This paper is an intervention within feminist and queer debates that have re-posed so-called negative states of being as offering productive possibilities for political practice and social transformation. What is sometimes called the politics of negative affect or analyses of political feeling has sought to de-pathologise shame, melancholy, failure, depression, anxieties and other forms of ‘feeling bad’, to open up new ways of thinking about agency, change and transformation. Ann Cvetkovich's recent memoir explores depression as a public feeling and (...) argues that ‘feeling bad might, in fact, be the ground for transformation’. As she suggests, the question, ‘how do I feel’ could usefully be reframed as ‘how does capitalism feel’? This performative staging of political forms of psychosocial reflexivity opens up new strategies for survival, new visions of the future, and importantly de-medicalises feeling beyond an individual expression of psychopathology. The grounds for affective politics might be found within new feminist futures that are attentive to the relations between emotion, affect, feelings and politics. This paper will be situated within these debates and the challenge of thinking about the productive possibilities of negative states of being. However, rather than focus on depression, I will turn my attention to experiences such as psychosis and temporal dissociation, based on my long-standing research with the Hearing Voices Network. In the context of discussions of disability and capability I will discuss the value of concepts such as debility, and ‘living in prognosis’, and respond to the call to think through what such states might offer for feminist and queer practice. (shrink)

Currently, affect and emotions are a widely discussed political topic. At least since the early 1990s, different disciplines—from the social sciences and humanities to science and technoscience—have increasingly engaged in studying and conceptualizing affect, emotion, feeling, and sensation, evoking yet another turn that is frequently framed as the “affective turn.” Within queer feminist affect theory, two positions have emerged: following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's well-known critique, there are either more “paranoid” or more “reparative” approaches toward affect. Whereas the latter emphasize (...) the potentialities of affect, the former argue that one should question the mere idea of affect as liberation and promise. Here, I suggest moving beyond a critique or celebration of affect by embracing the political ambivalence of affect. For this queer feminist theorizing of affective politics, I adapt Jacques Rancière's theory of the political and particularly his understanding of emancipation. Rancière takes emancipation into account without, however, uncritically endorsing or celebrating a politics of liberation. I draw on his famous idea of the “distribution of the sensible” and reframe it as the “distribution of emotions,” by which I develop a multilayered approach toward a nonidentitarian, nondichotomous, and emancipatory queer feminist theory of affective politics. (shrink)

This article is concerned with some of the ramifications of the affective dimension of Fanon’s writing. In their latest book, Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri take Fanon’s attempt to transcend European universality through the struggle for a ‘new universality’ as an exemplary schema that informs their politics of alter-modernity. In the article, I show that the affective dimension of Fanon’s search for a new universality is far more anti- than alter-European, albeit in an ambivalent way. I (...) analyse how this difference between an affective ‘anti’ and an intellectual ‘alter’ arises in Fanon’s analysis and experience of racism. I refer to this particular experience as mis-interpellation and analyse the equally particular affect it generates. More generally, I show that if one is to make use of Fanon’s work today one cannot separate the intellectual and the affective that are so intertwined in his analytical work as Hardt and Negri do. To do so is to abstract from the serious political ramifications that the presence of this affective dimension entails. (shrink)

This study examines the dynamics of cultural politics in reality television shows featuring North Korean resettlers in South Korea. As existing studies focus on the role of media representation reproducing a dominant ideology for the resettlers, this paper focuses on the specific media rituals of NKR2 programs, which can be seen as a product of the neoliberalist localization process of the global media industry. In doing so, this paper demonstrates how NKR2 programs interrupt the current dynamics of emotions in (...) regard to North Korean resettlers in South Korea. We argue that in shaping civic identity as an effect of the NKR2 show, cultural politics of citizenship in South Korea on North Korean resettlers serve the formation of relatively conservative and sexist civic identity. (shrink)

This essay contributes to scholarly discussions on the affective politics of demagoguery, especially in relation to the rhetoric of white victimhood and resentment, by exploring how civics education could formulate an anti-demagogic pedagogical response. Contemporary understandings of demagoguery as a rhetoric that emphasizes in-group identity and frames solutions as a matter of punishing an out-group, while also converting the shared vulnerability of life into an affective politics of white victimhood, create a new urgency to reconsider how (...) civics education may help students identify and interrogate demagoguery. This essay discusses potential risks in pedagogical efforts of civics education to confront demagoguery and examines ways out of these pedagogical missteps. The essay joins other scholars who call for a reorientation in how educators promote and practice civics education so that it takes into consideration that we live in a culture that is already demagogic. (shrink)

