ABSTRACT
While Western modern thought has sought to exclude affect and emotions from politics and publics and to delegitimize emotions as well as those characterized as emotional, feminist, queer, and postcolonial scholarship has critically engaged with these attributions, exclusions, and delegitimizations by unfolding both the significance and power of affect and emotion. It has shown how Western modern dichotomies such as rationality/emotionality, public/private, culture/nature, and mind/body have contributed to create a hierarchical (gendered, racialized, class) order and to mobilize and fortify the patriarchal Western capitalist state. Following this critique and in reference to Lauren Berlant’s work on national sentimentality, I will unfold in this chapter the figure of the sentimental contract in order to identify some crucial affective moments of politics and publics and their powerful effects. I aim to show that and how the figure of the sentimental contract alludes to an ambivalent affective politics in terms of belonging, solidarity, and political promises, and thus how it may help analyzing and criticizing contemporary reconfigurations of affective politics and publics.
