Affective Politics of Emancipation

Hypatia, Inc.
The Distribution of Emotions: Affective Politics of Emancipation

Author(s): BRIGITTE BARGETZ
Source: Hypatia, Vol. 30, No. 3, SPECIAL ISSUE: Emancipation (SUMMER 2015), pp. 580-596
Published by: Wiley on behalf of Hypatia, Inc.
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The Distribution of Emotions: Affective
Politics of Emancipation
BRIGITTE BARGETZ
Currently, affect and emotions are a widely discussed political topic. At least since the e
1990s, different disciplines—from the social sciences and humanities to science and tec
science—have increasingly engaged in studying and conceptualizing affect, emotion, feel
and sensation, evoking yet another turn that is frequently framed as the "affective tu
Within queer feminist affect theory, two positions have emerged: folbwing Eve Kosof
Sedgwick's well-known critique, there are either more "paranoid" or more "reparat
approaches toward affect. Whereas the latter emphasize the potentialities of affect, the for
argue that one should question the mere idea of affect as liberation and promise. He
suggest moving beyond a critique or celebration of affect by embracing the political am
lence of affect. For this queer feminist theorizing of affective politics, I adapt Jacque
ciere's theory of the political and particularly his understanding of emancipation. Ranc
takes emancipation into account without, however, uncritically endorsing or celebratin
politics of liberation. I draw on his famous idea of the "distribution of the sensible" an
frame it as the "distribution of emotions," by which I develop a multilayered appr
toward a nonidentitarian, nondichotomous, and emancipatory queer feminist theory of
tive politics.
Affect and emotions are currently a widely discussed political topic. Affect has been
identified as having significantly informed neoliberal US politics since the 1980s
through a "moral-emotional rhetoric" (Berlant 2005, 49) and "affective epidemics"
(Grossberg 1992, 281). In the aftermath of 9/11, emotions have become profoundly
politicized, enforcing a widely racialized and culturalized politics of fear (Ahmed
2004; Puar 2007) and invoking a national sentimental politics of (male) protection
in the US (Faludi 2007). According to Judith Butler, the US wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq reveal "how affect is regulated to support both the war effort and, more spe
cifically, nationalist belonging" (Butler 2009, 40). Furthermore, the transformation of
the Western state has been framed in terms of affect and emotion. Birgit Sauer, for
Hypatia vol. 30, no. 3 (Summer 2015) © by Hypatia, Inc.
Brigitte Bargetz 581
instance, emphasizes "affective governmentality" (Sauer 2015), and Patricia T.

Clough speaks of the "biomediated body" (Clough 2010, 207) as an affective form of
biopolitical governing. Similarly, a mode of governing through emotions is visible
within the contemporary political and financial crises in which emotions have
become a placeholder for publicly negotiating the il/legitimacy of political protests
(Bargetz and Freudenschuss 2012). The growing debates on affective politics also
challenge today's understandings of democracy. This is apparent in Butler's argument
for a "sensate democracy" (Butler and Spivak 2007) or in Chantal Mouffe's emphasis
on passions as a possibility for political mobilizing toward democratic ends (Mouffe
2002). Such ideas of affective democracies are echoed in recent uprisings—from
Cairo to New York, Madrid to London, Istanbul to Rio de Janeiro—bringing to light
a "new political economy of affects" (Lorey 2012, 45).
Yet the question of affect is not only embedded within processes of social and polit
ical transformation. Numerous academic fields have recently dedicated themselves to
what some call a new "affect dispositive" (Angerer 2014). Since the early 1990s at
least, different disciplines—from the social sciences and humanities to science and
technoscience—have been increasingly engaged in studying and conceptualizing
affect, emotion, feeling, and sensation, evoking yet another turn that is frequently
framed as the "affective turn" (Clough 2010; Koivunen 2010; Pedwell and Whitehead
2012). This turn is shaped by a desire to shift paradigms as, for instance, the lively
debate about affect, poststructuralism, and/or psychoanalysis indicates (Terada 2001;
Sedgwick 2003; Hemmings 2005; Angerer 2014), as well as by a desire to rethink the
material and the bodily in terms of the political (Navaro-Yashin 2009; Chen 2011).
From a feminist perspective, the turn to affect is especially interesting. On the
one hand, emotions and the body have always been of major interest within feminist
theory and philosophy, challenging main- and malestream understandings of the
subject, politics, critique, and knowledge production. On the other hand, the current
debate on affect is invested in envisioning new forms of queer and feminist research
(Koivunen 2010; Pedwell and Whitehead 2012). Unlike scholars who emphasize the
potentialities of affect, 1 argue, along with others, that we must critically assess the
mere idea of affect as promise. Emphasizing the potentialities, I claim, recirculates
within a liberal logic by politically romanticizing emotions and thus risks falling prey
to the restorative and liberating power of affect (Berlant 2000; Hemmings 2005;
Bargetz 2014), thereby enhancing a fantasy of a post-politics (Tyler 2008). Yet, con
trary to what Anu Koivunen has accurately outlined as two newly emerging and, at
times, contrasting feminist camps of critique or affirmation (Koivunen 2010), I
suggest embracing the political ambivalence of affect (Bargetz 2014). I propose that
only such a perspective allows us to move beyond this opposition and, consequently,
to fully grasp the political potential of affect. Emphasizing the ambivalence of affects
helps us consider how emotions are embedded within (heteronormative, racist, and
classed) power relations as well as how affects may serve as a critical and mobilizing
force for queer feminist politics.
For this ambivalent understanding of affective politics, I adapt French philosopher
Jacques Ranciere's theory of the political. I draw on his famous idea of the
582 Hypatia
"distribution of the sensible" and reframe it through a queer feminist perspective as

