The autopoetics of the self: A ‘demonic’ approach to ontological security studies

Abstract

AbstractOntological security studies (OSS) has been established as a significant area of study in critical security studies (CSS) to describe the ways in which social groups sustain and secure a stable sense of self. Although the self is the central figure of OSS, the subfield is yet to engage in a sustained interrogation of subjectivity in a way that questions its colonial foundations. In this article, I return to Jef Huysmans’s seminal understanding of security as a ‘thick signifier’ to analyse the ways in which OSS upholds the colonial activity of ordering, particularly an ordering of the self. By introducing Sylvia Wynter’s account of the emergence of Man-as-human, I question OSS’s conventional understandings of the self as constituted by identity. Analysing the self as a sociogenic being governed by autopoetics uncovers the ways in which understandings of the self that collapse into ‘identity’ serve to uphold coloniality. By redeploying Huysmans’s understanding of ontological security as that which simultaneously orders and guarantees the activity of ordering, I interrogate the ways in which doing OSS has real-world implications for those denied humanness in our colonial present. This analytic, termed a ‘demonic’ approach by Wynter, unlocks radically alternative understandings of being human that can be operationalized in service of collective liberation.