Emotions And Political Theory

This work aims to write about civil disobedience, defending an interpretation, based chiefly on an analysis of Martin Luther King Jr’s philosophical contributions, whereby this form of political claim has as one of its distinctive features, perhaps its core feature, the repair of injustices through evoking certain political (or moral) emotions in the target public, raising in him an emotional transformation or awakening. First, I resume the early evolution of civil disobedience concept and practice carried out by Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr in the XX century. Secondly, I sketch an comparison between some elements of John Rawls’ approach and King’s, detaching the emotional emphasis given by the latter in his defence of the principles which ought to guide civil disobedience. Last, following this interpretation, and to give more clarity for the consequences arising from the suggested focus shift on the understanding of the concept, I make appointments towards some recent critics adressed by Robin Celikates against John Rawls’ liberal civil disobedience.

On the whole, "Political Emotions" is a remarkably successful book that combines several areas of philosophical research in which the author’s proficiency is well known. It shows how problems that lie on the more intimate side of ethics, pertaining for instance to friendship and family life, have relevance for social justice and public culture; along the way, it also incorporates insightful readings of literary texts. Nussbaum’s book therefore ought to introduce readers of her work in one area (such as social philosophy) to aspects of her work in another (such as the philosophy of mind, or literary criticism). It explores the nature of human emotions, as they form early in life and develop in the context of personal relationships, in order to clarify some of the conditions of possibility for a just liberal democracy. "Political Emotions" asks: which emotions are essential for such a society to flourish, and which are apt to undermine its values and goals? In order to offer an account that can answer this question, Nussbaum draws upon her influential cognitive theory of emotion and, in the process, reformulates it in subtle yet significant ways.

El objetivo general del curso es explorar los principales enfoques y núcleos de debate propios de la antropología política como especialidad disciplinar. El programa se propone discutir ejes claves del área, incluyendo un panorama sobre su surgimiento y sobre las discusiones contemporáneas. En particular, el curso pretende contribuir a desnaturalizar algunas prenociones acerca de “lo político” que son recurrentes tanto en los usos sociales así como en los usos académicos puestos en juego en el ámbito de las ciencias sociales y de las humanidades (por ejemplo, el tratamiento de la política como un campo diferenciado y autónomo; como un ámbito dominado más por el interés y lo pragmático que por la dimensión moral; o a la reificación del estado al tratarlo analíticamente como una entidad bien delimitada y diferenciada de la “sociedad civil”). A fin de promover una perspectiva crítica, el curso se propone problematizar las relaciones entre conceptos teóricos y categorías nativas, entre instrumentos analíticos y concepciones locales sobre la política, lo político, el gobierno, el estado, la justicia, etc. La propuesta se centra en el análisis de “la política”, “lo político” y términos asociados, abordándolos como categorías prácticas que forman parte de los universos sociales que estudiamos antes que como definiciones teóricas preestablecidas. En ese camino, el curso articulará la perspectiva de la “antropología política” tradicionalmente interesada en la identificación y estudio de los procesos políticos y aquella de la “antropología de la política” preocupada por el modo en que las personas entienden, clasifican y producen los límites de aquello que en diferentes contextos se reconoce como “lo político”. Se pretende promover el análisis de las formas en que las representaciones sociales sobre lo político, el Estado, el gobierno, la militancia, etc. son socialmente producidas, reproducidas, desplegadas e impuestas por actores situados en el marco de procesos sociales concretos, incorporando el rol de la/s propias/os antropóloga/os en la producción de conocimiento sobre el tema.