the "distribution of emotions." This might seem surprising, since Ranciere does not
consider questions of affect, gender, and sexuality. His approach is neither feminist
nor has it been taken up widely within feminist debates. In the 1970s, along with
Genevieve Fraisse, he was one of the leading members of the French journal Les
Revokes Logiques (1975-81), which had two major interests: the "analysis of worker
and women's oppression," suffering, however, as Oliver Davis acknowledges, from the
"relative separation of its two halves" (Davis 2010, 46). This split also showed up in
the debates between Ranciere and Fraisse. Almost forty years later, Fraisse questions
Ranciere's potential for analyzing emancipation and domination, as he not only
equates domination with "the 'discourse of domination'" (Fraisse 2013, 49), but also
ignores masculine domination completely. Whereas feminist research has been reluc
tant to turn to Ranciere's work, queer theory has recently shown interest in his the
ory, even in the face of his own blind spots. In their introduction to a Borderlands
special issue on Ranciere and queer theory, Samuel A. Chambers and Michael
O'Rourke point out that Ranciere "has at best entirely ignored, at worst actively dis
dained the work of queer theory," commenting on the "impending queering of his
work" "with no small degree of amusement" (Chambers and O'Rourke 2009, 2).
Although Ranciere's theory remains blind to queer studies, feminism, and affect,
in this article I expose how his approach can be adapted in rethinking the current
queer feminist debate on affect between critique and appreciation and explore the
traces within his texts that allow for such a move. Ranciere takes emancipation into
account without, however, uncritically endorsing or even celebrating liberatory poli
tics. Yet in order to be able to refine this conceptualization of emancipation for con
temporary queer feminist theories of affect, it is necessary to reread Ranciere by going
beyond him. This means carving out the hidden openings and allusions to affect and
emotions and weaving them together with queer and feminist insights on affect. In
order to do so, I refer to a broad understanding of affect and emotion without draw
ing a sharp distinction between the two notions as, for instance, Brian Massumi sug
gests (Massumi 2002). In line with a specific queer feminist strand of affect theory
(Berlant 2000; Ahmed 2004; Cvetkovich 2012), I understand feelings, affect, and
emotion as deeply imbricated in the political and the social, and emphasize the bod
ily, psychic, and cognitive dimensions of affect.
In this article I briefly map out, first, some of the main threads in queer feminist
research on affective politics and argue against reducing affective politics either to a
more positive or to a more skeptical reading of affect. In the following two steps, I
show how Ranciere's political theory offers a way to support this objective. In the
second section, I unfold Ranciere's understanding of emancipation, which requires
discussing his twofold notion of politics. In the third section I demonstrate how this
approach can be reread through a queer feminist theory of affect, which is rooted in
the critique of modern Western dichotomies. I conclude by pointing out the poten
tials of thinking through what I call the "distribution of emotions" and how this can
contribute to a queer feminist theory of affective politics. Here, affect becomes a mar
ker of political critique: on the one hand, it offers a mode of mobilizing conditions of
inequality, which are (also) affectively distributed; on the other hand, it is a politics
that is not rooted in identity, but takes the (affective) interruption of these condi
tions as a starting point for (collective) politics. 1 argue that thinking through the
distribution of emotions allows us to criticize hierarchically structured power relations
that—not only but also—relate to sex and gender. The distribution of emotions is
not limited to theorizing the reproduction and transformation of gender relations, but
informs a multilayered understanding of affective politics. It introduces modes of
queer feminist engagement by going beyond a liberal and toward a nonidentitarian,
nondichotomous politics of affect.
Affective Politics: A Queer Feminist Question
The current debate on affect, emotion, feeling, or sensation is nothing new to femi
nist research, particularly in feminist theory and philosophy. Crucial feminist
contributions include challenging gendered binary oppositions, such as rationality/
emotionality and politics/emotions, along with other prominent dichotomies of Wes
tern modernity, such as culture/nature or mind/body (Jaggar 1989; Gatens 1995; Prok
hovnik 1999; Sauer 1999). Feminist critics have exposed these dichotomies as
modern, heteronormative power mechanisms, as a "liberal dispositive of feelings"
(Sauer 1999, 208), and as reproducing a hierarchical binary gender order that deva
lues and delegitimizes emotions along with those who are often characterized as emo
tional. Feminist, queer, and postcolonial scholarship has demonstrated how the
devaluation and delegitimization of emotions is deeply embroiled in (theories of)
modern capitalist politics and how such devaluations are tied to gender, race, and
class (Frye 1983; Lorde 1984; Prokhovnik 1999; Ahmed 2000; 2004; Skeggs 2005).
Whereas liberal theory associates politics with objectivity, rationality, interests, and
progress, feminist research has pointed out the importance of emotions in politics.
Feminist scholars have shown how emotionality and irrationality have been ascribed
to specific subjects in order to create a hierarchical (gendered, racialized, class) order
and to mobilize and fortify the patriarchal Western capitalist state. Consequently,
feminist philosophers and political theorists have critically engaged with these attri
butions, exclusions, and delegitimizations by unfolding both the significance and
power of emotions. In addition to addressing specific theoretical frameworks, such as
critical knowledge production (Jaggar 1989), body politics (Gatens 1995), and femi
nist solidarity (Lorde 1984), such work has consistently drawn attention to how poli
tics is also governed by emotions.
Within current queer feminist debates on affect, "two camps" (Koivunen 2010,
23) have appeared to emerge. For Koivunen, there are "at least implicitly and meta
phorically" two "new caricatures of feminist scholars": "those for joy, those for melan
choly; those for life, those for death; those for reparative criticisms, those constrained
by paranoia" (23). This discussion is inspired by a debate following Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick's famous article "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So
Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You" (Sedgwick 2003). Sedgwick
584 Hypatia
criticizes "the mandatory injunction" (Sedgwick 2003, 125) of paranoid attitudes and
methodologies within the context of US critical theory because of its "hermeneutics
of suspicion" (124), an expression she borrows from Paul Ricoeur. In her view, para
noid readings, which she identifies in Marxism, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism
alike, perform a mode of critique that concentrates on "exposure" and "unveiling hid
den" (138-39) truth, and consequently on questions of power and domination. Sedg
wick criticizes that, by doing so, these approaches not only claim "ownership over
the truth" (Love 2010, 236-37) but also disavow the empowering potential of affect
by focusing on negative affect, and remaining "averse above all to surprise" (Sedgwick
2003, 146). Countering this paranoid approach, Sedgwick emphasizes a more "repara
tive reading" that, as Heather Love summarizes, is rather "on the side of multiplicity,
surprise, rich divergence, consolation, creativity, and love" (Love 2010, 237).
Following Sedgwick's intervention, some scholars in queer feminist theory argue
that it is necessary to elaborate more on a reparative and emancipatory understanding
of affect, which has also recently led to a debate on the so-called "reparative turn"
(Feminist Theory 2014; Wiegman 2014). In terms of reparation, scholars claim that
the current turn to affect promises new modes of critical inquiry as well as new forms
of political agency. Others, such as Clare Hemmings, remain skeptical of this empha
sis on potentialities and "restorative power" (Hemmings 2005, 551). Hemmings
remarks in her readings of Frantz Fanon's and Audre Lorde's descriptions of people's
"affective responses to their blackness" (561) that it is problematic to emphasize the
positive side of affect, because it creates an "illusion of choice" (584). Thus, although
affect may open up new possibilities, some affects are often only accessible to certain
subjects, while others are "over-associated with affect" (561). Highlighting affect's
potential for reparation and surprise obscures affective attributions made to black
and/or female bodies, and the manner in which they are deployed to the detriment
of the subaltern.
I argue along the lines of Hemmings's critique of overestimating the reparative
mode of affective politics and her cautioning against dismissing the power of critique.
Romanticizing affective agency not only entails the risk of enforcing a politics of
truth—and thus a politics of authenticity—it also disregards how social and political
structures circulate through affect and thereby loses sight of those powers and forces
that inhibit political agency. Yet I also build upon Sedgwick's objection and claim
that remaining within a paranoid framework is insufficient for conceptualizing a femi
nist politics of affect. Apart from embracing suspicion, such a perspective risks rein
forcing the (gendered, racialized, and classed) delegitimization of affect and emotion
characteristic of modern Western politics and political theory, which has also been
used to legitimize the exclusion of multiple "Others." A theory of affective politics
should thus neither ignore the power of affect nor celebrate affective politics as a
new, all-encompassing form of politics (Bargetz 2014). Instead, I suggest a queer femi
nist theory of affective politics that considers the creative moments of affect as a
means of solidarity and political mobilization while never losing sight of how affect is
woven into the political and economic fabric and, thus, how emotions are used to
politically mobilize gender, sexuality, race, and class. I propose that Jacques Ranciere's
political theory and particularly his understanding of emancipation provides a useful

