The idea of the 'quasi-state' is developed in Soyinka's second lecture, and I shall return to it in my second essay. Here, however, I concentrate on what Soyinka says about fear itself. It is created, he argues, either by subjection to the forces of nature, or by subjection to human forces. The loss of self-esteem and dignity are the prime casualties of fear. When one feels fear, "part of oneself is appropriated".
So what do we understand the self to be, and what does it mean to have part of oneself appropriated? We all have the sense of a self within, what the psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin calls a "person's singularity"; a "historical being that preserves its history in the unconscious." Yet, natural as a sense of self may appear to be, its definition is not as uncontroversial as we might assume. Judith Butler, for example, refers to this sense of self as "'the illusion of substance" (my emphasis), arguing that there is no "point of agency" that "'is not fully determined by... culture and discourse."
Intelligibility of the subject is only made possible by "the structure of signification." Benjamin does not dispute the idea that the subject's positions are constructed, but argues that even so "psychoanalysis must imagine someone who does or does not own them." It is this imagined psychological subject that I refer to here as the self: a subject that is determined by culture and discourse, but that is experienced by both the subject and others as "singular." The arena of the cultural and the arena of the individual psyche are felt as continuously interacting, and thus cannot be meaningfully separated out at the experiential level.
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