ABSTRACT
Western political theory and philosophy have long since neglected affect and feelings in politics. This disavowal is based on a predominantly liberal conception of politics that is associated with rationality, objectivity, interests, progress, and the public. This chapter interrogates such a narrow understanding of politics and engages instead with two specific feelings, namely sensitivity and sentimentality, for rethinking the political. Framing sensitivity and sentimentality as a “political grammar of feelings,” this article suggests bringing into view two interrelated modalities of the political. On the one hand, it considers political sensitivity to be a sensory political register and mode of sensation, perception, cognition, and agency which is called feeling politics. This mode allows to address power relations and social structures, of the present and the past, and how they are affectively inscribed in peoples’ bodies and everyday practices. This affective political mode, on the other hand, is distinguished from political sentimentality. This notion is about the articulation of power relations too, however, it refers to feelings as instruments and means of the political, which the article suggests calling a politics of feelings.