"This dissertation seeks to improve our understanding of the process by which emotions enable citizens to learn about public affairs and engage in political activities during electoral campaigns. It advances a theoretical model that incorporates the dynamics of emotions, various forms of media use, interpersonal communication and political involvement. This affective citizen communication model integrates into a single framework the insights of affective intelligence theory (Marcus, Neuman, & MacKuen, 2000) and the work on communication mediation (McLeod et al., 1999, 2001) and its two iterations, cognitive mediation (Eveland, 2001) and citizen communication mediation (Cho et al., 2009; Shah et al., 2005, 2007). More specifically, it suggests that the effects of emotions triggered by political candidates (e.g., enthusiasm, anxiety, anger) on knowledge of the candidates’ stands on issues and on political participation are largely mediated by communication variables, including news media use, political discussion and debate viewing. By positing emotions as an antecedent of both mediated and interpersonal communication, the study extends current research based on affective intelligence theory. At the same time, the study adds emotions to communication mediation processes, which to date have been studied from a mostly cognitive perspective.
    To test the relationships between the variables identified in the affective citizen communication model, I rely on panel survey data collected for the 2008 and 2004 U.S. presidential elections by the American National Election Studies (ANES) and the National Annenberg Election Surveys (NAES), respectively. Two types of structural equation models are tested, cross sectional (to relate individual differences) and auto-regressive (to relate aggregate change across waves). Results suggest that positive emotions spark media use, whereas negative emotions spark political discussions, and both types of communication behavior influence issue knowledge and participation in campaign activities. Furthermore, the theorized structure is found to perform better than an alternative structure where communication variables cause positive and negative emotions. Thus, results provide strong support for the proposed affective citizen communication model. Refinements to the proposed model, connections with existing theories of political communication, such as agenda setting and partisan selective exposure, and directions for future research are also discussed."

As a vast literature on political disaffection, populism, "pitchfork politics," and the emergence of an "age of anger" testifies, the nature of democratic politics and the socio-political context in which it operates appear to have shifted sharply during the last decade. This is reflected in the rise of challenger parties, the election of unorthodox politicians, and widespread concern regarding the "crisis," "death," or "end" of democracy. Existing analyses have, however, understandably adopted a conventional model of party-based representative politics as their main interpretive lens or reference point to make sense of these changes. This article adopts a far bolder position. It suggests that a new form of "grievance politics" has emerged that constitutes a distinct and novel species of representative democracy. Grievance politics is defined by the fuelling and funneling of negative emotions and various blame-based political strategies which explicitly challenge and confound many of the core principles and values that have traditionally underpinned conventional conceptions of party politics. It is the tension between party politics and grievance politics-and their contemporary coexistence as competing modes of political representation-which this article seeks to underline and through this, to develop a clearer understanding of possible futures for representative democracy.

""In his « little Treatise in English» on Human nature (1640), and, later, in Leviathan (1647 – 1650), Thomas Hobbes examines and redefines the passions. Basing his argument upon the concept of motion, he conceives them as thoughts: passions are nothing but perceptions, which transit through the brain, and then move towards the heart. There they cause various sensations of pleasure or pain, by helping or hindering « vital motion ».
Anger, Hobbes claims, is a break-through in front of a sudden opposition, not the response to an outrage, as the Ancients had erroneously claimed. « Courage, in a large signification, is the absence of fear in the presence of any evil whatsoever; but in a stricter and more common meaning, it is contempt of wounds and death, when they oppose a man in the way to his end. Anger (or sudden courage) is nothing but the appetite or desire of overcoming present opposition. It hath been commonly defined to be grief proceeding from an opinion of contempt; which is confuted by the often experience we have of being moved to anger by things inanimate and without sense, and consequently incapable of contemning us. » (Leviathan, I, 6, 1-2.  Cf. Human Nature, VII, 1-2).
The definition of 'orge', as the grief for an undeserved slight, joined to the wish to retaliate, comes from Aristotle’s 'Rhetoric', a text Hobbes not only knew, but also translated. Anger was, for Aristotle, the political passion par excellence. It is because we are insulted that we revolt, and that our revolt is justified. It is in anger that we commit tyrannicide. Be it a tumultuous explosion or a long lasting grudge, ire is by definition the reasoned answer of a social actor, who suffers in his body as well as in the social image that he has  created for herself, and on behalf of justice: one does not recognize this person for that which he wishes to be considered. The gender mark is intended, given the heroic context. This criticism might appear to be just a minor detail, confined to Hobbes’ typology of the passions.  But since the new description of anger disconnects the emotion from any justification (thus from justice), refuting Aristotle was crucial for the consistency of Hobbes’ theory of the state. Leviathan must have zero tolerance for any form of social violence, from sedition (his sickness) to civil war (his death). Therefore the celebration of the noble killing of a king (conveniently labeled “tyrant”), has no place in modern politics. Those who come to treat a sovereign as an obstacle in their way understand nothing of the nature of the state, which is artificial and vulnerable, always threatened by a return to the state of nature.
    Furthermore, to object to Aristotle on anger was consistent with Hobbes’ profound weariness with classical political theory. One of the most insidious causes of the dangerous misunderstanding of the state, Hobbes argues, was ideological. People learned to cultivate dissent and glamorize discontent from subversive, poisonous political theories: those of the Ancients. « From the reading, I say, of such books, men have undertaken to kill their Kings, because the Greek and Latin writers, in their books and discourses of Policy, make it lawful and laudable, for any man so to do ; provided, before he do it, he call him tyrant. For they say not regicide, that is, killing a king, but tyrannicide, that is, killing of a tyrant is lawful » ('De Corpore Politico', XXVII,  10).  No learning of a language, Hobbes dryly comments, has ever been paid with so much blood, as that of Greek and Latin (Ibidem, 150).
In the transition from a theory of man as a political animal, naturally inclined to sociability (Aristotle), to a vision of human nature, made up of movement and competition, Hobbes rethought the anthropological underpinnings of politics. This required the simplification of the passions, and the rejection of that interlacing of rights, habits and body, which framed the complexity of the emotions in the classical past. The demystification of anger was critical.
 

