The Cultural Politics of Emotion

Content Warning: Because The Cultural Politics of Emotion is concerned with the connection between emotion and the experiences of marginalized groups, this study guide frequently refers to bigotry and violence against these groups.

Ahmed’s analysis of the characteristics and functioning of emotion enters a conversation about emotion that dates back at least to Aristotle’s Rhetoric. In Rhetoric, Book 2, Aristotle lays out theories regarding emotion that remain highly influential today; most relevant is his distinction between affect and emotion, a distinction Ahmed regards as artificial and not worth wasting time on. As the Western philosophical conversation around emotion developed over time, some philosophers began to focus on definitional discussions, concerning themselves with labeling, delimiting, and categorizing emotions in various schemes or debating the relationships among the sensory, the cognitive, and the motivational. These approaches are not the focus of Ahmed’s work. Rather, Ahmed is interested in one specific aspect of the philosophical discussion of emotions: What do emotions do in the world?

This phenomenological and behavioral thread of the philosophical discussion has been developed over the years through the contributions of thinkers, such as Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, David Hume, René Descartes, Anthony Kenny, and many others.