framework for conceiving of such an approach that ultimately moves away from
either reparation or paranoia.
Ranciere's Subject Of Emancipation
Emancipation is more than a "tricky word" (Scott 2012, 5). In recent decades, eman
cipation has become a contested concept within political philosophy and social the
ory while other notions—such as agency—have become prevalent. Ambivalences
about emancipation have been revealed in discussions on the entanglement of
emancipatory subjects and oppressive forces, on the impossibility of constituting the
demos as totality, and on the critique of a privileged emancipatory agent. It has been
questioned whether the identity of the oppressed is part of the "subject struggling for
emancipation" (Laclau 1996, 17) or that the emancipation of the politically excluded
is the "criterion of general emancipation" and that the excluded thus "need to present
themselves as the people of the people" (Balibar 2002, 2-6; his emphasis). Queer
feminist voices have criticized that every form of emancipation from patriarchy and
heteronormativity that is aimed at the state remains imbricated in the state's monop
oly on rationality and legitimate violence (Reddy 2011, 37-38). In a similar vein,
Butler has emphasized that "feminist critique ought also to understand how the cate
gory of 'women,' the subject of feminism, is produced and restrained by the very
structures of power through which emancipation is sought" (Butler 1990, 2). Calls for
emancipation have also been challenged, since the prevailing liberal discourses in the
global North are increasingly instrumentalizing the paradigm of women's emancipa
tion as evidence for political progress. Consequently, the rhetoric of emancipation
has been used to produce and delegitimize the global North's "Others" (Ahmed 2000;
Puar 2007; Mendel and Neuhold 2012) as well as to legitimize imperialist politics in
the name of women's liberation. In this vein, Joan Scott stresses that the "rhetoric of
democracy in the service of global capital now includes the language of sexual eman
cipation and its imagined equation with gender equality" (Scott 2012, 20). Within
these discourses, emancipation has not only been appropriated for specific national
interests, it also suggests the idea that some must be emancipated by others. Similarly,
feminist philosophy has criticized the androcentric and colonial premises of the Wes
tern notion of emancipation because it relies on the (patronizing) idea of being liber
ated, of being given freedom.
Recently, however, a renewed emphasis has been placed on emancipation within
academic debates, especially those concerned with the contemporary multiple crises
and political uprisings worldwide that have emerged as responses to these crises.
Numerous conferences signal a yearning to think through emancipation. Similarly,
Nancy Fraser has asserted that feminist claims for emancipation need to be reintro
duced into critiques of capitalist society, as the contemporary capitalist crisis cannot
be fully grasped if it is not framed as a "three-sided conflict among forces of market
ization, social protection, and emancipation" (Fraser 2013, 235).
586 Hypatia
Ranciere's approach to emancipation intervenes in these debates: not only has he

