Zenana: Everyday Peace in a Karachi Apartment Building

6. Conclusion: Emotion and the Political Actor

6 Conclusion Emotion and the Political Actor Throughout these pages, I have labored under the assumption that there is a meaningful relationship between emotion and the political actor. We are heir to an intellectual, Enlightenment tradition that has pondered this relationship in scores of treatises, inquiries , essays, and prolegomena. How has this relationship been imagined ? A central tenet of Enlightenment thought held that we could look inside the individual for answers to the how or why of social, moral, or political order. Exemplifying what Émile Durkheim decried as “empirical monism,” John Locke reduced moral sentiment to the natural dictates of individual sensation—pleasure directing us to the good, pain protecting us from the bad. Essentially egoistic, self-interested passions were at the root of even our most altruistic or social actions. This found resonance in later Freudian notions of emotion as serving a “signal function,” alerting the organism to situations of threat or danger.1 David Hume struggled to reconcile a similarly atomistic, individualist philosophy with his observations on “social passions” or “virtues.” In contrast to Locke, Hume concluded that benevolent actions were positive proof of prior benevolent sentiments; moral passions beget moral order. Thomas Hobbes, in his infamous Leviathan, also sought the origins of political order inside the individual; in his hypothetical state of nature, Conclusion / 171 man, in violent, competitive pursuit of self-interest, lives in perpetual “Feare of Death” and thus willingly sacrifices his liberty for the peace that king and contract secure. For Montesquieu, human passions propel or set in motion distinct political orders—despotism moved by fear, monarchies by honor, republics by virtue—but the relationship is less automatic than ideal typical. Such orders require these underlying emotions for effective governance, and in their absence they will remain “imperfect .” While Enlightenment thinkers largely sought explanations for moral or political order in human nature and natural sentiment, modern social thought turns this proposition on its head. For Durkheim, moral sentiments follow from society. He wrote: “It is not a simple juxtaposition of individuals who bring an intrinsic morality with them, but rather man is a moral being only because he lives in society, since morality consists in being solidary with a group and varying with that solidarity” (1933: 399). Social, benevolent sentiments follow naturally from social formations: “Wherever there are societies, there is altruism, because there is solidarity ” (94). The question, here, is not how atomized individuals come to feel bonded, and morally bound, in a group, but how the group creates individuals and individual sentiments (or, in Durkheim’s terms, how the group transfers its passions into individual consciousness). Freud and psychoanalytic thought, for the most part, return us to the individual and human nature. Herein, it is Eros—libidinal, sexual drive— that holds the group together (Freud 1959: 31). An erotic drive toward an object (a leader, an idea) gets diverted on the way to satisfaction and is transformed from sexual desire to “aim-inhibited” Eros, or love. Love for the object generates identification with others in the group who share this same relationship with the object. Altruism is a function of the psychic replacement of the ego-ideal (self-image) by the love object.2 With obvious exceptions, the intellectual legacy we have inherited has overwhelmingly cast peace or political community as secured through, or expressed via, sentiments of love, altruism, or benevolence, whether these emerge from egoistic impulses or social passions or forces. (This is an idea we will have to complicate below.) For Freud and Durkheim, the fact of society or groupness explains internal harmony.3 The problem of political order or of peace, then, can only be whether or not people in a given context constitute a “society.” Sentiments of altruism, benev- 172 / Zenana olence, or love operate purely within the boundaries of the group or moral community. Using the church as an example, Freud reminds us that “those people who do not belong to the community of believers, who do not love him [Christ], and whom he does not love, stand outside this tie. Therefore, a religion, even if it calls itself the religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it” (Freud 1959: 39). Indeed, to those for whom the fact of society or groupness suffices to create solidarity, morality, or love, the problem then becomes not only how societies come to be constituted but...