In 2018, Irish citizens voted overwhelmingly to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution to allow for the introduction of a more liberal abortion law. In this article, I develop a retrospective reading of the stubborn persistence of the denial of reproductive rights to women in Ireland over the decades. I argue that the ban’s severity and longevity is rooted in deep-seated, affective attachments that formed part of processes of postcolonial nation-building and relied on shame and the construction of (...) the Irish nation as a particular, gendered place. The article develops the notion of ‘gendered displacement’ to conceptualise abortion travel in the context of the history of women’s coercive confinement, and provides an affective, feminist reading of the interlinkages between place and nationhood. It also draws on three cases—the X, Y and Z cases—to illustrate the centrality of place and women’s occupation of space to the analysis of Ireland’s abortion ban, which should be read in the wider context of the legacy of what I term the ‘affective politics of place’. (shrink)

Many philosophers of music, especially within the analytic tradition, are essentialists with respect to musical experience. That is, they view their goal as that of isolating the essential set of features constitutive of the experience of music, qua music. Toward this end, they eliminate every element that would appear to be unnecessary for one to experience music as such. In doing so, they limit their analysis to the experience of a silent, motionless individual who listens with rapt attention to the (...) sounds produced by either musicians a on stage, a stereo, or a portable device. This approach is illustrated in recent work by Nick Zangwill. Drawing on essentialist assumptions, Zangwill concludes that properly musical experience is effectively disembodied and radically private. While this seems plausible when we consider the essentialists’ paradigm case, Zangwill’s conclusion seems odd once we consider the wide variety of ways that people experience music. One’s body and social situation seem ineluctably enmeshed within the experience of, e.g., hot jazz played in a nightclub, where listeners bob their heads and dance to the music, cheer on the musicians, and socialize with their fellow concertgoers. The question this paper aims to answer is: should we consider this and similar experiences of music properly “musical”? I maintain that we should. Far from the world of pure music that Zangwill and others relegate properly musical experience, I conclude that our musical experiences are fully enmeshed within the somatic, affective, and interpersonal dimensions of human life. (shrink)

This essay begins by considering Samuel Fuller's 1963 film Shock Corridor as a model of schizo-violence – a disorganised violence that eludes the Oedipal, moralising binary of action and reaction, and instead opens up the violent action to multiple becomings outside Oedipal and nationalistic framings. Through the de-Oedipalisation of the violent events punctuating American history, Shock Corridor performs a schizoanalytic model of desire capable of giving free rein to the force of traumatic affections. The latter part of the discussion situates (...) Fuller's film and the contemporary US military machine as diametrically opposed in their approaches to what we might call ‘the affective politics of war’. Several contemporary scenarios revolving around both actual war violence and Kathryn Bigelow's film The Hurt Locker (2008) serve to show how the schizophrenising operations of the brain itself constitute the greatest obstacle in the military's efforts to contain or repress the traumatic affections generated by violence and war. (shrink)

Cognitive biases that affect decision making may affect the decisions of citizens that influence public policy. To the extent that decisions follow principles other than maximizing utility for all, it is less likely that utility will be maximized, and the citizens will ultimately suffer the results. Here I outline some basic arguments concerning decisions by citizens, using voting as an example. I describe two types of values that may lead to sub-optimal consequences when these values influence political behavior: moralistic values (...) (which people are willing to impose on others regardless of the consequences) and protected values (PVs, values protected from trade-offs). I present evidence against the idea that voting is expressive, i.e., that voters aim to express their moral views rather than to have an effect on outcomes. I show experimentally that PVs are often moralistic. Finally, I present some data that citizens’ think of their duty in a parochial way, neglecting out-groups. I conclude that moral judgments are important determinants of citizen behavior, that these judgments are subject to biases and based on moralistic values, and that, therefore, outcomes are probably less good than they could be. (shrink)

Cognitive biases that affect decision making may affect the decisions of citizens that influence public policy. To the extent that decisions follow principles other than maximizing utility for all, it is less likely that utility will be maximized, and the citizens will ultimately suffer the results. Here I outline some basic arguments concerning decisions by citizens, using voting as an example. I describe two types of values that may lead to sub-optimal consequences when these values influence political behavior: moralistic values (...) (which people are willing to impose on others regardless of the consequences) and protected values (PVs, values protected from trade-offs). I present evidence against the idea that voting is expressive, i.e., that voters aim to express their moral views rather than to have an effect on outcomes. I show experimentally that PVs are often moralistic. Finally, I present some data that citizens’ think of their duty in a parochial way, neglecting out-groups. I conclude that moral judgments are important determinants of citizen behavior, that these judgments are subject to biases and based on moralistic values, and that, therefore, outcomes are probably less good than they could be. (shrink)

