Feeling and Performing 'the Crisis': On the Affective Phenomenology and Politics of the Corona Crisis
Tietjen,Ruth Rebecca
Tietjen,Ruth Rebecca
Abstract
How does it feel to be in a crisis? Is the idea of the crisis itself bound to our affectivity in the sense that without the occurrence of specific emotions or a change in our affective lives at large we cannot even talk about a crisis properly speaking? In this paper, I explore these questions by analyzing the exemplary case of the corona crisis. In order to do so, I first explore the affective phenomenology of crises in general and the corona crisis in particular, thereby paying attention to both individual (personal) and collective (socio-political) crises and crisis experiences. Then, I turn to the limits of the analogy between individual and collective crises. I reflect on how socio-political crises are not simply there but performed and procedurally constructed and show how, in the context of the corona pandemic, fears and hopes, feelings of solidarity and antagonistic emotions mirror political interests and values. While the phenomenological reflections in the first part help us to account for the fact that crises are not just objective facts but also subjective forms of experience, the political reflections in the second part help us to do justice to the inherently political nature of the language and experiences of (collective) crises. I conclude by pointing out a twofold relationship between (socio-political) crisis and critique. Thanks to their characteristic affective phenomenology, crises are tools of criticism; but due to their inherently political character, they also themselves have to be subjected to critique.
Description
Funding Information: This article was conceived and written within the research project “Antagonistic Political Emotions,” funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): P-32392-G. Work on this article was made possible by contributing, as an associate member, to Rik Peels’ project EXTREME (Extreme Beliefs: The Epistemology and Ethics of Fundamentalism), which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant agreement No. 851613) and from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. I thank the members of the Extreme Beliefs project and the European-American Online Workshops on Philosophy of Emotion (led by Rick Anthony Furtak and Imke von Maur) for their helpful and inspiring questions and suggestions. Especially, I thank Naomi Klosterboer, Lucy Osler, Thomas Szanto, Lucius Tan, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and discussion. Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s). © The Author(s) 2022.
Date
2023
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Research Projects
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Keywords
Affective Politics, COVID-19 Pandemic, Crisis, Emotions, Moods
Citation
Tietjen, R R 2023, 'Feeling and Performing 'the Crisis': On the Affective Phenomenology and Politics of the Corona Crisis', Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, vol. 22, no. 5, pp. 1281–1299. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-022-09877-9
License
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess