On being insecure: Heidegger’s fears

Abstract

Security happens in the future. Threats to our security concern the potential of a future event, of possibility and uncertainty. Fear, omnipresent in popular culture is thereby non-uniform. Like time itself, it intensifies and softens, accelerates and slows, and disrupts and destabilises as a function of many variables. This article re-interprets the phenomenon of insecurity by reading it together with Heidegger’s analytic of time as a function of our proximity to being as fundamental ontological question, one which unfolds in the form of a threatening future.