In his novella Fear, Stefan Zweig embodied fear in a character:

In the fado entitled ‘Medo’ [Fear], the great Amália Rodrigues lent her tragic voice to a question that many will recognise from their own innermost thoughts:

In the sonnet ‘Que poderei do mundo já querer’ [What could I still want of the world], Luís de Camões sings his lament:

Fear was both the best advertisement and the best thrill offered by Hitchcock’s film The Birds. The daring master of suspense always used obsessive fear as the most constant motif in his work, the element that powered his inspiration and creativity, as well as his success. And he also drew richly on his own many insecurities and phobias (acrophobia, claustrophobia, agoraphobia, atychiphobia, amaxophobia, etc.), transcribing, transmuting and transfiguring them in his tales of terror.

Francisco de Goya, in Folly of Fear, Gustave Courbet, in Desperation – The Man Made Mad with Fear, and Asger Jorn, in Fear, depict in different ways this natural emotion, regarded nonetheless as unheroic, prompted by either the awareness of danger or its underlying irrationality. Asger Jorn was one of the leading founders of the Situationist International and the CoBrA movement, which declared: ‘A painting is not a composition of colour and line but an animal, a night, a scream, a human being, or all of these things together.’ Edvard Munch had already said the same, through his painting.

In the history of Western thought, fear is a fundamental given for the construction of several successive philosophical anthropologies. From the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Cynics, Plato and Aristotle (particularly on the subject of Greek tragedy) to Freud, Jung, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Arendt, Cioran, and Hans Jonas, taking in Hobbes, Pascal, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Hegel and Marx, fear, seen as an emotion or a passion – positive or negative, natural or artificial, useful or dangerous, necessary or contingent – lies at the centre of meditation on the human condition, freedom and destiny, being and time, life and death, consciousness and the world, nature and culture.

Fear is one of the raw materials of history, a source of its energy. Over the centuries, fear has given its character and name to ages, periods and regimes. From the Fear of the End of the World, in the year one thousand, to the Great Fear of 1789 and the Terror of 1793−94, taking in pandemics, epidemics, famines, wars, tyrannies, schisms, heresies, massacres, persecutions, ethnic cleansings, religious purges, and natural disasters, the men and women who walked this Earth have often journeyed down the grim roads of fear.

The great earthquake of 1755, in Lisbon, set off a universal wave of fear, to which many literary, philosophical, scientific and religious writings bore witness. Foremost among these were Voltaire’s poem and his account in Candide, or Optimism, and the three essays by Kant.

The history of Russia, for instance, is shot through with fear (causing fear and suffering from fear), as is plain from multiple references in politics, the visual arts, music, film and literature: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev (Guy de Maupassant wrote two novellas, in 1882 and 1884, entitled Fear. In the second, the narrator recounts a terror-filled and terror-inducing story told by Ivan Turgenev, one Sunday, in Flaubert’s house).

In Japan, fear is that which one wishes to look in the eye. Summer is the season of fear and a good time to watch horror films and tell spine-chilling stories. The sophisticated pleasure of experiencing and causing fear is, it turns out, a universal sensual pleasure (Halloween proves this). Dracula (Bram Stoker) and Frankenstein (Mary Shelley) have fierce competition in the East.

The twentieth century was a century of fear. A host of infamous events were synonymous with horror and terror. The two world wars were factories of fear, death and ignominy. In the second, the death camps changed the ontological status of crime. More than at any time in the past, evil and fear were found together in this time of extremes, in a torrent of words beginning with B: barbarianism, brutality, boorishness, bestiality.

The historian Jean Delumeau, in his book La Peur en Occident [Fear in the West], shows that individuals, communities and civilisations conduct a permanent conversation, latent or manifest, with their fears and with fear, whether it wears the face of medieval terrors or that of the contemporary obsession with security. The history of fear is peopled with collective hallucinations and frenzied compulsions, delirious intimidation and inconceivable superstitions, shadowy conspiracies and scandalous mystifications, unconfessable intimacies and indecipherable nightmares, secret restlessness and visible alarm.

The book reveals the consistent features and what has changed in the varied forms in which fear has imposed itself over the course of history: from the mass fears caused by plague and want to the scares set off by popular sedition and political, legal, moral and religious disorder, from the terror generated by the actions and works attributed to the devil and his followers to the panics and alarm described in proceedings against witchcraft and other heresies, from the fear of death and the dead to the terror caused by apocalyptic prophecies warning of the end of the world.

