ABSTRACT

Philosophers, cultural, social and political scientists are increasingly recognizing affectivity as an essential dimension of the political. Affectively charged political rhetoric, political strategies, and the global rise of populist and nationalist movements have contributed to this resurging interest in political affectivity (cf. Cossarini and Vallespín 2019). Yet, when one recent political economy bestseller’s title reads Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World (Davies 2018), anybody who is at all familiar with the history of political philosophy from Plato and Aristotle through Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Montesquieu and, indeed, Kant, to contemporary postfoundational political theorists is likely to meet such a title with a raised eyebrow. Arguably, it is not news that the political is deeply stirred by affect and emotions. But affectivity is not just some by-product of a properly “emotion-proof” (Demertzis 2013) political domain based on rational judgment, deliberation and (self-)interest, as some traditional liberal political theorists have suggested (Hirschman 1977; Holmes 1995). 1 Rather, the political—the realm in which we negotiate our plurality and differences with a view to freedom, power, individual autonomy, collective recognition or our forms of living-together—is essentially affective. In this respect, ‘the political’ must be distinguished from policy-making or ‘real politics’, where affectivity and emotions are typically also involved, but often just contingently so (cf. Slaby and Bens 2019). The political is affective because it fundamentally deals with what matters to us, what we value, fear or desire, or what concerns us—us as a polity. Conversely, the affective is always political, since emotions are not just subjective affairs but are governed by “feeling rules” (Hochschild 1983) and are modulated by shared or conflicting values. Hence, emotions always involve the negotiation of what, how, and with (or against) whom we ought to feel.