never given up on the notion of emancipation, but he also goes beyond some of
emancipation's aporias. In times of post-democracy, he calls for emancipation by
offering an alternative account of politics. In view of today's multiple crises and upris
ings, his approach is a passionate yet still critical and careful claim for emancipation
that maps out "one of the few consistent conceptualizations of how we are to continue
to resist" (Zizek 2008, 79; his emphasis). In order to harness this potential, in the fol
lowing I elaborate on two decisive insights from Ranciere's theory: the question of
knowledge production and his notion of the political. Both aspects emphasize equal
ity, which is crucial in order to understand his notion of emancipation.
The significance of the power/knowledge nexus is apparent in Ranciere's double
critique of emancipation in terms of mastery: on the one hand as a privileged emanc
ipatory agent and on the other hand as the institutionalization of emancipatory
knowledge (Ranciere 1991; 2004). "[N]o party of government, no army, school or
institution," he claims, "will ever emancipate a single person" (Ranciere 1991, 102).
Moreover, emancipation in terms of revealing some hidden truth beneath the surface
is for Ranciere a fantasy of Enlightenment and a "pedagogical myth" (7). For him,
this is problematic, because it relies on the idea of a world that is "divided into
knowing minds and ignorant ones" (7). In challenging this misconception, he creates
the figure of the "ignorant schoolmaster," whose project of emancipation is based on
the fundamental assumption of an equality of intelligence among all human beings.
Presuming equality among people is also at the core of Ranciere's theory of poli
tics. Referring to the struggles of the working class during the nineteenth century, he
argues that emancipation was not based on the proletarians' identities. Rather, these
struggles appear as acts of emancipation because they indicate a "strong symbolic rup
ture" (Ranciere 2004, 219). This "rupture in the order of things" (219) relies upon
the assumption of equality—which, however, the political order denies the very
moment it emerges. In this vein, in his groundbreaking book La Mesentente (Disagree
ment), Ranciere claims that "politics exists when the natural order of domination is
interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have no part" (Ranciere 1999,
11). Equating politics with emancipation, he sees emancipatory politics arise when
those who are excluded from the existing sociopolitical order institute themselves as
an excluded part by turning toward the principle of equality.
Politics is at play when those who have no part emerge as an entity; Ranciere
calls this process "subjectivation." Two theoretical insights follow from this under
standing: first, that politics brings to light—manifests—an inequality, or a "miscount,"
as Ranciere calls it. In other words, emancipation uncovers, but does not overcome
inequality; it illustrates the declaration of a wrong. Second, Ranciere develops a
mode of "nonidentary subjectification" (Ranciere 1999, 100).1 The subject of politics
is not a group that '"becomes aware' of itself' (40). By placing an emphasis on subjec
tivation, Ranciere illuminates the gap between an identified part within the commu
nity and the instituting political subject. This distance between the people and their
part within the existing order implies that the process of emancipation involves a
process of disidentification.
In order to fully acknowledge this understanding of emancipation, it is necessary

