ABSTRACT
Security has undergone a fundamental shift in the last decades from an outward focus on a known enemy threatening the sovereign state, to a general inward focus on a new constellation of threat that is at once globalized and localized, both ubiquitous and intensely individual. During the course of the 1980s and 1990s the understanding of security shifted away from a logic of national security that opposed one state to other states. Security and insecurity are gradually being internalized. The increasing reflexivity of our insecurity fundamentally changes the equation of danger and protection that structures and justifies a range of social, political, economic and cultural institutions on both the national and international planes. The post-Cartesian subject of ethics, by contrast, is one guided and structured by insecurity. Precaution is equally incoherent and impracticable at the moment of imminence. For the margin of time in which to exercise caution is reduced to immediacy.
