The Emancipatory Power of the Body in Everyday Life by Leszek Koczanowicz

Author:Leszek Koczanowicz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031448331
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

She concludes by defining emotions or, more precisely, the way they operate and accomplish things: “The ‘doing’ of emotions, I have suggested, is bound up with the sticky relation between signs and bodies: emotions work by working through signs and on bodies to materialize the surfaces and boundaries that are lived as worlds.”33 Ahmed uses this concept of emotions as an angle from which to scrutinize justice and injustice, showing how they are reflected in emotions and how emotions deal with them. From my perspective, Ahmed’s crucial insight is that the feelings of justice and injustice are actually sparked by the tension between the public sphere and the intimacy of our bodies: “The objects of emotions slide and stick and they join the intimate histories of bodies, with the public domain of justice and injustice.”34

While Ahmed’s impressive account of emotions deals with how they are caught up between the macroscale and the microscale, it is the middle level that is most intriguing from my point of view. Niches of emancipation are where the clarification and understanding of emotions take place, which, according to Ahmed, add up to the most important stage in the social transformation of emotions. As she argues: The emotional struggles against injustice are not about finding good or bad feelings, and then expressing them. Rather, they are about how we are moved by feelings into a different relation to the norms that we wish to contest, or the wounds we wish to heal. Moving here is not about “moving on,” or about “using” emotions to move away, but moving and being moved as a form of labor or work, which opens up different kinds of attachments to others, in part through the recognition of this work as work.35

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