There are many types of political culture as well as many elements to be found in each type of political culture. The present study will be limited in two ways. Firstly, we shall not deal with all the elements of political culture. We shall focus on what has been called the "Affective Attitudes" element, which we take to include feelings and emotional proclivities, which to us, are inseparable from values and evaluations. Secondly, we shall not focus on all types (...) of political cultures, but rather on democratic political culture. We plan to study one particular conceptual relation between (democratic) political culture and (democratic) political system. This is the relation of congruence. This relation is less controversial than causal relation which some theorists propose as holding between political culture and political system. However, it does suggest concepts that can be used in formulating causal hypotheses that can be empirically tested. مناقشة لطبيعة الثقافة السياسية التي تتوائم مع تتوائم مع النظام السياسي الديمقراطي. سوف يجري التركيز على التوجهات الانفعالية (المشاعر العواطف والقيم) التي تشكل جزءا هاما من الثقافة السياسية -/- . (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to revisit the notion of indoctrination in education by providing a summary of the field and highlighting the role of affects and emotions in the aftermath of the ‘affective turn’. It is argued that affective indoctrination—defined as the emotional coercion or manipulation that, arguably, any form of education might use in order to be effective—is likely to invoke harm in students, intentionally or unintentionally. Hence, it is suggested that education theorists and educators (...) in general need not only to acknowledge affective indoctrination as a possible component of all education, but also to explore and take measures how to minimize the extent to which indoctrinal teaching may be facilitated through cultivating certain affects and emotions. Theorizing affective indoctrination can offer new insights into how and why educators and students adopt or resist particular political beliefs (e.g. democracy or fascism). (shrink)

Heightened political polarization challenges civic educators seeking to prepare youth as citizens who can navigate affective boundaries. Current approaches to civic education do not yet account for the emotional basis of citizenship. This paper presents an argument for critical affective literacy in civic education classrooms. Drawing from concepts and theories in critical emotion studies, affective citizenship, and agonistic political theory, critical affective civic literacy challenges the rationalistic bent of civic education, and offers instructional strategies for educating (...) the political emotions of students. The voices of late-arrival migrant youth enacting affective citizenship are featured in order to help illuminate the contributions of critical affective literacy to social studies research and practice. (shrink)

Introduction -- A concept of bodies politic -- Above, below, and alongside the subject -- Bodies politic -- Bodies politic as organisms -- The organism in Aristotle and Kant -- The anorganic body in Deleuze and Guattari -- Love, rage, and fear -- Terri Schiavo : the somatic body politic -- The Columbine High School massacre : the transverse body politic -- Hurricane Katrina : the governmental body politic -- Conclusion.

This essay reconceptualizes fanaticism as an activity that does not rely on the condemnation of ‘fanatical’ acts as a priori ‘irrational.’ Rather, it theorizes fanaticism as a method of ethical and political critique against a regime of representation. It also argues that it is crucial to understand fanaticism through an approach that does not set up a dichotomy between affect and reason, disavowing the ‘irrational’ behavior of fanatics. Drawing on affect theory and particularly the entanglement of feeling-thinking, this paper emphasizes (...) that fanaticism is better understood within a framework that takes seriously the role of affects. Such a conceptual framework has important pedagogical implications for how to address fanaticism in education. This essay suggests that it is crucial to invent pedagogical strategies that are rooted in a reconceptualized notion of fanaticism that pays attention to its ethical, political and affective dimensions. (shrink)

This article argues that it is important to understand militarism in schools as an affectively felt practice that reproduces particular feelings in youth and the society. The analysis draws on affect theory and especially feminist scholarly work that theorises militarism as affect to consider how militarism is affectively lived in schools. In particular, the article examines the ethical and political implications of affective militarism in schools and suggests an ‘affective methodology’ for exploring militarism’s affective logics in schools. (...) It is also suggested that resisting militarism in schools involves a serious ethico-political dilemma, namely, how to engage with the value of honouring fallen soldiers without inadvertently condoning the moral and political ideology of militarism. In seeking insights into the affective dimensions of militarism in schools, it is crucial to identify the complicated, productive and ambivalent intersections between militarism in schools and broader moral and political economies of military cultures. (shrink)

Remarkably accessible, Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment urges social scientists to move beyond the idealistic notion of the purely rational citizen to form a more complete, realistic model that includes the emotional side of ...

