In Security and the Instituted Imaginary

Abstract

This chapter explains what might be termed the ‘fort-da’ of insecurity and the ways in which subjectivities inevitably lean on and draw upon instituted imaginaries that compete to contain and order the fragility of human subjectivity exposed to disembedding effects of individualization and globalization, the self and other of late modernity. It addresses the intersecting psychic, cultural and social dimensions and dynamics of this fort-da game as it recurrently plays out in the contemporary West. The chapter also addresses the ways in which the conditions of late modernity have instituted new structures of subjectivation that amplify ontological insecurity. Both narcissism and the narcissism..