The Sentimental Contract or: The Unfinished Liberal Project

What are the political implications of the public empathy and solidarity that have recently characterized and still characterize parts of civil society in many European countries given the ongoing “necropolitics” (Achille Mbembe) of the European border regimes? And how do these politics relate to what Wendy Brown has called the current waning of nation-state sovereignty and a politics of walling? In my paper, I will introduce the concept of the “sentimental contract” and argue for approaching these questions from a theoretical perspective on affects and emotions. While mainstream political theory has long neglected affect and emotions and instead equated politics with rationality and objectivity, I will identify in my paper the affective moments of a liberal understanding of politics and their powerful effects. Thus, I argue for introducing affect and emotions into political theory, thereby offering new insights in terms of how political power and more explicitly state power operates. I follow Wendy Brown’s argument that within late modern societies the social contract remains at least ideologically and discursively constitutive and elaborate on a very specific figure of the social contract, namely the figure of the “sentimental contract”. I will develop this figure of the “sentimental contract” along four facets: national citizenship, the autonomous subject, the constitution and legitimation of political domination as well as the temporality of national politics. These four perspectives allow me to critically engage with a specific contemporary politics of national justice, which I will flesh out in terms of a manifold politics of pain, guilt, emotional recognition, de-solidarization, ignorance, harmony, and promises. Emphasizing such a sentimental politics, I will delineate some (neo-)liberal pitfalls of contemporary affective politics in times of political and economic crises. Furthermore, I will show that and how such an understanding of sentimental politics does not only contest the liberal notion of the political because it dismisses the idea of rational politics. Rather I argue that it also alludes to a new mode of governing, thus enhancing a (neo-)liberal politics through moralization, individualization, and privatization. Proposing the figure of the “sentimental contract”, I aim at providing further insights in the unfinished business of the Western liberal project.