A Surplus of Pathos

For my final project I will analyze the affective intensities that swirl around the recent debates about the budget and the deficit in the U.S. I will discuss both the institutionalized and dominant forms of discourse as well as the counter-publics. More specifically, I will draw on Sara Ahmed’s work on “Affective Economies” to illustrate the ways that rhetorical strategies are driven by processes of alignment on collective and individual levels. This crisis is an especially poignant example because questions of spending decide in who and in what we should invest in. The rhetoric fashions a specific group conception of what type of person or body politic the nation should adopt. This is an especially intense issue because of the way that American pulics view issues of spending as inextricably intertwined with conceptions of identity.