Mobilizing emotive power: The politics of affects

Abstract

In this article, I consider how the particular arrangement of power/knowledge in today’s biopolitical migration regime indexes an emotive negotiation between the State and the national subject, thus fostering symbolic and material exclusions. This arrangement is less concerned with "objective" knowledge, although it is still widely spread in statistics, narratives and representations; rather, it is the active mobilization of the immaterial capacity of the body to think, feel and understand which is increasingly becoming the focus of the power/knowledge dynamics of the present. Populist critics of diversity and multiculturalism draw on these emotive forces, such as love, moral panic, fear and insecurity in order to intervene in the public unconscious. They aim for a healthy and productive society of responsible citizen-subjects, from which «deviant and defective” (i.e. Muslim) immigrant ones can then be «legitimately” excluded. Although this approach is unrealistic and undemocratic – not least due to its denial of plural choices of modern affiliations/belongings –, a nostalgic attachment between State and national subject emerges from this formation, enabling the resurgence of "national" values and the simultaneous exclusion, or domestication, of strangers.