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Theorizing Agonistic Emotions

Democratic theory has had an uneasy relationship with the presence and functions of affect in politics. Throughout her work, Chantal Mouffe has repeatedly emphasized the importance of recuperating passions for political thinking and criticised universalist, rationalist thinkers whose accounts of politics, to the extent that they take passions into consideration at all, conceive of them as something to be managed or suppressed. For such thinkers, she argues, passions are perpetual sources of instability, located at the antipode of reason.Mouffe correctly invites us to see that passions are ineradicable from politics: they mark collective political identifications that constitute important sources of motivation. Following Lacan, she emphasises that we cannot, as theorists of democracy, ignore the affective forces that fuel and make collective identifications ‘stick’. Therefore, our goal should not be to repress but to ‘tame’ passions. Otherwise, we will face two dangers. First, there is always the possibility that undemocratic parties hijack passions and play them against the democratic idea. Such is the case of the extreme Right, whose rhetoric often resonates with the angry excluded. Secondly, unless democratic institutions supply venues for agonistic encounters, passions can erupt publicly in destructive ways, as is the case of the recurrent riots in the Parisian banlieues.