Ana Falcato and Sara Graça da Silva (eds) (2021)

The Politics of Emotional Shockwaves

Palgrave Macmillan

283 pp

Hardback: ISBN 978-3-030-56020-1, £77

The Politics of Emotional Shockwaves is a timely book that offers valuable insight into a wide range of contemporary phenomena. By bringing together a diverse set of methodological approaches, and by covering a broad array of emotional experiences, the volume is successful in attaining the goal postulated by its editors: to account for the current ‘global disposition of calamity’ (p. xx). The book’s heterogeneity and the acumen with which it deciphers our present world make it appealing to a broad readership. It will prove valuable to researchers and academics within the fields of philosophy, psychology and cultural studies or those in sociology who are interested in the interplay between politics, morality and emotions.

The essays collected in the book approach this three-edged nexus by focusing on specific phenomena and events. This does not, however, restrict their explanatory power to the current conjuncture. Ironically, the present state of social and political upheaval may have had the effect of directing our attention to a world of connections between emotions, politics and morality that is certainly not contingent. This volume provides an important contribution to the exploration of such an ecosystem by detailing how emotions permeate our politics, and by unveiling the moral underpinnings and consequences of our emotional experiences.

The book opens with a fresh perspective on one of the most discussed issues of recent years – polarization. Jesse Prinz (Chapter 1) provides an insightful explanation for the pervasiveness of emotional animus among ideologically distant political opponents that takes the fear of losing one’s self as its root cause. Prinz argues that adherence to a given ideology is today mostly about belonging and that it constitutes a relevant facet of people’s identities. Making concessions can hence be equated to a violent giving way of a part of one’s self.

Javier Gil and Sergio Brea (Chapter 3) also tackle this problem, describing how humour can have an impact on moral and political judgements, and how populist politicians use it to deepen ingroup bonds. As the authors argue, populist humour is a strong mobilising force due to how it favours confirmation bias and feelings of group superiority by denigrating others’ views. This type of toxic groupishness is also explored by Sara Graça da Silva in Chapter 7. In this essay, the author shows how smell is connected to emotions and morality, bringing to light how our evolutionarily developed tendency to negatively appraise unfamiliar smells further entrenches prejudiced moral outlooks on migrants.

In Chapter 2, Laura Luz Silva persuasively argues against the commonly held belief (for example, Nussbaum, 2016) that anger is inefficient for pursuing social change. The author shrewdly notes how the deciding factor for how anger is expressed in the public sphere – as a destructive or constructive action – is not something inherent in anger itself, but in the ‘context moderators’ (for example, the likelihood of social change) encircling the agents. Luz Silva makes another important point about how anger aims fundamentally at recognition by others of one’s moral claims and value. This relation between emotions and moral recognition is also explored by Oded Na’aman (Chapter 8, p. 167), who argues that ‘the failure to be shocked (…) marks the failure of our moral commitments’ to others.

In Chapter 5, Hannah Bacon argues for going beyond the Manichean debate on whether one should or should not view traumatic photos, defending a reconfiguration of the experience of witnessing that prioritises the relationship between the witness and the victims. According to Bacon, the triggering of a necessity to act must be the linchpin here. However, because they are a form of testimony that does not promote victims’ agency, which is prone to emotional appropriation, photographs may be the wrong vehicle for that. The same concern for the prioritisation of victims’ voices in the political permeates Shuhita Bhattacharjee’s analysis of contemporary Indian web series (Chapter 6). In this essay, the author shows how these series are successful in depicting pain as a mode of intervention in sociopolitical discourse that can empower those who have been wronged, thus contributing to a shift in the national conversation on sexual assault.

In Chapter 9, Ana Falcato, drawing on Kant’s connection between aesthetics and morals, describes how an experience of emotional shock can be a chance for deeper self-understanding and moral growth. Falcato distinguishes shock from surprise, arguing that the latter follows the former, bringing the necessary strength and curiosity for engaging in a process of positive change. In his essay (Chapter 11), Nicolas de Warren also explores an event of radically transformative understanding, interpreting G.H.’s journey in Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. as a mystic fable that challenges the relation between one’s self and the arrangements of the world.

In Chapter 10, Pablo Fernández Velasco and Roberto Casati provide a phenomenological analysis of disorientation that elucidates how emotions function as a form of ‘evaluative regulation’ in social settings and collective action (p. 204). This, often neglected, role of social regulation and coordination played by emotions is suggested in many of the other essays (for example, Prinz, Gil and Brea, Graça da Silva), and is a strong argument for the impossibility of debating politics without a thorough understanding of emotions.

This point is one of many ideas that seem transversal to the book. In the rest of the review, I discuss a few extra examples that I take to be of particular relevance. One such is the often-made connection between emotions and moral equality. Na’aman and Luz Silva, for instance, make clear how perceiving, or being perceived by, others as a non-equal elicits strong emotional responses that can only be ameliorated by social and political change. Such arguments give credence to the idea of equality as relational (Anderson, 1999).

The possibility for, and desirability of action in response to an emotional shock is also a major takeaway from the book. Essays by Luz Silva, Bacon, Falcato and Bhattacharjee convey an important message in favour of the agency of those in emotional distress. These arguments are valuable additions to a body of literature on the interplay between emotions and structures of oppression, which ranges from Audre Lorde’s (1981) case for the epistemic productivity of anger, to recent defences of the importance of emotions for building progressive social movements (Cherry, 2021).

There is, however, a caveat to be made here. The approach taken by these authors may have the perverse effect of restricting emotional events to their (social or personal) instrumental value. A blind emphasis on the instrumental value of emotional experiences would leave us one step away from forms of ‘affective injustice’ (Srinivasan, 2018). Those are instances in which victims of oppression are forced to negotiate between venting their distress and acting prudentially. We must keep in mind that emotions and their expression can be apt, regardless of how unproductive they are.

In the book’s introduction, an interesting point is made by the editors, who stress the idea that emotions are now a requirement for citizenship (p. xx). Many of the essays in this volume can be said to corroborate such view, as do the points raised earlier. There is, however, one related issue that the book does not tackle, and that I believe is of paramount importance in any discussion on politics and emotions. How do we harness and restrain the positive and negative facets of emotions for constructing better-working democracies? If we want democracies that are more inclusive and deliberative (Young, 2000), what kinds of institutions should we strive for? What forms of institutional design can best deal with our emotional and cognitive biases, and foment feelings of solidarity and mutual respect (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008)?

Despite not broaching these relevant topics, by revealing the multiple ways in which emotions, politics and morality inevitably intertwine the volume lays the groundwork for discussion. It thus performs the immensely valuable function of opening new paths for inquiry.