Description
n recent years, Ontological Security Theory has seen a refinement in its conceptual thinking tools through its extensive engagement with psychoanalytic and existentialist theory. This paper builds on these developments, engaging specifically with the ‘existentialist turn’ in IR (Subotić and Ejdus 2021); a literature which has advanced concerns with existential anxiety as a lens through which to read the crises of the post-liberal world order. While much of this literature has focused on the phenomenological and existentialist legacy of philosophers like Martin Heidegger, Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Tillich and Rollo May (Gustafsson and Krickel-Choi 2020; Kirke and Steele 2023; Krickel-Choi 2022), little attention has been paid to the work of Albert Camus and his philosophy of the absurd. To rectify this omission, this paper outlines the conceptual utility of Camus’s absurdism. It argues that Camus’s concept of the ‘absurd’ captures some of the irresolvable yet necessary tensions at the heart of ontological security seeking in the twenty-first century: particularly the tension between i) the fragility of meaning systems in a world of post-hegemonic multipolarity and ii) the inescapable compulsion towards ethical meaning-seeking in an irreversibly interconnected world. By homing in on this absurd contradiction, the paper aims to provide conceptual clarity on some of the tensions animating the post-liberal condition, and—by mobilising Camus’s normative sensibility—it subsequently offers ethical pathways to responding to this existentially disturbing epoch.
