Denazification

Abstract

Abstract This chapter takes up the challenge that emotional rhetoric is inappropriate to politics. The first move of the argument is genealogical, as it revisits a postwar concern about emotional rhetoric summarized under “denazification.” Then, the dominant philosophical rejoinders represented by Jürgen Habermas and Martha Nussbaum (following Rawls) are contrasted with a different rhetorical tradition available under “political pathology,” which indexes the basic rhetorical structure of politics beyond techniques for rabble-rousing. Finally, the recent “affective turn” proper, along with a variety of philosophical projects meant to tame emotion for political purposes, is briefly sketched through this alternative rhetorical tradition in order to demonstrate what sort of new analytic possibilities thereby become available.