Abstract
Bad feelings are everywhere. When faced with this situation in our empirical encounters or conceptual analyses, most socio-spatial research is committed to making things right again, with an eye to unleashing new potentials for action by repairing bad feeling. Yet this ‘ethics of rehabilitation’ assumes both the inherent possibility and ethical desirability of working away those affects that are deemed to be ‘negative’. We argue that this activating process risks delegitimising, in possibly troubling or violent ways, the ethical validity of both incapacities (when one is unable to act) and negative capacities (when one decides to not act). Instead of a rehabilitative ethics, we propose an ‘ethics of impotentiality’ that suspends the urge to activate negative affects, offering a radically situated ethical relation that is neither didactic nor moralising, refuses any easy distinction between empowering and disempowering affects, and allows for subjects to stay with inaction.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 190-205 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | Progress in Human Geography |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| Early online date | 11 Dec 2023 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Apr 2024 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Whilst working on this article, David Bissell was supported by the Australian Research Council (grant number DP220102908) and Thomas Dekeyser by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (grant number PF19\100052).
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2023.
Keywords
- affect
- ambivalence
- ethics
- impotentiality
- incapacity
- negativity
- refusal