Images of fear in political philosophy and fairy tales: Linking private abuse to political violence in human rights discourse
| Date | 01 February 2016 |
| Author | Marina Calloni |
| Published date | 01 February 2016 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088215612230 |
Journal of International Political Theory
2016, Vol. 12(1) 67 –89
© The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1755088215612230
ipt.sagepub.com
Images of fear in political
philosophy and fairy tales:
Linking private abuse to
political violence in human
rights discourse
Marina Calloni
Università degli Studi di Milano–Bicocca, Italy
Abstract
Human rights can be understood as formal norms related to existing legislations as
well as the result of public reasoning, when claims of validity coming from the bottom
up are politically juridified. Yet, where does the “significance” of human rights come
from? Does the “feeling” toward the violation of human dignity rise only from the
mobilization of radical spheres in the public space, or does it have origin in other
places, like in the intimacy of the household? In order to understand ex negativo the
genealogy of the “sense” of the violation of human rights as a counter-factual allegation
that immanently refers to daily life experiences, this article considers the interaction
between sentiment of fear and pretense of human rights, comparing images and
imaginaries of modern political theory with the stories of traditional folk/fairy tales.
Namely, philosophical representations of terror and literary narratives of monsters
have a common “private” genealogy, as it shines through the hidden relationship existing
between imagination, imaginary, and fantasy. Therefore, the character of the “wolf,” as
politically conceptualized by Thomas Hobbes and fictionally represented in fairy tales,
will be taken as a conceptual and figurative medium, able to underline the semantics
of violence. My thesis is that fantastic narratives implicitly evoke forms of violation of
human rights that political philosophy has denied for centuries because of the incapacity
to conceptualize unspeakable offenses. Fairy tales tell the truth, albeit under camouflaged
“bodies”: they are a disguised reminder of the perdurance of domestic violence in the
household, seamlessly perpetuated against women and children over centuries. Any
criticism toward the abuse of human rights should not forget the heuristic significance
Corresponding author:
Marina Calloni, Department of Sociology and Social Research, Università degli Studi di Milano – Bicocca,
Via Bicocca degli Arcimboldi 8, 20126 Milano, Italy.
Email: marina.calloni@unimib.it
612230IPT0010.1177/1755088215612230Journal of International Political TheoryCalloni
research-article2015
Article
68 Journal of International Political Theory 12(1)
of fairy tales and the place where they seem to be peacefully narrated to children: within
the domestic space of the family.
Keywords
Children, domestic violence, fairy tales, fantasy, human rights, imagination
Once upon a time there lived a woodcutter and his wife; they had seven children,
all boys. […] They were very poor. There came a very bad year, and the famine was so
great that these poor people decided to rid themselves of their children. […] “I am
resolved to lose them in the woods tomorrow, which may very easily be done; […] we can
leave them, without their noticing.” […] In vain her husband reminded her of their
extreme poverty. She would not consent to it. However, after having considered
what a grief it would be for her to see them perish with hunger, she at last consented, and
went to bed in tears. (Charles Perrault, Little Thumb, [1697] 1993)
Unveiling hidden interactions between imagination and
fantasy in narratives of violence
In modern philosophy and political thought, imagination and fantasy have been usually
differentiated one from the other as different faculties that characterize the human mind.
While imagination seems to be based on intellective norms, fantasy appears to be irra-
tionally disconnected from reality. However, veiled and misleading interactions meld
these two determinations. This article is thus aimed at underlining the veiled relationship
between (philosophical) imagination and (fictional) fantasy, introducing a new view-
point in the understanding of the private/public violations of human rights. In particular,
the article is interested to stress how both political theory and fictional tales have a com-
mon source while narrating the genealogy of fear in the context of family life. It is tradi-
tionally the first place where submission, discrimination, and subjection are experienced,
differently from the political sphere that is considered the prior space where liberty can
be practiced but only by few (male) fellows. The comparison between philosophical
images and fantastic pictures will exemplify better these arguments, linking symboli-
cally the portrait of the wolf in political treaties and in folk tales.
In the history of Western thought, Aristotle signaled a constitutive divide between the
rational and the fantastic, marking a distinction between mythos and logos with the aim
to separate conceptual thought from a narrative description of origins. Logos was meant
as a theoretical construct, able to elaborate rational categories and analytic frameworks
in a systematic and logical way, ascertaining whether a proposition was true or not.
Aristotle continues, however, to identify the word fantasy with the idea of imagination,
conceived as the capacity to produce images that derive from a sensorial experience,
without being conditioned by it.
Radicalizing this tradition in modernity, Kant separates imagination as a rational
faculty from fantasy, understood as the capacity to shape images freely without any
reference to reality. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, fantasy becomes deprived of any
To continue reading
Request your trial