The interview series poses questions concerning the role of affects and emotions in research practice and contemporary society to researchers on short-term visit and associate members of the Collaborative Research Center “Affective Societies.” Today we introduce William Mazzarella, Neukom Family Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He works at the transdisciplinary intersection of social anthropology, critical theory, media studies, theology, psychoanalysis, South Asian studies, and esotericism. His research explores how charisma, mass publicity, and affect mediate the restless interplay between the incitement and containment of social energies across scales of social life. His publications include „Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India“ (2003), „Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity“ (2013), „The Mana of Mass Society“ (2017), and the forthcoming „Magnetizer: A Fable of Spirit,“ which he presented in a keynote lecture at the CRC in July 2025.

Which research question affects you at the moment? What is its social significance?

Right at this very moment, today, I’m thinking about the ways in which scholars are too often blind to their own attachments and excitements. The stances of “scholarly neutrality” and “objectivity” are themselves intensely affective, despite surface appearances. People get very excited about them when there is an apparent threat to the protocol. Socially, this applies too, I think, to the liberalisms—and sometimes even the leftisms—that oppose the current wave of global authoritarianism. There’s an illusion on the part of many liberals that their politics represents cool, judicious reason against the hot-headed passions of the new right. But I would venture that part of the crisis of the resistance to the right these days is not just its lack of skill at mobilizing enthusiasms—i.e., its affective deficit—but also its inability to confront its own (strongly held, affectively intense) attachments.

Can you think of an emotion whose relevance has recently surprised you?

Let me answer the question like this, perhaps a little obliquely: I’ve been preoccupied with the fine line between “letting go” and “submitting.”

Do you perceive any affective driving force or affective barrier concerning your research work?

I need to know that there is, as it were, an animating kernel to any piece of work that I’m doing—a kernel that I will be able to call to mind and to feel as an image or a form, irrespective of what words I happen to use to articulate it. Most often, when I sense a barrier, it has to do with having gotten lost in the words, which also means having lost track of the image–form–kernel.

Which book has lately affected you the most?

I’ve been reading Wilhelm Reich’s account of his own experience with politics during the rise of European fascism in the late 1920s and early 1930s, published in the collection People in Trouble. There’s a vividness and clarity to his account that feels extremely resonant with our world and our politics today.

From which feelings or sentiments would you rather refrain at the moment?

There is a lot of understandable rage and grief in our networks these days—not least on social media. In the days after our last presidential election, whenever anyone tried to solicit my outrage, I found myself saying something like, “I refuse to give the bastards the satisfaction of my grief.” What people often miss is that the right runs on leftist outrage. For all that the reactionaries—especially in the U.S.—like to say “fuck your feelings,” they absolutely crave liberal grief, rage, shock. Let’s not fuel the fire. But that doesn’t mean—and I can’t stress this enough—insisting that affect has no place in public life. The challenge, rather, is to stop shouting for long enough that we can all actually clarify the ground of our excitements—which ones matter and which ones are just reactive.

Edited by Matthias Lüthjohann and Annabella Backes