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This paper is a response to Salvatore, Picione, Bochicchio et al's. (2021) application of psychoanalysis to understand and remediate current socially destructive processes. The authors conceptualize current anti-social tendencies as due to primary process thinking and meaning making brought about by the dominance of affect in the social field. I present some questions and challenges, including: revisions of Freud's concept of primary and secondary process, the ubiquity of affect links and primary process associations in all social life, the notion that affect is not discharge but is the link to the other and to meaning, a qualitative analysis of prosocial emotions in contrast to the authors' apparently quantitative and mechanistic analysis, and some alternative psychoanalytic formulations of social problems and of the relationship of the individual and the social. I propose that some destructive social phenomena prevalent today, rather than being manifestations of primary process-affective meaning making, are due to failure of social institutions to cultivate the right emotion in the right measure and failure to cultivate prosocial attitudes, values, and capacities, subject to qualitative analysis.

This report on climate anxiety is based on multidisciplinary research and observations made from practical actions taken to alleviate it. Written by eco-anxiety researcher Panu Pihkala. Editorial board: the experts of Mental Health Finland (Mieli ry.).

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: What is Climate Anxiety?
2. The Health Effects of Climate Change
3. The Psychological Challenges of Dealing with Climate Change
4. The Symptoms of Climate Anxiety
5. Vulnerability and the Impact of Social Context
6. Action, Emotions and Meaningfulness
7. Appreciating and Encountering Various Emotions
8. Third Sector Initiatives and Resources
    Environmental Organizations where Space is Given for Dealing with Emotion
    Psychologist Organizations
    Peer Groups
    Facilitated Discussion Groups
    Ecopsychologists and Ecotherapy
    Individual Events that Deal with Climate Anxiety
    Environmental Education and Art
    Discussion Therapy by Individuals and Small Groups
Literature

In the absence of democratic state institutions, Eastern European countries were considered to possess only myths of democracy. Working on the premise that democracy is not only an institutional arrangement but also a civilisational project, this book argues that mythical narratives help to understand the emergence of democracy without 'democrats'. Examining different national traditions as well as pre-communist and communist narratives, myths are seen as politically fabricated 'programmes of truth' that form and sustain the political imagination. Appearing as cultural, literary, or historical resources, myths amount to ideology in narrative form, which actors use in political struggles for the sake of achieving social compliance with and loyalty to the authority of new political forms. Drawing on a wide range of case studies including Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, this book argues that narratives about the past are not simply legacies of former regimes but have actively shaped representations and meanings of democracy in the region. Taking different theoretical and methodological approaches, the power of myth is explored for issues such as leadership, collective identity formation, literary representation of heroic figures, cultural symbolism in performative art as well as for the constitution of legitimacy and civic identity in post-communist democracies.

In the wake of a sociopolitically volatile era, which is increasingly
characterized by the intensive and extensive proliferation of borders,
migration- and border management are still commonly considered as
predominantly rational and dispassionate processes. Their functions
and filtering mechanisms, however, are underpinned by the instrumental
top-down exertion of affective power as well as by the cultivation of
emotional dispositions among political communities. At the same
time, compliance to- or contestation of these forces also manifests
‘from below’ through transgressive patterns of human mobilities and
mobilisations around borders, which are similarly affectively-driven.