to further engage with Ranciere's twofold logic of the political: on the one hand,
there is the logic of politics, which is synonymous with his notion of emancipation
that I have outlined above; on the other hand, there is the logic of the police.
Whereas the logic of politics designates an interruption based on equality, the logic
of the police describes the dominant order. The police, however, is not another term
for the state, but implies a broader form and technique of government. The police
delineates a specific mode of organization that Ranciere captures in his later work
using the figure of the "distribution of the sensible," le partage du sensible (Ranciere
2009a, 85). The distribution of the sensible alludes to an organization of power, to a
distribution of bodies, to an "allocation" (Ranciere 1999, 29) of ways of doing and
living, and to the mechanisms that legitimize this distribution. The distribution of
the sensible is a "system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously
discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define
the respective parts and positions within it" (Ranciere 2008, 12). As the heteroge
neous translation of the French expression le partage discloses, distribution indicates
both "division" (Ranciere 2004, 224) and "partition" (Ranciere 1999, 24), to "share
out and to divide up" (Davis 2010, 91 ).2 In this vein, Chambers stresses that distribu
tion describes "the sense of dividing up the world, of ordering it, of structuring it, on
the one hand, and the sense of connection, of linkage, and sharing, on the other"
(Chambers 2013, 70). The distribution of the sensible registers whose life and activi
ties are considered part of the community and whose are not; it designates who is
heard and who is able to speak within the existing political order. Or, as Ranciere
writes, the "distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is com
mon to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which
this activity is performed. Having a particular 'occupation' thereby determines the
ability or inability to take charge of what is common to the community" (Ranciere
2008, 12). As the distribution of the sensible, the police is not synonymous with
repression and control, but relates to the formation and distribution of places, people,
bodies, and the senses. It describes what is visible and sayable (Ranciere 1999, 29)
and what remains outside, invisible, unsayable. The logic of the police displays the
shared and the common as well as their excluded parts.
Following from this and in view of developing a queer feminist perspective on
affective politics, I want to highlight three aspects of Ranciere's notion of emancipa
tion. First, emancipation does not exist in itself but brings together two logics, the
logic of politics and the logic of the police. Ranciere does not deem those who exer
cise power to be situated on one side, and those subordinated to this very power to
be on the other side. Politics does not exist because "the poor oppose the rich"
(Ranciere 1999, 11). Emancipation emerges in an encounter between politics and
police, in which politics opposes the police, while the police constantly tries to pre
vent politics from happening. This encounter marks a political dispute, a disagree
ment, la mesentente. It displaces a body from its assigned place and allows subjects to
come into being as political subjects, while illuminating the existing distribution of
the sensible. This idea of emancipation foregrounds a politics of the possible, which
588 Hypatia
neither uncritically embraces nor romanticizes the power of change or agency.

Rather, emancipation relates to the existing sociopolitical order and its powerful and
exclusionary rationalities. As such, it is not opposed to but characterizes a mode of
critique and thus articulates the interconnectedness between power and resistance.
Second, conceptualizing emancipation as a mode of subjectivation offers a way to
understand both the political subject and the subject of political emancipation in
terms of becoming, of emerging. Emancipation delineates the process through which
subjects appear as political subjects, as subjects of a wrong, of an exclusion. Emanci
pation is the institution of the part that has no part in the existing distribution of
the sensible. As such it challenges beliefs in preconstituted emancipatory subjects or
political groups, such as "proletarians" or "women." Furthermore, this notion of sub
jectivation indicates an active dimension of emancipation. Emancipation does not
allude to the idea of becoming liberated through a privileged emancipatory agent or
some external force that excavates a "hidden political truth" (Ranciere 1999, 85).
Emancipation is a process and—more explicitly—one of political constitution.
Third, when framed in this manner, emancipation describes a process that relies on
equality instead of hoping for equality in a future that has yet to come. Thus, equality
is an assumption but not a goal of emancipation. Emancipation is "not a given" (Ran
ciere 1999, 33), but is the process through which the assumption of equality is verified.
Whereas the order of the police relies on misrepresentation and miscount, emancipa
tory politics come into existence through evoking the principle of equality. In this
vein, emancipation designates an act, and equality is its condition. Equality generates
emancipation and is therefore fundamental for both articulating and disrupting the
distribution of the sensible. Taking equality as a prerequisite for emancipation also
avoids reading politics into every form of interruption and disturbance.
Ranciere: Political Philosopher Of Affect?
It is because of the notion of subjectivation that Davis is surprised by Ranciere's dis

