The Politics of “Gut Feelings”: On Sentiment in Governance and the Law

F or those of us who work in the historical and contemporary interstices of knowledge and power, howwe identify what counts as the former and shapes the attributes of the latter— and vice versa—is a domain of exploding interest, of new research, of new and renewed debates. So much so that one might think that the murky nexus of knowing and inciting, of naming and shaming, of classifying and enraging has not been as profoundly on the agenda in the study of knowledge before. I’m thinking here of how sentiment/ emotion/feeling figure on our conceptual and political radars—what they tell us about social inequalities, the epistemics on which sentiments are imagined to depend, and what work we imagine they do to make and mark the distinctions among what Ian Hacking would once call “human kinds.” If the ubiquity of this “affective turn” in the human sciences is new, attentiveness in history, philosophy, and political theory to the operative working of emotion is not. Long before engagement with the social coordinates of sentiment, or “affect theory” specifically, took hold in European and US universities, a range of diverse advocates