摘要：WH ENLaurent Berlant and the Feel Tank Chicago organised two 'Interna-tional Days of the Politically Depressed' using the above slogan, theymeant to take negative feelings seriously as part of political culture. Part oftheir remit was to question the separation of the emotional from the rational,and the privileging of the latter in politics. They sought to justify and un-derstand negative affective states such as depression not as disconnection frompolitics, but as another form of attachment to it. They consider this primarily asan aesthetic perspective, interpreted as another means of relating to the world,one that draws on the senses. They take their cue from Jacques Rancière (1999;2004) and his discussion of the politics of aesthetics, in which he argues thataesthetics must be understood as that process that separates different domainswithin the perceptible or what he calls the 'sensible'; in these terms, divisionsin social, cultural and 'biological' terms are in the first instance aesthetic di-visions, which are subsequently politicised – that is, partake in struggles forpower. As such, the aesthetic prefigures the domain that we understand as po-litics, and in doing so it is a political process. Following along similar linesof thought, this article is concerned with the question of emotion in its medi-atised forms and its relevance in political practices. I want to argue that thetypical problematic of emotion is not one that finds it 'other' to reason, butone that connects it to reason in a very specific form: as mediator between the'lowly' sensations and the 'higher' cognitions. This leads to an examinationof emotion in terms of truthfulness or credibility of that which it conveys (andby association of the person who is conveying it), and in terms of the actionsto which it leads. But when it comes to mediatised emotion, how warrantedis this problematic of credibility-action. Introducing the question of media-tisation is crucial in that it significantly modifies not only the ways in whichemotion is conveyed but its broader political role or function. I will then arguethat a shift of perspective may provide a better insight when it comes to asses-sing mediatised emotion in political terms. This alternative may be thought asan aesthetic perspective in the sense discussed by Rancière.