This article seeks to intervene in what I perceive to be a problematic opposition in feminist theory between ontological and epistemological accounts of existence and politics, by proposing an approach that weaves together Elspeth Probyn’s conceptualisation of ‘feminist reflexivity’ with a re-reading of feminist standpoint through affect. In so doing, I develop the concept of affective solidarity as necessary for sustainable feminist politics of transformation. This approach is proposed as a way of moving away from rooting feminist (...) transformation in the politics of identity and towards modes of engagement that start from the affective dissonance experience can produce. Moving beyond empathy as a privileged way of connecting with others, I argue that the difference between ‘womanhood’ and ‘feminism’ is critical for a universal yet non-essential understanding of what motivates gendered change. (shrink)

This article analyses the discussion about the ‘new materialism’ or ‘material feminisms’ as an interplay between transdisciplinarity – moving beyond canons and disciplines – and affective interdisciplinary encounters. The previous discussion is taken in a slightly different direction, by arguing that a politics of materiality is at work in the debate, which is implied in affective interdisciplinary encounters. It is argued that despite the transdisciplinarity, the relations of natural science engagements to both social science and humanities feminisms (...) are pivotal. Two specific cases are analysed: the politics of definition, where ‘materiality’ tends to be equated with ‘natural science matters’, and the matter and politics of race. In the latter, race ‘sticks’ to the materiality of materialist feminism, which tends to be left out of the sphere of the presumably new and exciting material feminisms. (shrink)

The entwinement of affects and the public dimension seems an enigma. We cannot resolve this problem if we continue to refer to the Freudian analysis that deals with the classic dualisms opposing violence to order, love to death, and the body to social order. A feminist analysis, reworking psychoanalytical knowledge, offers another thesis. Taking the concept of `affects' – defined as one's corporeal drives in their sociocultural expression – a different analysis and new political practices emerge. This concerns recognizing a (...) necessary tension between an irreducible singularity and the `being-together' dimension, which is beyond the classic dualism opposing the body to the Law. (shrink)

This article analyses some of the governmental issues at stake in contemporary institutional politics in its confrontation with the challenges of digitalisation. Through notions such as algorithmic governmentality (Rouvroy and Berns), platformisation (Bratton, Stiegler), extractivism, and the affect theory (Massumi), and following a symptomatologic method, we will try to establish and discuss some key points that could be useful in order to update certain concepts regarding micro- and biopolitics (Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault), the public sphere, and the management of (...) social and individual bodies. Finally, we will try to understand how the manipulation of affects via the staging of possible catastrophic futures (Parisi) is used as a powerful neurosensory weapon, with performative effects for governing and modelling behaviours. If contemporary capitalism is capable of abstracting and extracting affects, of accumulating them and of creating value through this, which policies should we apply in this situation of uncertainty and of the manipulation of affectivity? Is there any place left for public institutions, or is the market the sole political actor left? (shrink)

Catherine Chaput’s Market Affect and the Rhetoric of Political Economic Debates places an affective and rhetorical emphasis on the vexatious question that she argues plagues the academic Left: Why is the capitalist mode of production so much more successful than its alternatives? Capital’s hegemony, the book argues, stems from its foundational theorists’ capacity to adroitly articulate the public’s bodily affects toward its regime of private property and wage labor. By contrast, its critics, be they revolutionary or reformist, are caught (...) in a series of rhetorical traps or oversights that neglect the affective dimensions of capital, and hence are incapable of mobilizing effective countermovements.... (shrink)

This book offers original readings of classic and contemporary black texts, highlighting the pain of racism and love-based strategies of antiracist resistance. Kathy Glass gives sustained attention to the impact of racist affect on the black body and how black women writers deploy emotional states to move readers to progressive political action.

This essay explores aesthetics, affect, and educational politics through the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière. It contextualizes and contrasts the theoretical valences of their ethical and democratic projects through their shared critique of Kant. It then puts Rancière's notion of dissensus to work by exploring it in relation to a social movement and hunger strike organized for educational justice in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood. This serves as a context for understanding how educational provisions are linked to the (...) aesthetic distribution of perception within the neoliberal city. It also serves as a powerful example of how these orders of perception are resisted and subverted at the local level by aesthetic and affective means. Through the Little Village hunger strike the essay argues that while Rancière allows us to recognize the aesthetic dimensions of the political, he falls short in addressing tactical and/or affective considerations. The essay concludes by seeking to extend the critical efficacy of Rancière's dissensus through a rendering of tactical affect within Deleuzian metaphysics. (shrink)

A theological treatment of the role of affections such as joy, compassion, and shame in contemporary politics. Hordern discusses what affections are and how they play a role in parts of political life such as representation and law. He shows that affections have an intelligent role to play in fostering loyalty, trust and public moral reasoning.

