ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which individual bodies and affects define today’s political struggles taking place at the margins or outside traditional political parties and hierarchies. We have only to think of movements driven by outrage against political and economic injustices such as the so-called Arab Spring, European summer, Occupy Wall Street last fall, and Chilean winter as a few notable examples of affects that transcend individual feelings to form transnational conditions (perhaps unspoken coalitions) of resistance or even revolt. Words like contagion and entrainment suggest the ways that suddenly, unpredictably, people can become seemingly not only of one mind but of one body. Groups share and further transmit and elaborate what Teresa Brennan called ‘energetic affects’. 1 The Indignados, or as Manuel Castells refers to them, the Indignadas of Spain, the over two million people who manifested in over 800 cities around the world between May and October 2011 fuelled by indignation, we might say, enact pure affect. 2 However, unruly acts and passions cannot be limited to the ‘outside’—they cross ideological and structural bounds, showing the fears, anxieties, prejudices and hopes that animate the attitudes and actions of the state itself. While usually commentators assign affect to the opposition, characterizing those outside established political systems as irrational or angry, what Freud observed just after World War I remains true today: ‘… it would seem that nations still obey their passions far more readily than their interests.’ 3 Hitler’s Germany offers an extreme illustration of the ways in which the mobilization of poisonous affects can lead to passionate identifications and dis-identifications that overwhelm all systems designed to contain them. The politics of passion can be as murderous as they can be liberating: context is all.
