Introduction to Feeling Implicated: Affect, Responsibility, Solidarity (2)

What does it feel like to be implicated? Or, to put it differently, what role do affects and emotions play in the production and reproduction of injustice? Can affects, emotions, and feelings be redirected to other ends? If so, how? What role might aesthetic projects and political formations play in that redirection? These are some of the questions that this two-part special issue of parallax seeks to address from interdisciplinary perspectives. Inspired by work on indirect forms of historical and political responsibility, the essays collected in these issues turn their attention to subjects who enable, perpetuate, benefit from, and inherit histories of violence and structures of inequality. These ‘implicated subjects’, as I call them, are folded into such histories and structures without having inaugurated them and without directing them.¹ The particular purpose of our endeavour is to explore how theories of affect, emotion, and feeling can contribute to a richer account of the texture of implication and the possibilities for social transformation – and to suggest how a focus on our ‘foldedness’ inside structures of injustice can provoke new thinking about affect and political mobilisation.

This second part of Feeling Implicated: Affect, Responsibility, Solidarity continues the discussion begun in the first issue. The first issue focused especially on race and ecology as sites for exploring implication in addition to the question of what kinds of political action and political formation can emerge out of diverse feelings of implication. To ‘feel implicated’, the first issue demonstrated, is not a singular emotional register; feelings of guilt, shame, anger, and more define the affective palate associated with problems of historical and political responsibility. Nor do those divergent affective registers coincide with certainties about the impact of conscious or unconscious feelings. Rather, the contributors to the first issue all implicitly or explicitly suggest, feeling implicated can be associated with a variety of political projects or with a ‘stuckness’ where politics runs aground; in his reflections on the first issue, Jonathan Flatley even wonders if feeling implicated is not inherently a hindrance to political formation.² Still, despite the non-determinate relation between affect and politics, the essays and Flatley’s response are in agreement that the link between affect and implication strongly shapes the way that struggles over identity, class, empire, and ecology play out today.

The current issue also takes up issues of race and ecology, though in somewhat different ways than we saw in the previous volume. The issue opens with a pair of essays that investigate race politics at the borders of Europe. Stefano Bellin and Henrike Kohpeiß focus primarily on Italy and Germany, respectively, but also situate their projects within a broader European frame as they explore the necropolitics of Europe’s migrant regime. For Bellin, the question of the border is related to the question of citizenship and the particular way that citizenship is inscribed on racialised bodies. Those of us who reside in the wealthy core of the West are, in Bellin’s evocative phrase, often ‘born implicated’. Referencing Arendt on natality and Heidegger on thrownness, among other philosophical resources, Bellin shows how ‘the randomness of our birth places us in different predicaments of power’. Bellin usefully highlights two aspects of our being-in-the-world: that we are at once ‘historically grounded’ in a ‘set of unchosen conditions that shape our lives’ and possessed of a projective ‘capacity to “take charge” of our thrownness and begin something new’. He also reveals the key role that affectivity plays in shaping how we grapple – or fail to grapple – with our dual condition. The sociologist Deborah Gould’s work on affect and activism in relation to ACT UP allows Bellin to chart the ‘emotional habitus’ that slots us into certain dominant ways of being, while still leaving possibilities that ‘affective friction’ will enable counter-hegemonic forms of what Gould calls ‘emotion work’. In addition to mapping out this complex and broadly applicable theoretical terrain, Bellin focuses on a particular political context: contemporary Italy, which he sees defined by colonial legacies, racialised constructions of identity, and exclusivist versions of citizenship. Against the presumptive whiteness of Italian identity, Bellin offers the counter-hegemonic discourse of the Black Mediterranean, which makes thinkable a politics of transfiguration that works both at the national and outer-national levels.