This article analyses arguments and concerns about the emergence of feelings of anger amongst students, when issues of injustice are encountered in the study of the subject civic education. The aim is to determine the extent to which such concerns supply grounds for regulating anger as counterproductive. In particular, it is argued that to encourage students to forgo all feelings of anger that might be aroused by issues of injustice that students have encountered in civic education—in the name of positive (...) psychology and students’ well-being—not only constitutes a form of ‘affective injustice’, but also unfairly asks students to engage in harmful emotion regulation that reproduces existing exclusions. A crucial task for civic education is to provide learning spaces in which teachers and students can explore the affective complexities of political anger and its consequences. (shrink)

How do we fashion a new political imaginary from fragmentary, diffuse and often antagonistic subjects, who may be united in principle against the exigencies of capitalism but diverge in practice, in terms of the sites, strategies and specific natures of their own oppression? To address this question I trace the dissonance between the approaches of Antonio Negri and Gilles Deleuze back to their divergent mobilizations of Spinoza’s affect and the role it plays in the ungrounding and reconstitution of the social (...) body. This dissonance reveals a divergence in their projects, the way these political projects emerge as counter-actualizations, the means by which they are expressed, and the necessity of a particular kind of historical subject to their realization. Most significantly, it speaks to how we might engage difference and alterity within our own political projects, our collective creations. I conclude with a focus on the productive possibilities provided by Deleuze’s writings on the scream, as a vehicle to uncover new terrains of struggle and new possibilities for collectivity. (shrink)

In this paper, we set out to show that the relationships between individuals, including the intersubjectivity inherent to the body politic, are also affective relationships, so as to reconstruct Spinoza’s minimalist theory of tolerance. According to Spinoza’s concept of affectivity and bodily life, affection refers to a state of the affected body and implies the presence of the affecting body, while affect refers to the transition from one state to another, taking into account the correlative variation of affective (...) bodies, that is, the affect is always a passage or variation in the intensity of our power to exist and act — the increase or decrease, the favoring or the restraint of our power to exist and act. We argue that Spinoza’s geometry of affective relations decisively contributes to a political theory of democracy, insofar as it anticipates modern, liberal conceptions of tolerance. (shrink)

Looking at a number of memorials, memory sites and artworks relating to the Holocaust the book uses this idea of synaesthetic perception to explore trauma, memory and the production of art in relation to painful memories.