regard of affect. In his view, Ranciere not only ignores the "powerful affective dimen
sion" of "the experience of non-recognition," but also the "positive role" that
"emotions can play in motivating the struggle for subjectivation" (Davis 2010, 97).
Even though I agree with Davis regarding Ranciere's shortcomings in terms of affect,
I would argue that Ranciere's theory entails implicit references to affect. Whereas
Davis turns to Axel Honneth in order to broaden Ranciere's "undertheorized" (97)
account of emotions, I propose rereading his theory through queer feminist debates
on affect and emotions. At least two important insights from his theory allow for
such a move: first, I show that the figure of the distribution of the sensible can also
embrace affect and emotions; second, I argue that his theory of politics echoes the
feminist critiques of modern Western dichotomies and particularly that of rationality/
emotionality.
As I have demonstrated above, the distribution of the sensible describes a complex
understanding of boundaries and divisions that relate to sense perception. By claiming
the senses as the police's powerful operation of partition, Ranciere criticizes a mode
of governing that creates a division of the senses, a division between what is consid
ered speech or voice and what is considered purely noise. Certainly, he articulates a
form of sense perception that emphasizes a politics of seeing, speaking, and hearing. I
suggest, however, that the governing of the senses must also be conceived in terms of
emotions and affective bodily sensations. For this rereading of Ranciere I turn to
queer feminist research on affect, which calls attention to a feminist genealogy of
emotion that began before the so-called affective turn and that situates affect and
sensation within the social and the political (Lorde 1984; Gatens 1995; Sauer 1999;
Ahmed 2000; Berlant 2000; Ahmed 2004; Cvetkovich 2012). Here, affect and sensa
tion serve as starting points for describing the political in affective terms and for
interrogating, for instance, how capitalism, sexism, and/or racism are inscribed in the
affective bodily practices of the everyday, or how affects become a site of community
formation. Viewed through such a lens, the world does not appear to be divided only
into those who speak and those who make noise. Rather, the distribution of the sen
sible also marks a distinction between those whose feelings constitute the existing
distribution of the sensible and those whose feelings are excluded. Following from
this, the distribution of the sensible may be read as an emotional partition, thereby
deeming affect and emotions as a political demarcation line. As such, it reveals the
"normative work of affect," making visible the power of feeling scripts, of that which
should or should not be felt, as well as that "one must emote properly" (Koivunen
2010, 22).
Rereading Ranciere in terms of affect and emotions seems even more compelling
when recalling his concept of emancipatory politics. Without ever mentioning a poli
tics of emotions or feminist concerns, the feminist critique of modern liberal dichoto
mies, and explicitly of the emotionality-rationality binary, still resonates in
Ranciere's theory of the political. For this reason, 1 would like to challenge Jackie
Clarke's critique that, for Ranciere, emotions exist only within the logic of the
police, but not within the logic of politics. Clarke criticizes that in Ranciere's politi
cal theory the "police order's polarity between reason and sensibility remains opera
tive" (Clarke 2013, 23) and that he ultimately repeats what he is concerned with.
"Recognizing that dominant groups try to dismiss the speech acts of the dominated
by characterizing them as noise or emotional, Ranciere is concerned to demonstrate
what is rational in such utterances" (23). Unlike Clarke's reading, I claim that Ran
ciere problematizes such an understanding of Western liberal politics, particularly in
his conceptualization of the rationality of disagreement. Invoking and emphasizing
the rationality of the politics of interruption and, consequently, of emancipation,
Ranciere argues against a rationalism that is based on the opposition between rational
interests and the "violence of the irrational" (Ranciere 1999, 43). He conceives the
political beyond this distinction by understanding it as a "false alternative," one that
requires a choice between the "enlightenment of rational communication and the
murkiness of inherent violence or irreducible difference" (43). Hence, Ranciere does
not follow up with the modern Western dichotomy that understands the logic of the
police as rational in opposition to the irrationality of the logic of politics. Rather, he
590 Hypatia
criticizes this understanding of politics and democracy and instead emphasizes the
emancipatory mode of the politics of disagreement. Such a critique of liberal—and
thus of gendered, racialized, and classed—dichotomies even appears in the figure of
the emancipated spectator that Ranciere considers to move beyond false oppositions
such as "viewing/knowing, appearance/reality, activity/passivity" (Ranciere 2009b,
12). These oppositions, he criticizes, are not "logical oppositions between clearly
defined terms" but "define a distribution of the sensible, an a priori distribution of the
position and capacities and incapacities attached to these positions" (12). His
approach criticizes dichotomies as a mode of the distribution of the sensible, and
thereby, from a feminist perspective, also alludes to a theory of affective politics.3
The Distribution Of Emotions
So far I have explored Ranciere's understanding of emancipation and suggested think