This Ph.D. dissertation examines the impact of various actors’ affective
practices on the construction, enactment and contestation of affective
borderscapes in the southeastern Mediterranean and its Aegean
appendix, and explores how those processes manifest and link up at
multiple scales across space and time from a perspective that accounts
for the affective dimensions of border regimes aside from their legal,
infrastructural and political causes and consequences.

Through long-term ethnographic engagement with communities and
individuals that have been passing through or inhabiting several
locations along the much-fraught Aegean borders in times of major
socioeconomic and geopolitical upheaval, this thesis formulates
and puts forth the concept of affective borderscapes as an original
contribution to border and migration studies. Affective borderscapes
are liminal, overlapping landscapes that function as contact zones and
as charged fields of often unanticipated affective interaction between
assemblages of animate and inanimate actors. This concept bears great
potential for the acquisition and mobilisation of knowledge, as well as
for the design and application of policy and practice.

In 1967 Hannah Arendt published an essay with the deceptively simple title " Truth and Politics " (1967). Most scholarly discussions of her essay consider her distinction between a traditional political art of limited, deliberate, strategic lying and modern, organised, global lying and self-deception and then evaluate her qualified defence of the virtues of mendacity. This article suggests, however, that her essay has a much broader ambit: viz., to defend the political value of truth-telling. The main purpose of this article is to demonstrate that she formulates her essay as an apology of the truth-teller in politics and of her own truth-telling in her controversial report of the Eichmann trial. It first surveys the personal motives of Arendt's political defence of frank speech. It shows that in developing this defence she significantly revises her scepticism about the value of truth-telling in politics. She does so by identifying three different types of truth-teller with distinctive political roles: philosophers who exemplify the truth in their own lives, citizens who see the world from other people's perspectives, and poets and historians whose stories reconcile citizens

This article offers a critique of a widespread political discourse that distinguishes 'resentment' from 'ressentiment', legitimating the former and dismissing the latter. This distinction not only incorporates some reactive sentiments at the cost of the depoliticisation of others, but also obscures the conditions of political action and judgement as such. Why is it necessary to protect the socio-political order from the risk of moral corruption in these terms, and for whom? First, a historical distinction is made between three problems that play a key role in the evaluation of the reactive attitudes: those pertaining to their rationality, their authenticity, and their justness. It is then argued that the first two problems are ill-posed. These problems concern differences in degree, and are therefore prone to the relativism of what, retrospectively, can be called 'the resentment-ressentiment complex'. The true problem with retributive passions concerns a difference in kind, not between resentment and ressentiment, but between active affects and passive or reactive affects. This Nietzschean 'demoralisation' of established discourses on the reactive attitudes by means of a historico-systematic reorientation leads to the concluding claim that while moral sentiments and political actions are always entangled, only the latter constitute the ground of social justice.

Although most political theories imply some view of the role of emotion in political life, some are hostile to emotion; and no general treatment of the emotional has yet been written in normative political theory. The theoretical study of political emotion should begin with the history of ancient Greek thumos as understood by Homer, who wrote free of the philosophical elevation of reason. Recent theorists have understood thumos as the angry and manly defense of one's own honor, family, and country. In Homer's Iliad, thumos motivates both men and women, participates in deliberation, and suggests not one disposition or emotion, but many emotions. The typical readings of ancient thumos neglect these elements in Homer, and fail to investigate the relationship between political regime and emotion. Employing recent studies of emotion, I articulate the mutual effect of political organization, morality, and emotional character focusing particularly on the story of Achilles.

This article examines how affective narratives of the COVID-19 pandemic on Chinese social media reinforce and challenge established scripts of national identity, political legitimacy, and international geopolitical imaginary. Taking theoretical insights from the scholarship on trauma, disaster nationalism, and politics of emotions, I structure the analysis of social media posts from state media and private accounts around three emotional registers: grief as a crucial site of control and contestation during the initial stage of the outbreak; gandong (being moved in a positive way) associated with stories of heroic sacrifices, national unity, and mundane 'heart-warming' moments; and enmity in narratives of power struggles and ideological competition between China and 'the West', especially the United States. While state media has sought to transform the crisis into resources for strengthening national belonging and regime legitimacy through a digital reworking of the long-standing repertoire of disaster nationalism, alternative articulations of grief, rage, and vernacular memory that refuse to be incorporated into the 'correct collective memory' of a nationalized tragedy have persisted in digital space. Furthermore, the article explicates the ways in which popular narratives affectively reinscribe dominant ideas about the (inter)national community: such as the historical imagination of a continuous nationhood rising from disasters and humiliation, positive energy, and a dichotomous view of the international order characterized by Western hegemony and Chinese victimhood. The geopolitical narratives of the pandemic build on and exacerbate binary oppositions between China and 'the West', which are co-constructed through discursive practices on both sides in mutually reinforcing ways. The lens of emotion allows us to attend to the resonances and dissonances between official and popular narrativizations of the disaster without assuming a one-way determinate relationship between the two.