The framework of the Black Mediterranean and the affects attached to whiteness also play important roles in Kohpeiß’s essay, which focuses on the European border regime from the perspective of Germany. Kohpeiß’s theoretical references complement and supplement those of Bellin. Here, instead of Arendt and Heidegger, we find Horkheimer and Adorno’s work on bourgeois subjectivity reinvigorated through an encounter with the radical Black thought of Fred Moten and others. Kohpeiß’s central concept is ‘bourgeois coldness’, which represents a particular mode of feeling implicated in the coloniality of power. The case study through which Kohpeiß elucidates her theoretical contribution is that of Carola Rackete, a German activist and captain from the NGO Sea Watch, who saved fifty-three refugees off the coast of Libya. Kohpeiß focuses not so much on Rackete herself – whom she recognises as an ethical actor – but on the German reception of Rackete’s actions and the way German commentators heroise her without ever confronting their own implication in the conditions that made Rackete’s actions necessary in the first place. In that heroisation, Kohpeiß finds a typically ‘bourgeois position that privileges impeccable morals over structural critique and change’. The fetishisation of Rackete by the liberal German public ‘stabilises the moral grounds of European subjectivity’ and thus allows the structural violence of the border regime to continue unperturbed. In this context, bourgeois coldness is a particular kind of affective disposition that Kohpeiß links to Enlightenment notions of critique and reason and to a restricted version of empathy: ‘the ability to extend a limited and highly moralised sentiment of care towards what can no longer be ignored’, but which is always turned toward ‘individual fates instead of structural injustice’. In a final twist, Kohpeiß suggests that the instrumentalisation of this particular mode of coldness cannot simply be opposed with an embrace of ‘warmth’, an affective disposition that comes with its own set of problems. Instead, she suggests, referring to Moten, perhaps a more radical form of coldness, a disconnection from the institutions that reproduce the white, bourgeois world, might provide a more effective form of resistance to structural racism and colonial power.

In her response to Bellin and Kohpeiß, Debarati Sanyal amplifies their questions about the necropolitics of the European border regime. Sanyal juxtaposes two recent tragedies – the death of several hundred migrants off the coast of Greece and the sinking of the Titan submersible in the north Atlantic that took the lives of five people, including crew members and their wealthy clients. The juxtaposition of these very differently received events allows Sanyal to make a point not only about differential grievability, but also about the complex intersection of race and class in the calculus of whose lives count and about the rhetoric of ‘crisis’ that always accompanies migrant movement – and not just in Europe. By turning in conclusion to the voices of refugees themselves – instead of the dominant white subjects who are at the centre of Bellin and Kohpeiß’s essays – Sanyal suggests how the most marginalised and precarious subjects of the global political-economic order continue to claim what Hannah Arendt called ‘the right to have rights’ and to model forms of resistance ‘in which implication is acknowledged, sensed and felt as a shared condition of relationality, responsibility and world-making’.

With its thoroughgoing critique of bourgeois affective dispositions such as empathy, Kohpeiß’s essay raises the difficult question of how feelings of implication can be redirected from their role in reproducing relations of injustice toward affective dispositions that facilitate resistance to what Bellin (following Gould) would call the dominant emotional habitus. Our next set of three essays addresses precisely this question, asking how works of literature and art can ‘provoke’ feelings of implication in order to instigate new possibilities of change. Arielle Stambler, Maria Anna Mariani, and Jennifer Noji all explore how cultural texts address their readers and viewers in order to prompt them to reflect on their political responsibility for empire, war, racism, and environmental degradation. Each essay attends to the medium- and genre-specific affordances of its object of study: a novel, a film, and an extended essay.

In the first contribution to this section, Stambler takes up Imbolo Mbue’s 2021 novel How Beautiful We Were and explores how it ‘invites readers to imaginatively inhabit the role of an implicated subject’. Like Kohpeiß, she orients her argument around a critique of liberal forms of empathy, although in Stambler’s case the dominant reference is the global human rights framework in which empathetic subjects in the Global North ‘feel’ for victims in the Global South without recognising their own contribution to those victims’ suffering. In contrast to this widely shared and frequently reproduced form of empathy, Mbue’s novel encourages ‘a form of attention’ that asks readers to grapple with feelings of implication, with their affective response to their embeddedness in relations of injustice. Without making exaggerated claims for the power of literature, Stambler nonetheless makes a strong case for how certain rhetorical structures – in this case, a collective narrative voice, among other formal features – have the potential to promote ways of reading and thinking about the world that are both ‘self-reflexive and de-centring’. That is, works such as How Beautiful We Were, can move privileged readers toward an examination of their own situatedness while simultaneously discouraging them from ‘centring’ and universalising their perspectives. The novel, Stambler convincingly shows, both deploys what Jennifer Wenzel calls ‘world-imagining from below’ (narrated as it is from the perspective of those whose communities have suffered from the extractive oil economy) and charts the ways that a variety of subjects (including those previously at the bottom of global hierarchies) come to be implicated in transnational social relations. Novels do not change the world on their own, but they have the capacity to prime readers to begin to recognise their political responsibility toward seemingly ‘distant’ violence and thus to encourage them to join with others in long term collective action beyond the pages of the text.

