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The notion of ambivalence currently seems to be an invigorating figure with heuristic potential in political, social, and art theory. It refers to a plurality of possibilities, a paradoxical multiplicity, and a complex relationality. It foregrounds thinking in terms of indeterminacy and incommensurability, as well as in terms of the possible. Ambivalence has been deployed in positive ways, as offering political promise, while, at the same time, being regarded with suspicion.

"Human progress lies in discontent!" was the motto of the Austrian magazine Die Unzufriedene (The Discontented). It was first published in 1923 as an "independent weekly magazine" designed to reach "all women." Yet, it was first and foremost a Social Democratic journal, established to socialize women politically and to obtain women's votes outside the Social Democratic purview in the 1923 National Council elections. Since women's suffrage had been established only a few years earlier, the struggle for women's votes was of utmost importance. This essay argues for understanding the journal as a mode and an instrument for the mobilization of affects for Social Democratic ends. Proposing the concept of affective attachments, it shows how the Austrian Social Democratic Workers' Party (SDAP) used the journal in an ambivalent way to affectively address women and to create political moods that would attract them to the party's political agenda.

Currently, affect and emotions are a widely discussed political topic. At least since the early 1990s, different disciplines—from the social sciences and humanities to science and technoscience—have increasingly engaged in studying and conceptualizing affect, emotion, feeling, and sensation, evoking yet another turn that is frequently framed as the "affective turn." Within queer feminist affect theory, two positions have emerged: following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's well‐known critique, there are either more "paranoid" or more "reparative" approaches toward affect. Whereas the latter emphasize the potentialities of affect, the former argue that one should question the mere idea of affect as liberation and promise. Here, I suggest moving beyond a critique or celebration of affect by embracing the political ambivalence of affect. For this queer feminist theorizing of affective politics, I adapt Jacques Rancière's theory of the political and particularly his understanding of emancipation. Rancière takes emancipation into account without, however, uncritically endorsing or celebrating a politics of liberation. I draw on his famous idea of the "distribution of the sensible" and reframe it as the "distribution of emotions," by which I develop a multilayered approach toward a nonidentitarian, nondichotomous, and emancipatory queer feminist theory of affective politics.

The notion of ambivalence currently seems to be an invigorating figure with heuristic potential in political, social, and art theory. It refers to a plurality of possibilities, a paradoxical multiplicity, and a complex relationality. It foregrounds thinking in terms of indeterminacy and incommensurability, as well as in terms of the possible. Ambivalence has been deployed in positive ways, as offering political promise, while, at the same time, being regarded with suspicion. ; Brigitte Bargetz, 'Figuring Ambivalence, Capturing the Political: An Everyday Perspective', in Multistable Figures: On the Critical Potential of Ir/Reversible Aspect-Seeing , ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Cultural Inquiry, 8 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2014), pp. 191–214

Over the last decades, many scholars, feminist and others, have argued that critique must be reframed in different and more 'productive' ways because its 'conventional' formulation and practice have outlived its usefulness as a conceptual tool. Instead, they have called for affirmation or affirmative critique and a more generative mode of critical engagement in the search for new imaginaries, transformative potentialities and other futures. New feminist materialist thought's emergence is, we argue, symptomatic of this contemporary intellectual landscape that claims to move beyond critique. While sympathetic with the desire to rethink a form of critique that speaks to the (urgent) politics of the present and the remaking of political imaginaries, we argue that the theoretical gesture to move beyond critique may offer a potentially troubling remapping organised around certain kinds of repression (of the undetermined and ambivalent work of critique) and amnesia (of feminist genealogies and over different feminist projects' conceptualisation of matter) that yield a politics without politics.

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich. ; This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.

Affective attachments can be regarded as fostering a kind of complementarity, yet without negating the tense nature of mixed and sometimes contradicting feelings. We would like to investigate this aspect in more detail by posing the following questions: How do affective attachments function as structures of relationality that organize lived experiences of the present? What role do sensory registers play in the accretion of habits, histories, and rhythms of living into forms of sociality? What forms of life are made possible and available, disavowed and denied by ambivalent investments in objects of promise and nostalgia that appear increasingly frayed, including neoliberal good-life fantasies and images of sovereign and imperial nation-states? How are these investments sustained and how do they circulate in what Kathleen Stewart describes as the "charged atmosphere" of ordinary living? Programme Part I: Discussion Lauren Berlant (University of Chicago) Kathleen Stewart (University of Texas, Austin) Interrogating forms of attachment means thinking about how material and affective structures give shape to subjectivities, publics, nations, and worlds. It demands looking closely at how forms of life are organized and disorganized at the very moment of their emergence and at the openings, possibilities, foreclosures, and enclosures enabled by the bindings and unbindings at work in the historical present. Lauren Berlant has suggested that thinking the political differently requires a "lateral exploration of an elsewhere that is first perceptible as an atmosphere." Under what conditions do alternative routes for living take form and unfold? How are they registered by aesthetic renditions of affective experience? How do they inform the politics of precarity and vulnerability? And in what ways are they able to disrupt the fantasies that structure the late modern world and the normativities they engender? 19:30 Welcome 19:40 Opening Remarks from Each Speaker 20:00 Moderated Discussion 20:45 Q&A 10 July 2012, 10:00 – ...

The lesson taught by every historical attempt to construct society in accordance with an idea: where utopia is, wreckage will follow. So we have been told, and do, in large part, believe. The empire of capitalist parliamentarism, sovereign police, and conventional skepticism rises from the ruins of futures past. This symposium invited four inventive, provocative, and engaged thinkers to reflect upon utopia and its wreckages, to help us understand the valences of realization and ruination, of wreaking and wrecking, within socialist/post-socialist, sovereign/post-sovereign, imperial/post-imperial, feminist, and queer political programmes. Boris Buden is a writer and cultural critic. He studied philosophy in Zagreb and cultural theory at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Among his many publications are Barikade (Zagreb 1996) and Zone des Übergangs. Vom Ende des Postkommunismus (2009). Among his translations into Croatian are two books of Sigmund Freud. Bini Adamczak is an unstable alliance of everyday reproduction modes, unwanted heritages, and quarrelsome spectres, such as deconstructivist feminisms and the orthodox critique of value. She's a performer, visual artist, and independent author of borderlining texts such as Kommunismus. Kleine Geschichte wie alles anders wird (2004) and Gestern Morgen. Über die Einsamkeit kommunistischer Gespenster und die Rekonstruktion der Zukunft (Münster, 2007). Daniel Loick teaches social and political philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt. His book on sovereignty, Ironien des Politischen. Elemente einer kritischen Theorie der Souveränität (2011) will be published this fall. He is also co-organizer of the international conference Re-Thinking Marx at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Karen Tongson is associate professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Her book on race, sexuality, popular culture, and the suburbs, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries, will appear in August 2011. She is on of the editors of the series Postmillennial Pop ...