Publié le 21/04/2020 sur le site du média en ligne AOC
L’épidémie de Covid-19 est l’occasion de mettre en évidence le « travail émotionnel » effectué au quotidien par les femmes, que ce soit professionnellement ou dans la sphère privée. C’est à elles qu’incombe presque exclusivement la gestion de ces émotions qui ont été marchandisées et standardisées à mesure que les métiers du care se sont développés. Les conséquences de la crise sanitaire sur la santé mentale de toutes celles qui supportent le poids des émotions risquent d’être incommensurables.

El campo general de investigación en que se inscribe este texto consiste en el análisis de las configuraciones políticas, las representaciones simbólicas y los complejos de valores afectivos que organizan el accionar de los diferentes sujetos en relación con el funcionamiento de la democracia ateniense, sus instituciones y sus prácticas. Entendemos por configuraciones políticas la construcción de formas de acción, dominación o resistencia mediante las cuales los sujetos buscan tomar decisiones con el fin de garantizar o de alterar la reproducción de las estructuras de poder establecidas. A su vez, las representaciones simbólicas son el conjunto de recursos de pensamiento con los cuales los agentes diseñan sus cursos de acción en función de los objetivos políticos que trazan en relación con el poder vigente. Ambas dimensiones no se hallan al margen de los complejos de valores afectivos en tanto que productos de una experiencia cultural y social, entendiendo que las diferentes emociones puestas de manifiesto según las circunstancias y las conformaciones subjetivas específicas muestran las actitudes deseadas o criticadas respecto de la realidad institucional, política y social ateniense. A partir de esto, buscamos contribuir a dar respuesta a los interrogantes que se siguen planteando en torno a la constitución de la política como condición fundamental de la vida humana en la Grecia antigua, y en particular la conformación de la democracia, sin prescindir de una concepción cultural de las emociones, cuyo significado se considera más social que individual, atendiendo a los juicios de valor que subyacen a la construcción ideológica de las emociones, según se ponen de manifiesto en diferentes géneros discursivos. En este sentido, el desarrollo de la política democrática, cuya configuración paradigmática la hallamos en la Atenas clásica, supuso la capacidad del pueblo de limitar la opresión coactiva de los sectores aristocráticos, así como de construir un espacio específico de participación y disenso. Bajo estas condiciones, las representaciones simbólicas operaron como vehículo para procesar este singular suceso, dando cuenta al mismo tiempo de las pasiones extremas que éste supo desatar y que se expresaron en los conflictos políticos, muchas veces con una inusitada violencia física y psicológica como lo muestran abiertamente ciertos momentos de la historia ateniense.

Korea has a long history of linking conflict resolution with particular moral and societal values. In this chapter we explore the potentials and limits of this tradition by focusing on the concept of Han, which many Korean scholars claim as unique to their culture.  We explore in detail two important aspects of Han. First, the concept of Han explicitly acknowledges the emotional dimensions of conflict and its resolution. This focus on emotions contrasts sharply with Western approaches to mediation, which are part of a broader cultural tradition dominated by instrumental understandings of reason.  Second, the concept of Han, as understood and practiced in Korea, shifts the focus of conflict resolution from the individual to the collective. The main task is not to address and solve individual grievances or a clash between particu- lar individuals, as is the case in dominant Western approaches to mediation. The purpose, rather, is to find ways of harmonising the relationship between individuals and the society at large.

