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 of minor differences figure here, as the fragility of the human subject exposed to the trials of late modernity resolves into the denials and defences of presumed autonomy or assumed community; the entrepreneurial self as against the re-traditionalized self. Human subjects lean upon, engage with and form of inter-subjectivity in relation to such instituted imaginaries.
