REVOLUTIONARY JOY/ INFECTIOUS FEELING

Abstract

Political solidarity confounds our political theory when the latter is grounded in economies of interest, cultures of responsibility or instruments of rights. The gratuitous materialisation of solidarity might be rethought from the perspective of affect if by the latter we indicate a field of interpretive capacity, sometimes called recognition, not limited to or by personal attachments. This capacity we might liken to a ‘shared situation’ to quote Jean Laplanche (1989, 126). Following this train of thought through the figure of revolutionary joy and ‘adherence’ in Jean Genet’s last work, Prisoner of Love, and its uptake in Mahmoud Darwish’s memoir of the siege of Beirut, Memory for Forgetfulness, this paper envisions an affect studies that materialises modes of affinity and adherence by tracing an example of affect’s echo between two texts, each attuned to the fading of a revolutionary moment as it is forced underground.