Fear of fear itself: diseased others in the American imagination

Abstract

This article investigates the ways in which late nineteenth and early-to-mid twentieth centuries white American’s fear of racial degeneration and foreign influence produces a pathological link between otherness and disease, operating in diverse racist discourses ranging from xenophobic anti-socialism/anti-communism to the pseudoscientific medical discourse of neurasthenia. What Americans feared was in fact fear itself. Examining Sigmund Freud and Roberto Esposito’s theories about anxiety and immunity, this article argues that fear of fear itself, a paradoxical objectless fear, symptomatically reveals the productive power of fear, which searches for an object to be dreaded from “others,” such as foreigners, immigrants, and racial minorities. This article, in this sense, (mis)construes that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous 1933 inaugural “fear itself” speech is not a rhetorical gesture intended to emphasize the ungroundedness of Depression-era American fear, but a veiled call for generating a displaced object of fear that will enable contemporary Americans to find ways of coping with anxiety.