Sara Ahmed and the Cultural Politics of Emotion

In this introduction to the translated 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, Vered Maimon  positions Ahmed’s book as a leading work in the theories of affect and discusses its fundamentals. She describes Ahmed’s extraordinary public persona, an intellectual who left established academia and exists separately from it, lecturing around the world, writing books overflowing with complex theory, and publishing popular feminist manuals. At the end of the introduction, Maimon asks how the hate movement that Ahmed outlines can help us understand the destruction that Israel is carrying out in Gaza and the public’s consent to it: The intensity of the holding on to the vulnerability of the national body and the preoccupation with the real and imagined intrusion of the foreigner into its borders; the love for the collective at the heart of the all-consuming hatred towards those who threaten it.