The cold Bourgeoisie: Affect and colonial property

Publikation: Beiträge in SammelwerkenKapitelbegutachtet

Authors

"Bourgeois coldness" is an expression that appears in Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment to describe bourgeois indifference towards suffering resulting from subjectification and the capitalist economy. While not further developed by Adorno and Horkheimer, the concept of coldness allows the reader to reflect on the affective structure of bourgeois life. This chapter argues that capitalist alienation and self-interest are only two aspects of coldness. Another, which manifests in the affective disregard for others, is the coloniality of structures of feeling. European colonialism has not only shaped the world economically; it has grounded its forms of exploitation in a system of racial difference established with the conquest of the Americas and the transatlantic slave trade. Underlying the colonial world order is an idea of the subject defined by self-ownership. The centrality of property to colonial power and modern subjectivity accounts for the violent reinforcement of racial difference in capitalist modernity and the affective attitudes that accompany it. This chapter expands the concept of bourgeois coldness to describe bourgeois existence as a comfortable location within racial capitalism. Bourgeois subjects reproduce their social order through legal abstractions that allow them to remain distant from the violence that is the condition of possibility of that order.

OriginalspracheEnglisch
TitelCapitalist Cold : Emotions and the Economy in Europe and the United States
Anzahl der Seiten21
VerlagTaylor and Francis Inc.
Erscheinungsdatum24.01.2025
Seiten27-47
ISBN (Print)9781032399126
ISBN (elektronisch)9781003351955
DOIs
PublikationsstatusErschienen - 24.01.2025

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Publisher Copyright:
© 2025 selection and editorial matter, Agnes Arndt and Kerstin Maria Pahl. All rights reserved.

DOI