Feminist Snap: On Democratic Impatience’s Affects

• In Event: Feminist Affects and Attachments

Abstract

Contemporary democratic theorists across multiple approaches consider patience as critical for democracy, and dismiss impatience as vice. In Why We Can’t Wait Martin Luther King, Jr., on the other hand, shows that impatience, too, can enact and advance democracy. To King democratic impatience aids in overcoming undemocratic legacies, fosters democratic agency, ensures political accountability, and creates more inclusive practices of democratic belonging. While King’s approach to democratic impatience provides a critical corrective to much of democratic theory, this paper explores whether King offers a democratic impatience that is, ironically, too ‘patient’. In particular, King’s critique of rioting and turn to non-violence reflect the incorporation of patience within democratic impatience. Similarly, King’s democratic impatience entails patience insofar it moves beyond refusal towards pursuing long-term programs of political transformation. Does King not thereby lose sight of valuable forms of democratic impatience, namely those that manifest themselves as uncontrolled anger, as rupture, and as refusal (rather than careful pursuit of long-term transformation)?

My paper pursues these possibilities with the help of Sara Ahmed’s discussion of feminist snap in Living a Feminist Life. Much like King, Ahmed identifies and praises impatience’s democratic potential. For Ahmed snapping can be a critical for the development of feminist consciousness and or the enactment of feminist resistance. Yet, unlike King, she precisely praises feminist impatience insofar it is expressed as anger, constitutes a rupture with patriarchal structures and persons, and refuses what is insufferable. Ahmed even praises feminist impatience when it builds on or entails violence and/ or violent imagery.

My objective, however, is not to replace King’s approach to democratic impatience with Ahmed’s. Instead, I want to investigate the contexts in which these different forms of democratic impatience can be effective. King’s and Ahmed’s conceptions of democratic impatience may thus be complimentary. That said, with Ahmed the paper wants to expand the capacity of democratic citizens to attend to others’ snapping, that is, to better attune democracy to impatience’s democratic potential, even when respective impatience is visibly angry, enacts ruptures, and – for the time being – manifests as refusal.

Author

• Mario Feit, Georgia State University