In this paper, I examine the friction between xenophobic discourses on migration and the crisis caused by the politics of austerity in Greece. On the one hand, an ‘excessive’ influx of migration is managed through violent means by the state and the para-state; on the other, a ‘scarcity’ of domestic resources is blamed for a ‘rise’ in racist attitudes, and the political ascent of a fascist movement-cum-parliamentary party, Χρυσή Αυγή (Golden Dawn). ‘Crisis’ is said to give rise to ‘austerity’—and (...) hostility. Inverting the inverted causal relationship between crisis, austerity and hostility, I problematise representations of hostility toward migrants which construct racism as a consequence of economic conditions or even as the antidote to the ‘bitter pill’ Greeks have been forced to swallow. I examine how racialised and gendered violence secures the politics of austerity in Greece. Specifically, through an examination of three eruptions of violence (the feminicidal acid attack on Konstantina Kouneva, the murder of Shehzad Luqman, and the drowning of eleven refugees near the island of Farmakonisi), I make concrete connections between the politics of austerity and what, drawing on Sara Ahmed, might be termed an ‘affective economy of hostility’ that articulates racialised and gendered modes of belonging and estrangement. Some bodies are rendered vulnerable and precarious, while others assert an entitled relation to national space while being economically disentitled by austerity measures. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Political Affections: Civic Participation and Moral Theology by Joshua HordernMichael P. JaycoxPolitical Affections: Civic Participation and Moral Theology By Joshua Hordern NEW YORK: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2013. 312 PP. $125.00Hordern asks his reader to consider that the decline of participatory democracy in Western societies may be ameliorated by a renewed appreciation of the role of emotions in politics. Creatively retrieving many elements of the Augustinian tradition, he (...) argues that the “evaluative intentionality” of emotions is an imperfect type of moral insight whereby human beings both participate in and conform themselves to the created “order of value” (40, 77). Although the power of sin profoundly destabilizes human inclinations, emotions can become stable moral guides through a process of “intersubjective verification” (81). Hordern claims that the epistemological capacities of socially stabilized emotions are substantial enough to enable the community to “participate in and evaluate the goods with which institutional practices are concerned, recognize the authority of those who promote the proper ends of those goods, and initiate common political reflection and deliberation” (142).Bringing these insights to bear upon his own political context, Hordern claims the “resentment,” “alienation,” and “disillusionment” that some British citizens feel toward the cosmopolitan project of the European Union stands as [End Page 213] evidence that “law which is not primarily rooted in the locality which it governs will run the risk of opposing the affections of the people” (22, 23, 242). Working from the premise that “local loves are the fertile soil in which more wide-ranging loves may grow,” Hordern champions “the politically beneficial possibilities of a limited ethnocentricity,” by which he means that emotions shared in smaller communities and within nation-states motivate citizens to attend to the common good most effectively (224, 240).Anticipating the objections to this proposal, Hordern assures his reader that the influence of Christianity upon democratic processes minimizes the negative effects of ethnocentric nationalism, such as the oppression of socially vulnerable groups. Insofar as Christian emotions participate uniquely in the transcendent order of values, the participation of this community in the temporal order would “disturb, renew, or correct patterns of social trust” (271) and provide “a critical standpoint whereby affections in all institutions may be described and assessed” (164).This reviewer shares some of Hordern’s general premises regarding the intelligence of emotions and their motivational potential in public life. By way of evaluation, however, I find three significant problems with his argument. First, although Hordern grasps Martha Nussbaum’s emotion theory quite well, he habitually mischaracterizes the more central aspects of her moral thought in order to prop up his somewhat more conservative agenda. For example, he accuses her of denying the existence of a “stable moral order” and of endorsing an individualistic concept of agency (98). These inferences fail to account for the highly social and essentialist vision of human flourishing that provides the normative content of her capability theory and her feminist ethic.Second, he offers some weak arguments as he develops his account of emotional stabilization. For example, he alleges that virtue cannot stabilize emotion because it is a form of “epistemological self-dependence” that “tends to block repentant attentiveness,” but this assertion is grounded in his antecedent concern to discredit Aristotelian habituation as a moral theory (110, 101). As he develops his own alternative proposal about intersubjective verification by appeals to “the power of memory,” he glosses over significant counterarguments concerning the “contested” nature of social memories of historical events (110, 115).Third, Hordern does not propose any universal norms of justice capable of checking the authority of particular civil governments. For example, he seems dismissive about the moral dangers of emotionally motivated nationalism, the gravity of which he attempts to minimize by emphasizing the critical aspect of Christian political participation. (The historical record of fascism in Europe would hardly support such a claim.) Nevertheless, he presumes a tacit normative point of reference every time he offers a political judgment. For example, he claims that civil authority should caution “against overreaching [End Page 214] itself in pride,” but this is to beg the question of what the interventionist role of governments should be vis-à-vis systemic injustice (198).Political... (shrink)

This article draws from the work of scholars in Critical Whiteness Studies to provide a nuanced analysis of ‘white shame’ in anti-racist education. In particular, it is argued that antiracist politics and pedagogy can be enriched by recognizing the affective and political complexities emerging from white shame and shaming. The purpose is to suggest that white shame has different manifestations depending on context and subject/group, and that those manifestations are related to feelings about white privilege, white ignorance, white (...) fragility, and white complicity. The author uses examples of white shame to discuss the pedagogical principles that inform the development of strategies for anti-racist education, emphasizing how educators can capitalize on teachable racial moments in the classroom that: move beyond white students’ tendency to default to shame; and, move beyond white students’ affective investments to racial inequality, while critically equipping white students to explore responsible ways of inhabiting their whiteness. (shrink)

A serious problem confronting discourses on recognition is that of showing equal respect for citizens’ diverse cultural identities whilst at the same time attending to feminist concerns. This article focuses on the complex issues emerging from the recent legislation prohibiting the Muslim veil in French state schools. I respond to these problems by defending two conditions of a postcolonial and feminist approach to the politics of recognition. This approach should be, first, transformative, in the sense of widening its conception (...) of core values through an engagement with cultural difference. Second, it should be critical in its orientation to practices affecting women adversely within any social group. An integration of these concerns is proposed in terms of ‘affective citizenship’. This approach supports the different components of women’s autonomous functioning, through a universalistic commitment to the creative expression of their hybrid identities. (shrink)