In this article I explore the broad appeal of one recent and unusual cinematic revival of an orthodox romantic love narrative. According to the cultural historian David Shumway, a new intimacy paradigm for couples, and not the older romantic love paradigm, accounts for the growth in support for gay marriage. Instead I argue it is romantic love, intensified and rewritten, that is still capable of bestowing unique cultural authority. The film’s reception recalls for us the rebellious social and political power of romantic love, its traditional transgressions against patriarchal control of familial alliances and reproduction, and its fervent individualism. In so doing, the film invigorates romantic love as a political force both in its presentation of non-heterosexual men, but also in its spur to cultural activism through online forums. I look in particular at one forum and its communal articulation of an emotional condition called “Brokeback Mountain Fever,” a curious amalgam of longing and grief. Through the forum, the film points to a communal participation in the effects of traditional romantic love stories, enabled by new forms of sociability on the internet. Finally, I consider how the film might help us to understand our current situation in the midst of an often unacknowledged tension between not only love and marriage, but also romantic love and intimacy.

The recent revival of social scientific interest in Gabriel Tarde has acknowledged his pioneering work as an economic thinker, micro-sociologist and political anthropologist. The aim of this article is to link Tarde's anthropological insights about regularity, repetition, and imitation to an assessment of the dynamics of innovation and progress, so fundamental for modernity. Collective values or social facts emerge as the result of the contingent, passionate, and affective interpenetration of otherwise disconnected individuals. Tarde's ontology is based on a radical existential pluralism, which is the basis not only of sociability but also of innovation and progress. The central idea is that dynamics of innovation and progress are based on the passions of humans as imitative beings. Imitative innovation and can be exemplified for different spheres of society including arts, literature, economics, or politics. Lastly, I shall deal with historical dynamics of the appearance of the concept of progress and the powerful impact of generational change as driver of progress.

The study of emotion has become a steadily growing field in international relations and international political sociology. This essay adds to the field through a further empirical examination of the political roles emotions can play. Specifically, the essay questions how emotions were implicated in the construction of transnational solidarity—and the associated humanitarian actions—following an event of pivotal global importance: the Asian tsunami disaster of December 2004. To this end, I focus on the emotional dimensions of dominant media tsunami imagery and examine how emotions helped to produce the humanitarian meanings and ideologies on which the subsequent solidarity and humanitarian actions were based. Analyzing photographs in the New York Times, the essay demonstrates that the dominant tsunami imagery helped to evoke solidarity and garner aid. It did so, at least in part, through mobilizing stereotypical and deeply colonial representations of developing world disaster that are suggestive of a “politics of pity.” In this way, the essay contributes both an empirical study of emotions in world politics and an examination of the linkages between emotions and contemporary humanitarianism.

Times of transition are times of intense emotional upheaval. Not only because of what people are supposed to leave behind, but also because of the uncertainty ahead. Indeed, one might argue that it is precisely the implied demand to “move on” that can trigger conflicting feelings over the emerging order (Mueller-Hirth and Oyola, 2018). Despite the evident importance of emotions to the narrations and imaginings of conflict, interventions, and political change, systematic analysis of their political significance in the study of peacebuilding interventions are still few and far in between (Wasinski, 2017, 154). Scholars currently confine their most concentrated efforts to the space of trauma, recovery, and reconciliation after violent conflict (Åhäll and Gregory, 2015; Hutchison and Bleiker, 2015). This scholarship is often situated within the related but distinct field of transitional justice (Baker and Obradovic-Wochnik, 2016) and builds on the findings of peace psychology. At its core, it is motivated by the question of how complex emotions in postconflict societies, the “residue of lived experience” as Petersen (2017) puts it, can be accommodated to instill the type of favorable transformations that are conducive to peace (Halperin, 2015). Somewhat surprisingly, peacebuilding studies are therefore trailing instead of leading conceptual innovations in the study of emotions in the broader field of international relations—in particular, where the study of their intersections with political power is concerned. This chapter argues that international relations scholarship on emotions has much to offer to the critical research agenda on a post-liberal peace. It sees the greatest potential in the ontological propositions that posit a radical social view of emotions (Wolf, 2017).

