ABSTRACT
Power, Politics and the Emotions has the desire to offer a potentially reconstructive approach to a critique of the state. A reconstructive approach that responds to the complex and often confounding experience of institutional life as this has been communicated to by research participants across a range of welfare contexts. In this book, the negotiation of fear and anxiety not as a matter of managing and negotiating the contours of already existing institutional space between inside and outside which enables governing subjects to somehow stand outside of power and responsibility for the reproduction of unequal institutional orderings. Institutional spaces, as they are defined in modernist rationalist terms via a public private split, are imagined through their ability to control inappropriate, privately, supposedly individually generated emotionalities, like hate, fear, loathing. This control is dependent on the externalising of violence which, from a melancholic point of view, is already always there; constitutive of institutional space.