In this book Lara Trout provides provocative but problematic food for thought. She crafts an exegesis of Peirce's concepts of evolutionary agapism and critical commonsensism as resources for a theory of social justice aligned with contemporary race and gender theories. Conforming Peirce's tenets to her own agenda, she develops a radical politics of societal inclusiveness by way of analyzing and critiquing putative "nonconscious biases" in the "background" beliefs of broad segments of the contemporary populace. Unfortunately, this steers Peirce's ship (...) on an unrecognizable course. Trout's strategic word, straight out of the Foucaultian-Frankfurtian play-book, is "hegemonic," which she repeatedly applies to "white.. (shrink)

Are the employees working in different countries and enjoying healthy compensation truly loyal to their organization? Our study attempts to answer this question by examining the role of perception of politics on the affective commitment of expatriates in the Sultanate of Oman. Following the axiom of equity theory, the relationships between the perception of politics (POP) to affective commitment (AC) and Islamic work ethics (IWE) to affective commitment (AC) was tested. The moderating role of Islamic (...) work ethics was also examined in the POP-AC relationship. Responses from 146 employees were collected following a simple random sampling technique. Employees working in different organizations at various managerial levels were approached for data collection. Descriptive statistics, correlation, and regression tests were applied to test hypotheses using SPSS-22.0 and SmartPLS-4. Results confirmed the positive relationship between Islamic work ethics to affective commitment and the negative relationship between perception of politics to affective commitment. Moreover, the negative relationship between the perception of politics with affective commitment was weaker when Islamic work ethics were high. Practical implications of the study are presented based on the results. (shrink)

Previous empirical studies have shown that perceptions of organizational politics are negatively related to individuals’ affective commitment. The key contribution of this study was that it found the interactive moderating effects of political skill and quality of leader–member exchange (LMX) on the relationship between perceptions of organizational politics and affective commitment. Our results indicated that politics perception affective commitment relationship was weaker when both political skill and quality of LMX are high. When only political (...) skill is high and the quality of LMX is low, or LMX quality is high but political skill is low, the negative relationship between politics perception and affective commitment was not mitigated. Limitations and implications for future research are discussed. (shrink)

Spinoza rarely refers to art. However, there are extensive resources for a Spinozist aesthetics in his discussion of health in the Ethics and of social affects in his political works. There have been recently been a few essays linking Spinoza and art, but this essay additionally fuses Spinoza’s politics to an affective aesthetics. Spinoza’s statements that art makes us healthier (Ethics 4p54Sch; Emendation section 17) form the foundation of an aesthetics. In Spinoza’s definition, “health” is caused by external (...) objects that maintain our power to act in a variety of ways. Humans need such objects because our complex bodies constantly lose or consume many parts necessary to our overall functioning. Notably, Spinoza defines humans’ bodies through this complexity (2p13Sch), so health as maintenance of complexity is a distinctly human endeavor. Further, while art is not the only healthy activity, I argue that art is a particularly potent cure, which explains Spinoza’s otherwise opaque comment that music can cure melancholy (by which he meant a near-total inability to act, akin to death). Rather than only causing frivolous pleasures, art may be as essential to human flourishing as are other human beings in general; other people are “most useful” because of the variety of actions they make possible (4p35Cor & Sch1). Art’s production of a dizzying variety of affects is likewise most useful for health. -/- Having established how art in general affects the individual, I then explain the role of artists in shaping social groups. Artists use vivid and highly charged affective techniques, as do political sovereigns and religious prophets (TTP chapters 1-2 & 15-16). However, sovereigns and prophets are concerned exclusively with “morality,” defined by Spinoza as the use of affects (primarily based on fear and hope) to produce “obedience” in the generic multitude or people at large. An artist, however, rarely causes affects in the whole nation, affecting instead only a smaller niche or “sub-genre” of people. The affects produced in this group are also not identical to those used by sovereigns, since artists do not primarily deploy sad affects of hope and fear but instead use a wide variety of joyful affects. Further, in Spinoza’s analysis of ceremonies (TTP chapter 5), we see how small groups exposed to repeated ceremonies or social practices eventually develop new strengths which they lacked before. Repeated exposure to shared aesthetic “ceremonies” (e.g., live music performances) of the same sub-genre will over time create the capacity of new powers in the sub-genre of people, which distinguishes them from the masses. Spinoza says sovereigns forge a “second nature” for the generic people through affects; we can then affirm that smaller groups exposed to a distinct sub-genre of art can acquire a new “third nature” which will contain unique powers extending beyond healthy maintenance of their existing bodies. That is, art in general is necessary to flourish and remain whole (maintaining health), but it can also occasionally expand what one is to unforeseen heights (through specific artistic sub-genres). (shrink)

