Eros Effect as Emergency Politics: Affective and Networked Politics of Agonistic Humanism in South Korea’s Sewol Ferry Disaster

Abstract

This article examines how people, based on their personal reception of a crisis, come together and organize themselves to readdress the status quo in a state of emergency by exploring the sociopolitical power of affect, empathy, and spontaneity as a transformative movement mobilizer. Using Bonnie Honig’s notion of Emergency Politics, this article further conceptualizes George Katsiaficas’ notion of Eros Effect by reconsidering the transformative, constitutive power of people’s plural and contingent political agency in a crisis situation. Human affect, especially empathy to the devastated, coupled with communication networks, helps consolidate and spread what Herbert Marcuse called the New Sensibility of the human species as a transformative political power. This article further complicates Bonnie Honig’s claim on agonistic humanism by revisiting a dichotomy of mourning mothers and acting fathers. As an empirical case, this article investigates how the Korean people have organized themselves in a series of protests and rallies to take care of the victims of the Sewol Ferry after it sunk, killing more than 300 passengers, mainly high school juniors, on April 16, 2014.