In The Power of Images: Siena, 1338, Patrick Boucheron looks with penetrating sharpness at the fresco known as The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, painted in 1338 by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, in the Council Room (Sala dei Nove) in the Palazzo Pubblico of the Republic of Siena. The painter was to die a decade later, a victim like his brother Pietro (also a painter) of the black death, the deadly wave of the plague which generated the most unrelenting and merciless fears.

This powerful allegory, whose incandescent power and symbolic energy remain undimmed, was painted at a time when the city was establishing itself, when the Republican principles were at risk of being undermined by a tyranny rooted in personal power and discretion, by the discord caused by social hatred, and by the overwhelming catastrophe of war (the mural includes its own Guernica, denouncing the warfare of the day). Nonetheless, the greatest and most dangerous fear was not considered to be that of tyranny – it was of how the orchestrators of tyranny succeeded in seducing the people into accepting it.

Abrogio’s frescoes were a powerful weapon in the political battle to ward off the fear engendered by the dangers of poor government. By presenting both thesis and antithesis, the figures and forms represented in the murals stood in opposition to negativity, denouncing it, and proposed a positivity, defending a form of politics based on integrity and legitimacy, which would bring about a fair and peaceful way of living together. Whilst based on wisdom and virtue, good government, to be worthy of the name by which it went, would above all have to produce beneficial effects and concrete, lasting outcomes in the life of each citizen.

As the reading of this work shows us, fear is a terrible tyranny, which can exercise a perverse and demonic power of seduction. It leads those who suffer from it to accept tyranny, but it often gives them the vengeful desire to be tyrants themselves. A fearful people is a subject people! Not uncommonly, it also becomes a people that wants to subject and tyrannise other peoples.

When we consider what can here serve as an example and a lesson, a question arises, which asks us in clear terms: in speaking of this masterly painting and this monumental Tuscan city of the fourteenth century (which, even without clearly realising it, had already started out on its irreversible journey of decline), is it not of ourselves, of our own civilisation and culture, our own age and cities, our own threats and tragedies, our own dangers and fears, that we are actually speaking?

To ward off, exorcise, contain, domesticate, discipline, minimise, sublimate and overcome fear, but also, in sinister symmetry, to instil, manipulate, exploit, explode, communicate, infect, falsify, and manoeuvre it! What is fear for? What is it like to be afraid? What is being afraid?

Being afraid is not to think of anything else without also thinking of fear. Feeling fear is feeling a hand seize us, without knowing whether it pulls or pushes us into the danger – and it is to experience over the sharp shiver of our body and our mind an acid breath that blows against the direction of our own breathing. To be afraid is to dream that a fox has got into the hen house and there will be no cockcrow in the morning. To be afraid is to know that the ship is heading for the high seas and the storm will set its destination as the ocean bottom. To be afraid is to dig deeper into a black hole into which everything falls and nothing comes out clean.

To be afraid is to tell others to be afraid with us and to use other people’s fear as company, support, an excuse, an alibi or a justification for our own fear. There are people who are afraid because they generated fear in themselves and there are people who are afraid because they suffer the fear that others generated in them. There are people who import fear and others who export it.

To be fearful is to be passive, lost, in thrall, pursued, perturbed, possessed, paralysed, a prisoner. But it can also be to throw caution to the winds, to be driven mad, to become rash, irresponsible, inconsequential, imprudent, precipitate, impetuous.

To be afraid is to be blocked, overpowered, cast down, subjugated, beholden, submersed, resigned, silenced. But if necessary, useful or expedient, it can also be to betray, deny (the fear felt by Peter, who denied Jesus when arrested and condemned to death by crucifixion), denounce, slander, repudiate, surrender, lie, desist.

Fear controls, constrains, oppresses, excludes, expels, censures, torments, vexes, enslaves, destroys. But can it also liberate, release, subvert, spur, bring together, encourage, dignify? Could the negative power of fear, through a strange and ironic displacement, turn into a positive power of reaction, protest and action? Could the law and the power exercised in its name create fears, but also act as protection against them and as their antidotes?

