Politics of Feelings / Economies of Love

Politics of Feelings / Economies of Love brings about a set of reflections on the possible relation between ideology and social emotions, sexuality and nationalism, love and emotional community within nationalist and/or market fundamentalism. In attempts to find out how these issues were tackled in film, visual arts and architecture, we are trying to draw some new lines of understanding love as a tissue in which ideological, political, social and economic meanings are inscribed.

This publication is composed of visual and textual contributions which unfold different chapters on the entanglement of politics and collective sentiment, as well as love as a trigger for dedicated unpaid work.

As we have witnessed over the past few decades, the mass politics of passion can often be a major driving force in the contemporary political arena. The “politics of emotions” represents the core of identity politics. To paraphrase Vjeran Katunarić in his article “The politics of memory”, the rulers of societal emotions are ideologies and their instruments of mass politics, primarily the media. Consequently, it can be said that our social and emotional capacities often limit our cognitive horizons. With respect to ideological speech, we are interested in its representation in language and image. According to Susan Sontag, the utopian aesthetics deployed in Nazi propaganda (i.e., identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism (sexuality transformed into the magnetism of a leader and his joyful followers). The transformation of sexual energy into a spiritual force for the benefit of the community is the fascist ideal. Our interest is twofold: firstly, we are interested in the politics of emotions within the dominant political discourse, including the sexuality/sexualisation of ideological speech, and secondly, in its relation to the emotional community of two or more individuals.