Affect, Active Intolerance, and Abolition

What are the affects and transformative ways of feeling that characterize the work of social justice? What activates anger and love, courage and curiosity, in the service of resistance? What exactly does resistance to oppressive conditions feel like? And, conversely, what do oppressive conditions feel like? How are affective scripts prompted and suppressed, how are they embattled, in the work of social justice? In the collective inquiry that follows, we take inspiration from the 1970s French prison resistance network, Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons (the Prisons Information Group, or GIP), which framed resistance to oppression affectively as an active intolerance of and against the intolerable. While authors range far and wide in the archives they consult and the problematics they engage—from prisons to clinics, from coloniality to ableism, and from curiosity to the power of writing and poetry—this symposium reflects on the affective work of intolerance directed toward intolerable institutions and practices.