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who has written at length, to radical effect, about fear, and the damage and calamities it brings, offers this warning: ‘Fear prepares us to accept anything.’ And it might also be added that it prepares us to be capable of anything. The fact is that fear can make us brave, or can make cowards of us.

In his poem ‘Fear’, Carlos Drummond de Andrade wrote:

I was afraid of what I liked and I liked what I was afraid of. I was afraid of writing and I was afraid of not writing. One day, she said: ‘After fear, comes the world.’ Clarice Lispector made fear a word that would not break free from her slow lips:

In her poem ‘Do Medo I’ [Of Fear: I], Luiza Neto Jorge wrote:

The Portuguese writer Al Berto chose O Medo [Fear] as the title for his complete poems and the philosopher José Gil gave the title Portugal, Hoje: O medo de existir [Portugal, Today: The fear of existing] to his exploration of the question of nation- hood today.

In the Portuguese literature on travel, adventure, shipwrecks and discoveries, the sea, fear and death were written into the nautical charts. In Fernão Mendes Pinto’s Peregrinação [Pilgrimage] or História Trágico-Marítima [Tragic History of the Sea], we read the fear as if it were our own…

There are many fears: individual fear and collective fear, physical fear and psychological fear, conscious fear and unconscious fear, inner fear and outer fear, superficial fear and deep fear, waking fear and dreaming fear, prior fear and subsequent (or posthumous) fear, theoretical fear and practical fear, old fear and new fear, childlike fear and adult fear. There is fleeting fear and lasting fear, fear of ourselves and fear of others, religious fear and political fear, fear whipped up by the police and that by the media, fear in matters of health and of crime, ecological fear and scatological fear, offensive fear and defensive fear, visceral fear and metaphysical fear, comic fear and tragic fear, real fear and imaginary fear, diurnal fear and nocturnal fear, fear of what we know and fear of what we don’t.

An astute observer of the human heart and the dark shadows that lurk there, Joseph Conrad warned us that:

The psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung advised his readers: ‘Find out what a person fears most and that is where they will develop next.’

There is a passage in the Divine Comedy that could serve as an epigraph to the bitter text of our time. In the opening lines (The Inferno), Dante Alighieri plays the card of fear:

In our own age, when everything that elevates yields its place to everything that pushes downwards, we see, hear and read the word ‘fear’ everywhere in this ‘forest savage’ in which we live and die. On the printed paper of newspapers and magazines clutched in our impatient hands, or in the mobile glow of screens which reaches our clouded vision, in the headlines of repetitive news bulletins or the photographs on posters at demonstrations, there it is, that word made of nervous sadness and agitated affliction, set out in restless letters and bearing alarmed and alarming messages.

Fear is the circumference around the dark circle we inhabit, without knowing how to get out. Our oldest fears have been joined, for good reason or no reason at all, by an avalanche of new and successive fears. Today, there are fears that belong to several generations of fears: fears that generate fears that generate fears that generate fears, in an unbroken and extraordinary chain. Today, fear crushes life and no longer serves it, as it sometimes did in the past, to endow it with an elevated capacity for resistance, indignation and protest.

Our ‘liquid modernity’, with its obsession with speed, competition, change, flexibility, the ephemeral, fame, growth, profit, success and triumph, has been left without a reliable compass, setting the needle spinning – chaotically, randomly and arbitrarily – between the cardinal points, causing disorientation, uncertainty, insecurity and instability.

As Zygmunt Bauman explains, in Liquid Fear, this is how the great habitat of ‘liquid fear’ was constructed, omnipresent and omnipotent, spilling out in the form of many fears: fear of the other, transformed into hatred of the other and the egolatric cult of the self, fear of life and fear of the world, fear of the future and fear of death (‘Man can be master of nothing while he fears death, but he who does not fear it possesses all’, says Tolstoy); fear of nature and fear of technology. In this forest of wrong turns and traps, people are either hunters or prey, and feel constantly in danger – a danger made of many dangers.

What a deluded age is this which, forgetful or heedless of the tragic lessons of an age so close to our own and still present, has gone back to using fear against freedom, making it a sordid transaction and an effective instrument of submission and domestication, an aggressive weapon for manipulating consciences and choices, a powerful machine for controlling and dominating people’s will, their desires, thoughts, acts, aspirations and behaviour?!

