Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Your Scribd Membership Has Expired. Click Here To Renew It
Your Scribd Membership Has Expired. Click Here To Renew It
Your Scribd Membership Has Expired. Click Here To Renew It
Chapters 3–5 realize a key ambition developed earlier in the book: to assess the
political impact of affect without assuming in advance its coordination or coher-
ence. Tracing these effects empirically requires leaving aside familiar expectations
dictating intentionality as a cornerstone of political agency. Emotions have specific
properties that change the way human beings act in social and political settings. A
circulation of affect does more than sustain identities, institutions, and norms; it
also shifts the basis of legitimacy behind these things by coupling them with new
sources of symbolic inspiration and performative energy. Following these affective
dynamics helps us understand some enduring mysteries in global politics—how,
for example, new political movements emerge, how cultural identities absorb sup-
port from adjacent social and economic grievances, and how events and memories
from the past continue to shape interactions in the present. Far from a repetitive af-
fliction, affect is integral to the way human actors navigate a shifting terrain of so-
cial interaction.
1 page (<1 min) le in this chapter PAGE 31 OF 378 8% read