Exploring Fear: The Changing Mask of Fear

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Wole Soyinka

Find out more about this year's lecturer, Wole Soyinka, from bbc.co.uk.

Related programme

Reith Lectures 2004: The Climate of Fear

'Soyinka's life is inseparable from his work, much of which arises from a passionate, almost desperate, concern for his society. This concern is apparent in his poetry, drama and essays, but is not merely literary. It shows itself in his letters to the Nigerian papers which can always be relied upon to rouse enthusiastic support or bitter opposition. Indeed it is this very concern, and the speed with which he translates ideas into action that puts him so often at odds with institutions and governments.' - Eldred Durosimi Jones

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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Content last updated: 07/07/2004

About the author

Lynda Morgan completed her Ph.D thesis on South African settler fiction at the School of Oriental and African Studies (the University of London), and her main literary interests continue to be in African literature and colonial/postcolonial studies. She publishes papers in these areas, and regularly contributes to national and international conferences. In August she will deliver a paper on South African and Australian settler fiction at the ICLA Congress in Hong Kong. She is also a published poet.