TY - CHAP

T1 - The cold Bourgeoisie

T2 - Affect and colonial property

AU - Kohpeiß, Henrike

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2025 selection and editorial matter, Agnes Arndt and Kerstin Maria Pahl. All rights reserved.

PY - 2025/1/24

Y1 - 2025/1/24

N2 - "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.

AB - "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.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85215563123&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.4324/9781003351955-3

DO - 10.4324/9781003351955-3

M3 - Chapter

AN - SCOPUS:85215563123

SN - 9781032399126

SP - 27

EP - 47

BT - Capitalist Cold

PB - Taylor and Francis Inc.

ER -