In the Ethics, Spinoza argues that individual human emotions and imagination shape the social world. This world, he argues, can in turn be shaped by political institutions to be more or less hopeful, more or less rational, or more or less angry and indignant. In his political works, Spinoza offered suggestions for how to shape a political imaginary and political culture that is more guided by hope than by fear or anger. In this chapter, using the framework of Spinoza's theory of emotions, I will investigate how Barack Obama's promise of 'hope' was translated into Donald Trump's rhetoric of hate. Such a transition, from hope to fear is one that would be unsurprising to Spinoza. Spinoza worried about the political and personal effectiveness of hope. He argued that hope can easily be turned into what he called 'indignatio' or indignation – an emotion that he believed eroded trust in political institutions. Spinoza warned about the danger of governance that relies upon the emotions of anger and hatred. I will set out how the Trump administrations reliance on the motivational forces of hate and anger risk what Spinoza called indignation. Spinoza's political works were written to show how to turn political indignation and anger into a chastened, and perhaps more rational, hope. Finally, I will propose that we may derive from Spinoza participatory, democratic institutions that can overcome this indignation.

Tsoni, I. (2013). 'African border-crossings in a 'city of Others': Constellations of irregular im/mobility and in/equality in the everyday urban environment of Athens', Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 27(1), pp. 141-169. 7 diverted from crossing it by my newfound acquaintances, until sufficient rapport and trust were established between us over time and I was, eventually, granted reluctant passage. Most of my local acquaintances were men, who would readily admit that they couldn't really cook, or that they didn't wish to prepare anything complex themselves. They would resort, thus, to 'white food' 4 during their journey. Food preparation was a task reserved 4 Based on fieldwork observations, 'white food' in this context had a dual meaning. It signified both food that is white as in plain/bland/starchy (such as rice, potatoes or white bread), as well as food meant for 'white people' and was, therefore, considered to be culturally and corporally unfamiliar, and even detrimental, to them as it could not provide proper physical and, most importantly, spiritual nourishment.

This paper explores the role of disgust in mediating disabled women's experience of workfare in the Australian state. As global social policy has been restructured along neoliberal lines in Western nations, the notion of ‗workfare' has been widely promulgated. This paper draws on nine case studies from across Australia to explore how this has resulted in disabled women being coerced to participate in a range of workfare programs that are highly bureaucratised, sanitised and moralised. The findings suggest that with the advent of Australian neoliberal welfare reform, some disabled women are increasingly framed in negative affective terms. A primary emotion that appears to govern disabled women forced to participate in Australian neoliberal workfare programs is disgust. The experience of the participants interviewed for this study suggests that the naming of them in negative emotional terms requires disabled women to perform a respectable unruly corporeality to ensure that they gain and maintain access to a range of services and supports, which are vital to their wellbeing.

We recently spoke with Thomas Nail, an associate professor at the University of Denver, to talk about his recent book “The Figure of the Migrant.” In it, Nail develops a theory of what he calls kinopolitics and argues that the migrant has become the “political figure of our time.”

This article presents a critical review of The Feeling of History, a recent work by the American anthropologist Charles Hirschkind. In this book, the author treats Andalucismo, a political movement that arose in modern Andalusia early in the twentieth century and was chiefly characterized by an extremely positive view of the Islamic Iberian past (al-Andalus)-a tendency that is certainly unusual in Spain and goes against the prevalent Spanish nationalism. In his book, Hirschkind not only develops an uncritical view of Andalucismo and its intrinsically emotional reading of the past but also legitimizes a rather farfetched conflation of modern Andalusia and al-Andalus. Moreover, he offers an extremely shallow and unnuanced reading of current Spanish scholarship on the Middle Ages, branding it wholesale as an heir to Francoism. He also lends legitimacy to those who call into question the origin of al-Andalus in the Islamic conquest of 711 CE-representatives of an unscholarly approach that has been largely dismissed by academic outlets since the 1970s. Burdened by heavy ideological prejudices and hampered by the author's limited knowledge of the most recent academic historiographic debates in the field of Iberian medieval studies, the book represents a failed attempt to present the Anglophone readership with a consistent introduction to Andalusian nationalism together with a critical appraisal of the Andalusian nationalist interpretation of the medieval Iberian past.

Sammelrezension der folgenden Bücher:
BRIAN MASSUMI: Politics of Affect, Cambridge 2015. Polity Press.
JUDITH MOHRMANN: Affekt und Revolution, Frankfurt/M. 2015. Campus.
MARTHA NUSSBAUM: Politische Emotionen, Berlin 2014. Suhrkamp.
JOHN PROTEVI: Political Affect, Minneapolis 2009. University of Minnesota Press.