The Political is Affective
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.59123/5a9bee79Keywords:
Affect, power, politics, Spinoza, affective disposition, OkinAbstract
This paper argues that the political is affective based on the claim that politics and affects are relations of power. Recognizing this connection challenges long-standing dichotomies that have structured political theory: reason versus emotion, public versus private, mind versus body. Drawing on feminist theory, affect studies, and Spinoza’s philosophy, I show how affective relations not only reflect but actively constitute political realities. Understanding the political as affective means abandoning the figure of the autonomous, disembodied subject and involves a reorientation of political thought toward interdependence, materiality, and relationality. Moreover, affective relations in past and present shape affective dispositions that reflect both individual histories and broader societal structures such as gender, race, and class. These dispositions influence how we move through and interact with the world, providing a basis for an intersectional understanding of how power is lived, negotiated, and reproduced. Understanding the political as affective and the affective as political builds upon but also expands the scope of feminist critique. Revisiting the feminist insight that “the personal is political,” I develop a critique of the public/private split by foregrounding affective relations, which cross and complicate boundaries. By tracing how power is lived and transmitted through affective entanglements, this perspective opens new conceptual and political possibilities for imagining more inclusive, responsive, and transformative forms of collective life.
Downloads
References
Ahmed, S. 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd ed. Edinburgh University Press.
Anderson, E. 2010. The Imperative of Integration. Princeton University Press.
Bargetz, B., & Sauer, B. 2015. “Der Affective turn: Das Gefühlsdispositiv und die Trennung von öffentlich und privat.” Femina Politica 24 (1): 93-102.
Berlant, L. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Butler, J. 2015. Senses of the Subject. New York: Fordham University Press
Clough, P.T. 2007. “Introduction.” In The Affective Turn, edited by P.T. Clough and with J. Halley. Duke University Press.
Collins, P. H. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Connolly, W. E. 2002. Neuropolitics: Thinking, culture, speed. University of Minnesota Press.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 139–168.
———. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–1300.
Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race & Class. New York: Random House, 1981.
Dworkin, A. 1981. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. Putnam.
Firestone, Sh. 1970. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: William Morrow, 1970.
Gatens, Moira, and Genevieve Lloyd. 1999. Collective Imaginings. Spinoza, Past and Present. London & New York: Routledge.
Hanisch, C. 1970. “The Personal Is Political.” In Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation, edited by Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt, 76–78. New York: Radical Feminism, 1970.
hooks, bell. 1981. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. South End Press.
Jaggar, A. M. 1996. “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology.” In Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy, edited by A. Garry and M. Pearsall. Routledge.
James, Susan. 2003. Passion and Action. The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. Oxford University Press.
———. 2020. Spinoza on Learning to Live Together. Oxford University Press.
Lorde, A. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press.
Lloyd, G. 1984. The Man of Reason. Male and Female in Western Philosophy. Methuen Publishing.
Malm, A. 2021. How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire. Verso.
Massumi, B. 2002. Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Duke University Press.
Mühlhoff, R. 2019. “Affective Disposition.” In Affective Societies, edited by J. Slaby and C. von Scheve, 119–30. Routledge.
———. 2020. “Affective Disposition, or: Reading Spinoza With Foucault. Towards an Affect Theory of Subjectivation and Power.” SSRN Electronic Journal.
Nagle, A. 2017. Kill all Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Zero Books.
Nussbaum, M. C. 2013. Political emotions: Why love matters for justice. Harvard University Press.
Okin, S. M. 1989. Justice, gender, and the family. Basic Books.
Protevi, J. 2009. Political affect: Connecting the social and the somatic. University of Minnesota Press
Ray, S. J. A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet. University of California Press, 2020.
Saar, M. 2013. Die Immanenz der Macht: Politische Theorie nach Spinoza. Suhrkamp.
Sharp, H. 2011. Spinoza and the politics of renaturalization. University of Chicago Press.
Slaby, J. and von Scheve, C. 2019. “Introduction” In Affective Societies, edited by J. Slaby and C. von Scheve, 1-24. Routledge.
Slaby, J. and Bens, J. 2019. “Political Affect.” In Affective Societies, edited by J. Slaby and C. von Scheve, 340-351.
Spelman, E. 1988. Inessential woman : problems of exclusion in feminist thought. Beacon Press.
Spinoza, B. 1985. Ethics. In: The collected works of Spinoza, ed. and transl. by E. Curley (Vol. 1). Princeton University Press.
———. 2016. Theological-Political Treatise. In: The collected works of Spinoza, ed. and transl. by E. Curley (Vol. 2). Princeton University Press.
———. 2016. Political Treatise. In: The collected works of Spinoza, ed. and transl. by E. Curley (Vol. 2). Princeton University Press.
Srinivasan, A. 2021. The Right to Sex. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Steinberg, J. 2018. Spinoza’s Political Psychology. The Taming of Fortune and Fear. Cambridge University Press.
Tacitus. 2012. Annals. Transl. by Cynthia Damon. Penguin Classics.
Whetherel, M. 2013. “Affect and discourse– What’s the problem? From affect as excess to affective/discursive practice.” Subjectivity 6 (4): 349–368.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Marie Wuth
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
