Explosive Emotions

Understanding the source of our current political and social malaise through our emotional responses to it

We are in an explosive cultural moment. Whatever explanation for this is offered—inequalities, disaffection of political institutions, traumatic memory, woke culture, the rise of populism, the dominance of technology—it is the inescapable fact that we are in a period of palpable malaise. In Explosive Emotions, sociologist Eva Illouz explores the source of our discontent through a number of key emotions. Hope, disappointment, envy, resentment, anger, fear, anxiety, shame, nostalgia, jealousy, and love are all embedded in the institutions of social life. These institutions—corporations, the consumer market, the university, the nation-state, marriage, and sexuality—shape our emotional lives.

Illouz argues that hope was the emotional foundation of modernity—shaping ambition and promising improvement. But today, this hope has morphed into disappointment, envy, anger, or nostalgia—because, she contends, advanced techno-capitalism has overseen both a series of transformations in modern democracies and the decay of nationalism. Drawing on the insights of literature and philosophy, Illouz outlines the psychological structure of these emotions; mobilizing data from sociology and political science, she examines how and why they are deployed in society. Unbeknownst to us, she explains, emotions contain and enact the key ingredients of society. Norms, rules, social structures, and cultural guidelines are the invisible yet burning magma of emotions, the heart of their energy. Emotions continue the work of society inside the self. Mapping our epochal malaise, Illouz shows how and why all our previously established structures are unraveling.