Erzählte Affekte und radikale Entwertungen von Anderen. Psychosoziale Funktionen von Abjekten

Abstract

The significance of emotions for human practice has been receiving increased attention in various disciplines recently. In sociology, an affective or emotional turn was diagnosed already two decades ago, and parallel trends appear in both (narrative) psychology and philosophy. This article outlines an affect and emotion theory perspective for figuration, micro-sociological and social respectively cultural-psychological conflict research. It then introduces Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytically defined concepts of the “abject” and “abjection”. After some definitional clarifications, we illustrate the heuristic, hermeneutic and explanatory potential of these theoretical concepts by drawing the empirical example of the relationship between Alevis and Sunnis in post-migrant Germany. These are embedded in historical “relations of injury and harm”, in which not only excessive physical violence, but also psychological and symbolic violence has been exercised and suffered. The radical, abjectivising devaluation of people of the Alevi faith played a major role in this. We argue that the resulting demarcations, contact blockades and practices of exclusion, which continue to this day, cannot be adequately understood without recourse to their affective-emotional foundations.