Spider Universe: Weaponising Phobia in Bataille, Nietzsche, Spinoza and Deleuze

THE image is from Lars von Trier’s film Antichrist [1] – indeed it pro-vided the basis for the promotional poster. I’m not going to talk about the famously phobic director today, but wish simply to indicate how the image and indeed the film ‘weaponises’ phobia, which is to say turns it into an offensive rather than defensive weapon. Initially it would seem that phobia is defensive in that it crystallises in an object an indefinite fear or anxiety, a crystallisation that supports the process of individua-tion which senses mortal danger from the very universe that has given rise to it. As Freud suggested in his case study on Little Hans, phobia is an effect of the question that being raises for the subject ‘from where he was before the subject came into the world’ [2]. Anxiety occurs the moment discontinuity apprehends the vulnerability of its existence in the presence of a voracious outside, an order, momentarily, of exteriority that would return existence to the infinite continuity of intimate violence (there are plenty of mothers who eat their offspring).