Mariani’s essay focuses intensively on one work and one affect: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Rage (La rabbia) and the eponymous emotion it seeks to produce. Pasolini’s Rage, in Mariani’s analysis, functions similarly to Mbue’s novel in Stambler’s reading: it makes seemingly distant acts of violence proximate to viewers; it seeks to overcome and ‘disturb the distance = indifference equation, making the seemingly remote concern us again’. As with Stambler, Mariani also focuses on form as the key intermediary between the work’s political message and its impact on its audience. Rage, created in the early 1960s, is an experimental, montage-based essay film that concatenates newsreel footage and photographic stills from around the world to suggest that even the most seemingly separate sites of violence are linked – and that the comfortable, privileged viewer bears responsibility for them all. Within the montage of events from Algeria to Umbria by way of Cuba, one site occupies a particularly vital place in Pasolini’s vision: the explosion of the atomic bomb, which Pasolini provocatively merges visually with the face of Marilyn Monroe. The Marilyn/atomic bomb montage, which Mariani considers at length, evokes the complicity of the spectator’s gaze, which ‘has been shaped by the most trivial segment of the information industry’ and which fetishistically screens out the violence behind the mushroom cloud. But Pasolini, of course, seeks to counter this gaze; in fact, to create a counter-gaze: ‘a gaze that knows how to turn distance into an opportunity for knowledge, instead of an alibi for irresponsibility’. Key to this project of crafting a new gaze – a gaze in which viewers feel implicated in the violence they witness – is the powerful affect of rage. Rage plays a key role in the ‘cognitive activity of vision’ Pasolini evokes; it ‘creates a state of emergency – or extreme alertness – with respect to injustice’. As Mariani concludes, rage – both the film and the affect – turns us into ‘implicated spectators’.

Rage, or at least its somewhat more moderate sibling anger, also plays a key role in our final essay, Jennifer Noji’s consideration of readers’ responses to Jamaica Kincaid’s well-known, book-length essay A Small Place. Here, however, this powerful emotion plays a more ambivalent role than in Pasolini’s and Mariani’s indictment of the passive spectator. Kincaid’s bracing text famously mobilises anger as a rhetorical strategy, and, as Noji shows in her analysis of ‘real’ readers’ responses on Amazon and Goodreads, some readers respond in kind with anger directed toward the author. Yet, Noji reveals, anger is only one of a range of responses to the book; other important affects she finds in reader comments include guilt, shame, ambivalence, and quite a bit of seeming indifference. At stake in Noji’s investigation is the question at the core of this project: what does it actually feel like to be implicated? Kincaid’s text provides an illuminating case study because it seems – not unlike Pasolini’s Rage – designed explicitly to provoke its audience. Noji thus focuses on a corpus of so-called ‘amateur criticism’, which she approaches through a combination of digital and ‘traditional’ close-reading methods. Although cognisant of the limits inherent to the method of analysing anonymous online comments, Noji reveals how the corpus she investigates can provide insights about the experience of being forced to confront one’s own implication. Noji correlates affects with evaluations of the book (according to Amazon’s and Goodreads’s ‘star’ system) and finds (roughly) three categories of response that correspond to high, low, and middling ratings of the text. Positive evaluations ‘illuminate how feeling implicated can comprise a complex experience involving both negative and positive feelings – an experience with the potential to motivate action’. But, as the negative evaluations reveal, feeling implicated may also, in contrast, ‘solidify preconceptions and motivate inertia rather than self-critique and action’. Finally, while both positive and negative evaluations correlate with strong feelings of different sorts, a third group of readers who assigned Kincaid’s text three stars express mixed feelings or even a lack of strong affect, which Noji relates to Kohpeiß’s notion of ‘bourgeois coldness’. Noji concludes, ‘the feeling of indifference itself may also serve as a source of implication – a subject’s indifference allows violence to occur without protest or remark’. Noji’s study, combining empirical analysis with textual interpretation, opens up new pathways for understanding the impact of literature and art on feelings of implication and political responsibility.

