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.

“If the contact with an object generates feeling, then emotion and sensation cannot be easily separated. A common way of describing the relation between them is as a form of company: pleasure and pain become companions of love and hate, for example […] The idea of ‘companions’ does not do the trick precisely, given the implication that sensation and emotion can part company. Instead, I want to suggest that the distinction between sensation and emotion can only be analytic, and as such, is premised on the reification of a concept.”

Here, Ahmed clearly stakes out a position that separates her from both the history of philosophical thinking about emotion and affect and from the majority of thinkers in her own field. Emotion and affect, she says, cannot be meaningfully separated in real world contexts, and any distinction between them is semantic. Ahmed makes use of Marxist theory in explaining that mistaking this artificial difference for a “real” difference reflected in the physical world is “reifying” the concept.

“But forming an impression also depends on how objects impress upon us. An impression can be an effect on the subject’s feelings (‘she made an impression’). It can be a belief (‘to be under an impression’). It can be an imitation or an image (‘to create an impression’). Or it can be a mark on the surface (‘to leave an impression’). We need to remember the ‘press’ in an impression. It allows us to associate the experience of having an emotion with the very affect of one surface upon another, an affect that leaves its mark or trace.”

Ahmed’s careful attention to language, her use of etymology to connect ideas, and her interest in the boundaries that delineate related words are evident as she explores both the noun-sense of “impression” through its “effects” and the verb-sense of its root word, “press,” as surfaces that “affect” one another. Her switch to the noun-sense of “affect” at the end of the passage, in constructions where the reader might ordinarily expect to see the word “effect,” playfully connects the bodily sense of emotion (affect) and the idea of influential interaction (effect), which lays groundwork for her later claims about Emotions as Social and Relational Practices and