Description
In his famous psychoanalytical work on The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker quotes Aristotle’s aphorism that ‘luck is when the guy next to you gets hit with the arrow’. Captured neatly in Shrek’s Lord Farquaad’s meme that ‘some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make’, international political practice is – historically and contemporaneously – riddled with examples of agents feeling and expressing an existential narcissism in which ‘practically everyone is expendable except ourselves’ (Becker 1973, 2).
Building on a burgeoning scholarship of ontological security and existentialism in IR, this paper seeks to explore this kind of narcissism as a potentially foundational practice for making ‘the international’. Grappling with the question whether/how studying ‘the international’ requires a theoretical abstraction at least in some form (Erikson Rio 2024; Herborth 2021), the paper asks whether/how ‘the international’ necessarily cultivates an ideological, epistemological, and practical temptation to omit oneself from ‘necessary sacrifices to save the planet’, and/or to maintain that Others should ‘bear the consequences’ of pervasive global problems.
Informed by other scholarship on narcissism in IR (Hagström 2021, 2024; Harden 2021; Volkan 2014) and in broader psychoanalysis from the likes of Becker, Freud, and Rank, the paper argues that an analysis of the intersections between narcissism and ‘the international’ helps to progress the study of existentialist/anxious global futures in IR scholarship. By finally exploring possible avenues out of IR narcissism, it places the study of existentialism and ontological security at the very heart of what it means to research ‘the international’.