ing along the lines of Ranciere to go beyond him by rereading his approach in terms
of a politics of emotion beyond cognition. In this last part, I am weaving both
threads together, and develop the concept of the distribution of emotions that, I
argue, can shed light on a queer feminist theory of affective politics. Although affect
and emotion have long since been excluded from main- and malestream research and
politics, the current turn to affect challenges these positions and raises questions such
as: what would a theory of the political look like if it did not ignore affect and emo
tions? What is the relation between politics and affect? Is it one of paranoia or one
of reparation? Can affective politics enhance emancipation or does it feed into a
liberal politics of choice and a fantasy of post-politics? From a queer feminist perspec
tive, I would like to discuss in this final part three insights from thinking through the
distribution of emotions.
First, the distribution of emotions is a contribution I would like to make to what I
have identified as an unsatisfactory and problematic opposition within queer feminist
debates, which frame affective politics either in terms of reparation or paranoia. The
distribution of emotions subscribes to neither a negative nor a positive conceptualiza
tion of affect, that is, to neither romanticizing nor delegitimizing affect and emotions.
Here, it is necessary to recall Ranciere's crucial insight that emancipation does not
occur outside the police order, but that it is both a mode of making the police order
visible and of reconfiguring it. Emancipation is not a stage of liberation, but is always
entwined in the police order, that is, in the existing distribution of the sensible. From
this vantage point, the distribution of emotions means that affect and emotions are
not necessarily emancipatory but that they may become a mode of emancipation and
subjectivation. Emancipation occurs when a political dispute in which those who are
excluded and marginalized institute themselves as political subjects. Conceiving the
political order as the distribution of emotions means that acts of emancipation—that
is, of challenging, interrupting, and reconfiguring the predominant order—bring to
light how (and whose) affects and emotions are politically excluded, and how emo
tions are employed as a powerful line of demarcation. In this vein, emancipatory
affective politics questions regimes that play rationality off against emotionality and
scrutinize how sexism, classism, racism, ableism, and nationalism are (though differ
ently) affectively inscribed within such regimes. In this sense, affective emancipation
does not establish truth claims by referring to "true feelings" but brings to light the
emotional mechanisms of power, illustrating how exclusion is produced and how peo
ple are discouraged affectively. Yet as a mode of critique of emotional power regimes,
emancipation does not remain within what Sedgwick criticizes as a paranoid frame.
Instead it signifies an intervention and, consequently, change. Similarly, this notion
of emancipation in terms of emotions does not fall prey to what Hemmings criticizes
in view of a Black feminist and postcolonial critique, that is, that emphasizing affec
tive politics risks losing sight of the fact that some people are more suffused with
affect than others. On the contrary, speaking of the distribution of emotions reveals
that emotions are distributed differently in public and in politics. This also applies to
contemporary politics, for instance in the context of 9/11, where a "differential distri
bution of public grieving" was observed regarding the loss of lives of non-US nation
als or illegalized workers (Butler 2009, 38) and where "queer losses" (Ahmed 2004,
157) have hardly or not at all been part of public mourning.
Second, the distribution of emotions marks the concept of subjectivation as a mat
ter of emotions and thus links to queer feminist debates about the subject of feminist
politics. Some feminist theorists dismiss the subject question because of its compli
cated connection to identity politics and bring forward alternative concepts, as for
instance a freedom-centered feminism (Zerilli 2005). I want to argue for the distribu
tion of emotions that moves away from identity politics and conceptualizes affective
feminist politics without taking identities as a starting point for emancipation. Speak
ing of the distribution of emotions accentuates emancipation as a possibility for criti
cizing and for interrupting the police's disempowering and unequal mode of
governing, which appears in at least a twofold way: in terms of differentially distribut
ing emotions but also in terms of governing through emotions. The distribution of
emotions points to a political dispute where those who are affectively excluded and
marginalized in one or both ways interrupt the dominant emotional order. For a
queer feminist politics of affect, this means that such politics is not based on "identi
ties," as for instance on "women" or "women's emotions" or assumed "female emo
tional capacities," such as empathy or love. Instead of assuming a pre-existing
political subject, an affective politics of dissent and disagreement describes the process
through which political subjects come into being, also affectively.
Yet marking affect and emotions as a point of reference can still explicitly point
to the importance of criticizing and challenging emotionally informed gender rela
tions and hierarchizations. A politics of emotions delineates an affective act of both
"insubordination" (Spelman 1989, 266) and subjectivation of those who are emotion
ally excluded or marginalized, for instance, in terms of gender, sexuality, race, and
class. This becomes visible when the heteronormative family is perceived as a marker
for happiness, which not only produces the picture of the "unhappy queer" but also
the assumption of a queer impossibility of ever becoming happy (Ahmed 2010). Fem
inist affective politics is not about a seemingly universal standpoint rooted in
592 Hypatia
presumed shared embodied experiences. It is a politics that gives attention to an

