Abstract

Politics is about much more than the laws we enact, the politicians we elect, the institutional structures and procedures that we support, and the distribution of rights and goods that undergird those decisions. It is, certainly, all of those things, but it is also something deeper and more fundamental to our way of being in society and among those with whom we live: at the level of our sensibility lies that which conditions our experiences and interactions. By sensibility I am referring to the status quo of our existence, how we perceive the world and those around us, how we move around in that world—including how we are seen as we do so—and what we use as the bases for our judgments about it. This pre-reflective, though certainly not pre-experiential, scaffolding of experience is what is at stake in Alfred Frankowski’s book The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization: Toward a Political Sense of Mourning. In what follows I want to think through some of the consequences of how the text understands resistance as it relates to our ability to critique the contemporary world, and what critique looks like, given the centrality of sensibility to politics.