Some of those theoretical trends draw on older genealogies of thought, from Baruch Spinoza to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Others joined important anthropological work in illustrating that emotions should not be regarded as pre-social, pre-ideological and pre-discursive psychological and individual states, but as social and cultural practices. 3 Challenging the conventional oppositions between emotion and reason, and discourse and affect, these key trends of contemporary social and cultural theory have explored and reconfigured political and ethical (mis-)appropriations of emotions; the complex relation between power, subjectivity and emotion; the place of emotion, affect, sentiments and sentimentality within political and political theorising; the affective dimension of the normative; the affective as a condition of possibility for subjectivity; and the emotive and affective investment in social norms as a constitutive mode of subjectivation.

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In this Critical Exchange, political theorists and philosophers of the contemporary condition were asked to reflect on the politics of mourning. Political theorists have increasingly turned to mourning as a prism through which to view the differential politics of grief and grievance (for an overview see McIvor and Hirsch, 2019). Yet in this particular moment it is impossible to think about the linkages between politics and grief outside the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic. As this exchange was coming together, the virus was beginning its spread. While only some of the contributions directly confront the question of death and democracy during a pandemic, all speak to the ways that loss, grief, and politics are intertwinedsomething that the current crisis has made abundantly clear.

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