In her response to this cluster of three essays on ‘provoking implication’, Hanna Meretoja builds on her own work in narrative hermeneutics to reflect further on what it means to be addressed by a work of art as an implicated subject. Meretoja asks us to be self-conscious about the particular theories of narrative and affect we bring to the study of ‘feeling implicated’ and she encourages us to be especially ‘attentive to the social, historical, and cultural contexts in which narrative practices are entangled, to the traditions they perpetuate and challenge’. As Meretoja insightfully notes, narratives – and aesthetic works in general – do not only reflect on questions of injustice but can also constitute ‘cultural practices that contribute to structural injustice’ or ‘narrative traditions that perpetuate regimes of domination’. Meretoja also encourages us to link narrative and affect to questions of meaning: ‘tying affect to issues of sense-making, interpretation, understanding, and narrative agency could be a way of discussing responsibility as something that is not merely a matter of subjective feeling but something very real and intersubjectively grounded’. With her reflection on the importance of ‘sense-making’, intersubjectivity, and the interpretive dimensions of narrative, Meretoja helps open up new terrain for further reflection on implication and implicated subjects.

Although we believe these two special issues have already covered a lot of ground, many avenues remain open for the analysis of what it means to ‘feel implicated’. I conclude with a few thoughts for future work inspired by exchanges with my co-editors Stefano Bellin, Jennifer Noji, and Arielle Stambler. First, we believe, a greater degree of differentiation is needed. The essays collected here are largely focused on the present and on the grappling of metropolitan subjects with their own implication. What happens when we shift our vantage point? Can the notion of implication illuminate earlier periods or contexts in the Global South (as, indeed, an essay like Stambler’s would suggest or as Sanyal’s response calls for)? Second, we think that more work could be done on the different levels at which affect and implication intersect and the dynamic ways they interact, including on social media.³ We can see affective dynamics such as patriotism (Bellin), coldness (Kohpeiß), and indifference (Noji) functioning at the ‘first’ level to produce and reproduce relations of injustice, and we can also see how a dawning, discomfiting recognition of implication (the ‘second’ level) can lead to rage (Mariani), anger (Noji) and resentment (Cucharo, in issue 1). The question of constructing durable solidarities – the ‘third’ level where feelings of implication lead to political interventions – remains a central concern and a problem that encompasses both theory and practice.

Here we return to the challenge posed by Flatley in his response to the first issue: the assertion that feeling implicated actually blocks access to more politically motivating affects such as anger. While, for my part, I understand anger as a powerful emotion that can emerge precisely from the recognition that one is implicated in injustice – a feeling that can subsequently lead to constructive forms of action – more work needs to be done on the conditions of possibility for sustained resistance to histories of violence and structures of inequality. Empirical work – including work from reception studies (Noji) and social movement studies such as that of Deborah Gould, cited by Flatley and Bellin – would certainly be in order.⁴ In considering this problem, we might also want to take up the role of ‘positive’ emotions such as hope or love in helping sustain political movements. Can implicated subjects move from the necessary discomfort that accompanies upholding an unjust world to forging forms of differentiated solidarity? If so, how? While the introductions, essays and responses in Feeling Implicated do address such questions, we are certain much remains to be thought, felt, and – not least – done.

*****

In closing, let me take the opportunity to thank all those who have made these two special issues possible – my fellow editors, the contributors, the colleagues who provided peer reviews, the colleagues who attended the symposium we hosted at UCLA along with the staff of the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, and the supportive editors of parallax.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Rothberg

Michael Rothberg is the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies, Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, and Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 See Rothberg, Implicated Subject; and “Feeling Implicated.”

2 See Flatley, “On Implicatedness as a Political Feeling.”

3 See my “Feeling Implicated” in the first of our special issues for discussion of the three levels of affect and implication.

4 Deborah Gould, Moving Politics.