2023/08/07 by Xander Kirke, Brent J. Steele · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Global Security and Public Health #Peacebuilding and International Security #War, Ethics, and Justification
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s0260210523000335
openalex publication_date 2023/08/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
Abstract This paper contributes to this special issue by examining the existentialist themes re-emerging in Ontological Security Studies (OSS) and does so by proposing an under-explored and overlapping terrain regarding the function of myths and ontological security. What Blumenberg calls the ‘absolutism of reality’ becomes something to avoid through the process of telling, retelling, and adapting myths to suit our existential needs. The paper distinguishes our existentialist intervention into OSS from recent ones within that research community and then draws examples of the work on and of myth from the recent Covid-19 pandemic. Speaking to the need for OSS to develop an ethical-political perspective to not only explain but also change the world, the account we develop here also provides a pathway for an alternative politics based in counter-myth. It discloses, therefore, a promising and, in the face of rising authoritarianism and anti-democratic forces, necessary moral ethos regarding prescriptive ideas about what to do and how to confront and and counter the mounting challenges of global politics in the 2020s and beyond.