The “Fear” of Social Sciences. Towards a Political Epistemology Proposal of Affective Intensification

Abstract

The present text constitutes a critical proposal regarding a question focused on the categories with which Social Sciences have developed models of analysis around phenomena linked to fear in contemporary global contexts. We propose that these models of approach work as technologies that tend to reduce the affective powers of thought linked to the emergence of events that appear as inexplicable and unclassifiable, transforming fear into an epistemopolitical operation that, paradoxically, produces a harmonizing and articulating effect of those manifestations that escape outside the scope of objective explanatory criteria that fear supposes as an ordering axis of the multiplicity of forms and manifestations related to social life. In this sense we seek to describe how the treatment of the node “terror-fear-violence” allows to glimpse the emergence of a Policy of fear linked to the founding principles of contemporary neoliberal democracies, demanding from this elucidation the opening of an ethical-political question referring to the methodological conditions with which phenomena linked to terror has been progressively outlining a social economy of fear, thus opening a reflection that allows the understanding horror experiences in contemporary contexts from a perspective based on aesthetic-political keys of investigation.