The Politics of Ugly Feelings

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

In much of the literature in contemporary and historical political theory, negative affects are studied as destabilizing threats to reasoned democratic judgement; as ‘mere’ ideological formations; as “ordinary vices” that democratic citizens should rid themselves of; and/or as private and personal pathologies, antithetical to politics and in need of medical treatment. The presentations on this panel take a different approach to what Sianne Ngai has called “ugly feelings.” Putting Political Theory in conversation with Affect Theory, and indebted to Ngai’s work, each of the four panelists offers a political and historicized account of a single bad affect: Nica Siegel studies Frantz Fanon’s ambivalent treatment of exhaustion as a uniquely colonial pathology; Noga Rotem explores Richard Hofstadter’s nervous appreciation for the scholarly style of paranoia, in his influential Paranoid Style in American Politics; Nazli Konya studies regime-sponsored mass mobilizations as a kind of Gezi-envy—a desire to reproduce and surpass the people’s democratic desire; and Elizabeth Anker studies what she calls “ugly freedoms”—the systemic and hidden political oppressions that commonplace conception of universal freedom are predicated on.
Together, the papers on this panel argue for a reading of ugly feelings as political affects: This means—for some—treating them as less-than-conscious dramatizations of political impasses (Siegel, Anker). For other panelists it means reading ugly feelings as conveying unnamed political desires (Konya, Rotem, Siegel); as too close for comfort to passions political theorists typically admire (Siegel, Rotem), or as forms of an unconscious political compliance (Konya, Anker), or resistance (Siegel).
In our contemporary moment of democratic erosion and the re-emergence of fascism around the world, risking proximity to ugly feelings (instead of distancing ourselves from them by pathologizing or privatizing them) may sound dangerous and irresponsible. However, the papers on this panel highlight the democratic possibilities that might emerge from such pursuit.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Ugly Freedoms - Elisabeth Robin Anker, George Washington University

• Gezi-envy - Nazli Konya, Colby College

• Fanon's Engine: The Politics of Exhaustion - Nica Siegel, Yale

• Scholarly in Technique: Richard Hofstadter and the Style of Paranoia - Noga Rotem, University of Washington

Chair

• Lida E. Maxwell Boston University

Discussants

• Juliet Hooker Brown University

• Lida E. Maxwell Boston University