Description
This piece argues that ontological security studies (OSS) in International Relations rests on a foundational asymmetry: whilst privileging 'security', it has left the 'ontological' curiously undertheorised. I offer a friendly theoretical critique, contending that OSS remains constrained by what I call 'Giddensian gravity', a theoretical pull that reifies the self as the container of political ontology, neglects the surrounding environment's constitutive role in shaping subjectivities, and obscures ontological insecurity (OI) as a positive condition of being. I claim that Anthony Giddens' structuration theory fundamentally transformed R.D. Laing's original conceptualisation of OI, displacing its affirmative character and foreclosing transhuman dynamics. To address this limitation, I develop a post-Giddensian framework through Deleuze's Spinozist philosophy, particularly his univocal ontology and the concepts of affect and affection. I reconceptualise OI as an affirmative, transhuman condition perpetuated through bodily encounters, from which ontological security emerges only as transient and incidental. Affect operates as incorporeal movement propelling political transformation, whilst affections capture the corporeal traces through which the surrounding environment shapes subjectivities. This framework repositions OSS's contribution to constructivism by offering affective alternatives to discursive approaches, and advances critical security studies by theorising insecurity as affirmative rather than as a condition requiring resolution.