‘In this great age’ (as we called it in the first edition of Electra, borrowing from Karl Kraus’s mordant and deadly irony), which we call our own, fear is a new, inexhaustible and dizzying opium which permits and justifies every kind of cruelty, credulity, monstrosity, abuse, cowardice, abstention, fakery, flight, scheming, conformity, opportunism, servitude, surrender, reconversion, rewriting, retreat and resignation.

Faithlessly faithful heir of the people of Exodus, it was Franz Kafka who said that the important thing is to seek – and find – a key to open the doors which, as in Bluebeard’s castle, show us the horror that our fear wants to ignore, even when our lucid minds want to know. To recall this, when we again have before our eyes the terrible events of war, of disaster, destruction, hunger and annihilation, is to draw up a metaphysics of fear and a mnemonic of evil. Even with the memory and experience of evil, the human being is an animal unable to learn to be human. What is more: who returns to and stubbornly retrieves the inhuman. In the present and in the future, as in the past, this is what we have to be fearful of!

The author of The Trial, who understood like no one else the revealing and accusatory relationship between human animals and non-human animals, lived in fear and in his work, shot through with that trembling and tremendous word, was a way out for that which had no way out. For that reason, it became prophetic, pedagogical, prophylactic.

In the violent opening to Letter to His Father, without wasting any time on pleasantries and addressing his attention, directly and without delay, to the vexatious matter besetting him, Franz Kafka wrote:

Fear of living and of dying, fear of loving and of writing, fear of everything and everyone, fear of the night and the not-night, fear of the figure and of the phantom, fear of health and of sickness, fear of solitude and of company, fear of lucidity and of madness, fear of what happens and what does not happen, fear of fear and the lack of it, it is no surprise that this timid man, at once fearful and bold, who made of his fragility an unstoppable agility, should have exclaimed: ‘My fear is my substance and, probably, the best part of me.’

Marcel Proust, the great and obsessive entomologist of human insects, perceptive seer of the truth that lives and breathes in paradoxes, imbalances, asymmetries and contradictions, put fear under the powerful magnifying glass of his mind:

And he warned: ‘We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.’

In the Gospel according to St. Mark, the resurrection of Jesus is narrated as follows:

And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him. And very early in the morning the first day of the week, they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun. And they said among themselves, ‘Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?’ 

And when they looked, they saw that the stone was rolled away: for it was very great. And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted. And he saith unto them, ‘Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him. But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you.’ And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid.²

We might call this crucial moment in the Gospel account, dealing with the founding event of a faith and a religion, a dialectic of fear. In a book written in the name of the fear of God, the exclamation, ‘Be not affrighted’ has been reiterated, repeated and renewed, in recent decades, by successive popes.

Looking at the signs of the times and the crude way in which they manifest themselves, perhaps those contemporary pontiffs understood that the appeal to courage, always violent, to not be afraid was, even for a church which, though subject to sinking into the most perilous human abysses, believes itself to be divinely founded, a possible guarantee of resurrection.

In devoting the dossier of this thirtieth edition to the spectre of ‘Fear’, Electra is pressing ahead with its fearless (we like to think) portrait of our time, of our world and of the unhappy alliance between the worst of both, which they wantonly cultivate like an unbreathable atmosphere or a poisonous plant. As the great Franciscan preacher Saint Bernadine of Siena would say, in the distant age of which the book The Power of Images speaks: ‘and everything we do, we do in fear.’ We might add that this is exactly what is going on with us today, although, out of an aberrant blindness, we continue to repeat the hollow, voluntarist and triumphant discourse of optimism, success and triumph.

Looking carefully, watchfully, critically, at the places where the present is built and destroyed, where the past is deliberately confused and pirated, and the future constrained and threatened, we see fear being used as a fundamental technology of a wrecking machine, whose sinister mission is to execute a tyrannical power grab, an indecent devaluation of life, a gross mercantilisation of the universe, the unstoppable devastation of resources, debasement of the common good and the general interest, the utilitarian and self-serving inversion of values, insolent legitimisation of fakery and lies, crude manipulation of instincts and impulses, and the totalitarian perversion of human communication.

This is why, by tackling the topic of fear and its calamities head-on, we are not seeking merely to understand the world. We also want to transform it!