The issue concludes with a translation of a chapter from The Cultural Politics of Emotion, the influential book by philosopher and cultural scholar Sara Ahmed, which was first published in English more than twenty years ago. At the center of the book is a different conceptualization of emotion. Not as a behaviorist system of sensing, perception, and response, nor as a psychological system of seething inwardness. Emotions, according to Ahmed, confuse the relationship between the inside and the outside because they are shaped between people, between people and things and the environment, and create surfaces and boundaries. Emotion is not discrete, immediate, and unmediated, she claims; it is always in motion and created from that motion — it passes, passes through, resonates, and is distributed; and in the process, it creates an impression, that is, it imprints itself on the subject, on their body, and carves out its place in it. Ahmed’s book is therefore a phenomenological reading of concrete social realities, of the emotional movements underlying racist and neo-nationalist movements. Of the book’s chapters, which address, among other things, pain, fear, disgust, and love, we chose to translate the chapter that Ahmed devotes to hate, in which she analyzes the reversal at the basis of hate, the mission itself as love. Love for a nation or people, that is, for the cohesive group that the infiltration of foreigners threatens. Tracing the anxiety about the harm and desecration that underlies hate, an anxiety that is tied to their infinite imagination, shows the movement of emotion that is created of fantasy, projection, likeness, and differentiation.
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