Where Does Sadness Come From? Politics, Potentiality and a Possible Humanities

Abstract

If, as Spinoza suggests, sadness is an inadequate idea, how do we account for its mobilization in nationalist and post-colonial critiques of colonialism, neo-colonialism and neo-liberalism? How, in other words, might we see in the inadequate idea of sadness the very conditions for thinking our way into a discussion of political subjectivity that loosens the grip of biopolitics on African subjectivity? Drawing on aesthetic practices of art and film, this article argues that a fundamental shift is discernable in the careful ways in which the affect of sadness has been worked over by artists and filmmakers in Africa. This is a site of productive reworking, which not only eclipses the exhausted political sphere in Africa, but offers ways to theorize its reconstitution. To this end, the article asks that we attend to the ways in which potentiality and impotentiality are rendered as central premises for tackling the question of the renewal of political subjectivity in Africa.