Wonder and amazement. In La crise du Muntu: Authenticité Africaine et philosophie (I owe this reference to Norman Ajari, whom I thank), Fabien Eboussi Boulaga writes that ‘what comes first for the Muntu is neither astonishment nor wonder, but only stupor (stupeur) caused by total defeat.’ Contrary to Socrates and Aristotle, who consider wonder (thaumazein) to be the beginning of philosophy, Boulaga tells us that, for colonized peoples, the experience through which thought begins is much more violent, much more devastating: it is not the experience of wonder of a subject facing the world, but that of a world of victors seeking to maintain their domination over Black people through terror. No political liberation will be valid for me as long as it does not consider it imperative to abolish what prohibits wonder. Prohibiting wonder is tantamount to killing children − dread par excellence − since it is thanks to children that a world will begin again.

Extension of the realm of dread. There are, therefore, clear asymmetries in dread, in the sense that we are not all struck by the same stupor, by the same terror: phobopolitics first strikes minorities. But this distinction − which concerns different regimes of lived reality − must not become an opportunity for the privileged to imagine that they will never be affected by what is happening ‘far away’. In an interview conducted in May 2025 for the magazine Usbek & Rica, activist and writer Fatima Ouassak warns us that what is happening in Gaza is ‘a laboratory for genocidal technological progress’, where the latter serves ‘to get rid of populations considered undesirable, harmful. People have started talking about AI genocide.’ For this reason, ‘what is targeting Gazans today could target us tomorrow.’ So there is a time difference, delays − but tomorrow, this dreadful scenario could become reality everywhere, almost everywhere.

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