ABSTRACT
What makes us frightened? Who gets afraid of whom? The above encounter shows us that it is not simply a question of some body being afraid of some body who passes by. On the contrary, the object of fear is over-determined; here, the Negro is the object of a fear that is declared by a white child, but mediated through the memory traces of the black man. The fear announces itself through an ontological statement, a statement a self makes of itself and to itself – ‘I’m frightened.’ Such statements of fear tell the other that they are the ‘cause’ of fear, in a way that is personal: ‘Now they were beginning to be afraid of me.’ As such the fear signified through language and by the white body does not simply begin and end there: rather the fear works through and on the bodies of those who are transformed into its subjects, as well as its objects. The black body is drawn tighter; it is not just the smile that becomes tighter, and is eventually impossible, but the black body itself becomes enclosed by the fear, and comes to feel that fear as its own, such that it is felt as an impossible or inhabitable body. In this way, fear does not simply come from within and then move outwards towards objects and others (the
white child who feels afraid of the black man); rather, fear works to secure the relationship between those bodies; it brings them together and moves them apart through the shudders that are felt on the skin, on the surface that surfaces through the encounter.