ongoing process of simultaneously rendering explicit and destabilizing sexism and het
eronormativity and the ways in which they are affectively (re)produced. Such a poli
tics unfolds how emotions express both boundaries and belongings.
Taking affective mechanisms of exclusion in place of identities as a starting point
for a queer feminist politics also enables us to rethink coalitional politics. As a collec
tive mode of politics, subjectivation not only allows political subjects to come into
being but also to fuel—however briefly, even only for an instant—a moment of affec
tive solidarity and relationality. In the distribution of emotions, affects are not some
thing that the subject possesses; they are distributed and circulate between bodies. As
such, they can stick to some bodies more than to others (Ahmed 2004); but they
can also become a mobilizing and relational force. Since affects emerge within the
processes of political subjectivation within multiple moments of encounters, they
mark an "in-between-ness," as Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth put it
(Seigworth and Gregg 2010, 2). Moreover, affective politics of subjectivation and
emancipation articulate forms of collective affective dissent, thus taking as a starting
point, for instance, anger (Lorde 1984), depression (Cvetkovich 2012), or "the
experience of discomfort" (Hemmings 2012, 158) and consequently everyday
ruptures, bodily affects, and sensations.
Third, the distribution of emotions builds upon the idea of equality among people
rather than promoting an emancipatory politics of affect that relies on truth claims.
This, too, has insightful consequences for rethinking queer feminist politics. Affective
emancipation is neither about negative or positive affects, as some criticize, nor about
a politics of affective authenticity, as others problematize. Rejecting truth claims as a
condition of emancipation, on the one hand, discards the idea of privileged emanci
patory agents such as "women"; on the other hand, it avoids a politics of emancipa
tion in the name of others. Affective politics of emancipation describes a situated
political practice, a struggle, by embracing the power of disturbance that is based on
the premise of equality. Taking equality as an assumption rather than as a goal of
emancipation also challenges a liberal understanding of politics. The distribution of
emotions is not about different forms of gender equality in terms of emotions that
have to be reached in some unknown future. Instead, the assumption of equality indi
cates that emancipation can bring to light affective forms of gendered and sexual
inequality.
The distribution of emotions introduces a relation between politics and emotions
that shows how affect and emotions are neither merely enabling nor simply an instru
ment of power relations. The distribution of emotions can take into account how
emotions are involved in governing those who have no part, which has been (and
still is) common (though differently) for devaluations and discriminations related
explicitly to gender, sexuality, class, nationality, and/or race. Thinking through the
distribution of emotions makes it possible to grasp the historically specific distribution
of the sensible that privileges the emotions of certain people over those of others
and, by doing so, it is also able to consider how politics are affectively translated. At
the same time, the distribution of emotions conceives of emancipation as working
through affect and emotions. I set out to show that emancipation is both based on
affective dissent and inspired, or even driven, by a longing for transformation, that is,
for a different distribution of the sensible.
By casting the distribution of emotions as a way to rethink current queer feminist
debates on affect I do not aim primarily to contribute to a theory of queer feminist
affective politics but rather to a queer feminist theory of affective politics. This means
that the distribution of emotions is not exclusively about gender and sexuality. Yet it
alludes to a theory of the political that allows one to take into account how the pre
dominant political order is gendered and sexualized, but also how it is embedded in
classism, racism, and/or nationalism. The distribution of emotions takes up important
queer feminist challenges in terms of the political subject, knowledge production,
power, critique, and emancipation and contributes to a queer feminist political theory
by designating gendered and engendering traces as mechanisms for social criticism
and politics.
Notes
I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their inspiring comments on an earlier
version of this paper, as well as Erika Doucette for her careful and insightful English proof
reading of the text.
1. Apart from quotations, 1 prefer to use the term subjectivation in this article. For
the difficult task of translating Ranciere's main concepts such as le portage, le sensible, la
me'sentente, or subjectivation, see also Panagia 2010; Chambers 2013.
2. For translating le portage, Chambers uses the double notion partition/distribution
(Chambers 2013). For the French term le sensible, Ranciere's original text Le partage du
sensible has been translated as the "distribution of the sensible." Chambers, on the con
trary, refers to the notion of the "sensitive" (Chambers 2013, 187) and Davis argues for
the "sensory," objecting that "the sensible" designates an unnecessary distinction between
sensation and the mediation of sensory experience, which is already expressed by le partage
(Davis 2010, 179-80).
3. Following from these two arguments that allow for a rereading of Ranciere's the
ory in terms of affect and emotions, one could even conceive of his notion of the "sensi
ble" as a similar intervention. Davis mentions the "obvious confusion which rendering le
sensible with 'the sensible' in English risks generating" (Davis 2010, 180). I wonder
whether the French le sensible does not already suggest a double connotation of perception
and sensory experience, thus displaying another move beyond the reason/feeling binary
within Ranciere's approach.
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Affective Politics of Emancipation

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Hypatia, Inc.

The Distribution of Emotions: Affective Politics of Emancipation

Hypatia vol. 30, no. 3 (Summer 2015) © by Hypatia, Inc.

instance, emphasizes "affective governmentality" (Sauer 2015), and Patricia T.

"distribution of the sensible" and reframe it through a queer feminist perspective as

Affective Politics: A Queer Feminist Question

political theory and particularly his understanding of emancipation provides a useful

Ranciere's Subject Of Emancipation

Ranciere's approach to emancipation intervenes in these debates: not only has he

In order to fully acknowledge this understanding of emancipation, it is necessary

neither uncritically embraces nor romanticizes the power of change or agency.

Ranciere: Political Philosopher Of Affect?

It is because of the notion of subjectivation that Davis is surprised by Ranciere's dis

The Distribution Of Emotions

So far I have explored Ranciere's understanding of emancipation and suggested think

presumed shared embodied experiences. It is a politics that gives attention to an

. 2010. Happy objects. In The aff

Grossberg, Lawrence. 1992. We gotta get out of this p

Love, Heather. 2010. Truth and consequences: On p

. 2008. The politics of aesthetics

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