Under the shifting epistemic and political norms of post-truth politics, the conditions of feminist solidarity and agency are increasingly threatened. This article argues that feminist humour provides models for affective orientations that sustain feminist work and survival during such periods of political crisis. First, I explore a potential issue post-truth politics poses for feminists: That information overload can lead to truth burn-out that threatens intersectional feminist thinking and action. Next, I explain why comedy is well-suited to help (...) maintain feminist work in the context of post-truth politics. I then present a reading of Sarah Cooper’s skit, ‘How to medical’ to explore Cooper’s work and demonstrate how it operates as parodic political critique. I conclude that the affective stance of a feminist comedian models how feminists can keep surviving in the midst of post-truth crises. Such work shows how oppressive power can be engaged closely enough that deep critiques can be developed but with sufficient affective distance that feminist engagement can be sustained over time, through a multiplicity of crises. Cooper’s engagement can thus be read to generate strategies for how to (effectively) feminist affect under post-truth conditions. (shrink)

How does it feel to be in a crisis? Is the idea of the crisis itself bound to our affectivity in the sense that without the occurrence of specific emotions or a change in our affective lives at large we cannot even talk about a crisis properly speaking? In this paper, I explore these questions by analyzing the exemplary case of the corona crisis. In order to do so, I first explore the affective phenomenology of crises in general (...) and the corona crisis in particular, thereby paying attention to both individual (personal) and collective (socio-political) crises and crisis experiences. Then, I turn to the limits of the analogy between individual and collective crises. I reflect on how socio-political crises are not simply there but performed and procedurally constructed and show how, in the context of the corona pandemic, fears and hopes, feelings of solidarity and antagonistic emotions mirror political interests and values. While the phenomenological reflections in the first part help us to account for the fact that crises are not just objective facts but also subjective forms of experience, the political reflections in the second part help us to do justice to the inherently political nature of the language and experiences of (collective) crises. I conclude by pointing out a twofold relationship between (socio-political) crisis and critique. Thanks to their characteristic affective phenomenology, crises are tools of criticism; but due to their inherently political character, they also themselves have to be subjected to critique. (shrink)

In this article I set out to trace some of the implications of recharging the political potency of nature in more-than-human terms. This shifts attention from a biopolitical focus on the inventiveness of the life sciences and what this means in terms of the emergence of ‘cyborg’ political subjects to an onto-political focus on the inventiveness of knowledge controversies and what these mean for techno-political practices. Specifically, the article examines the onto-politics of ‘natural’ hazard events and their capacity to (...) force thought in those affected by them, and so to place new demands on research practices in terms of rendering such events affective and amenable to political interrogation. I work these arguments through the demanding experimental ethos of the philosopher Isabelle Stengers, for whom scientific practices produce reliable knowledge claims only in so far as the questions they address are at risk of being redefined by the phenomena mobilized in them, and who extends this ethos to elaborate an understanding of, even a test for, an adequate political theory and practice. I do so with reference to a recent research experiment in which I collaborated with social and natural scientists and people affected by flooding in the UK. (shrink)

Christian Marazzi's first book: a post-Fordist classic on the roots to economic crises in the contemporary age. Communication as work: we have recently experienced a profound transformation in the processes of production. While the assembly line excluded any form of linguistic productivity, today, there is no production without communication. The new technologies are linguistic machines. This revolution has produced a new kind of worker who is not a specialist but is versatile and infinitely adaptable. If standardized mass production was dominant (...) in the past, today we produce an array of different goods corresponding to specific consumer niches. This is the post-Fordist model described by Christian Marazzi in Capital and Affects. Tracing the development of this new model of labor from Toyota plants in Japan to the most recent innovations, Marazzi's critique goes beyond political economy to encompass issues related to social life, political engagement, democratic institutions, interpersonal relations, and the role of language in liberal democracies. This translation at long last makes Marazzi's first book available to English readers. Capital and Affects stands not only as the foundation to Marazzi's subsequent work, but as foundational work in post-Fordist literature, with an analysis startlingly relevant to today's troubled economic times. This Semiotext edition includes the afterword Marazzi wrote for the 1999 Italian edition. (shrink)