A Tragic Photograph: Emotional Journey of a Political Spectator
-
Satya Prasoon
Satya Prasoon is an Assistant Professor, School of Law, BML Munjal University. He is currently a Visiting Faculty at NALSAR University of Law where he teaches Constitutional Law and elective courses on ‘Supreme Court of India and National Identity’ and ‘Religious Freedom for Minority Religions and Religious Denominations in India’. He has done his B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) from West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (India) and LL.M. from University of Melbourne (Australia). He can be reached at satya.prasoon@gmail.com
Shilpi Singh is an Assistant Professor, Division of Politics, School of Interwoven Arts and Sciences, Krea University. She teaches Political Philosophy, Political Theory, Indian Political Thought etc. She can be reached at shilpi.singh@krea.edu.in.
Abstract
The essay defends a conception of emotion generated upon witnessing a tragic incident as embedding judgment and hence not to be dismissed as lacking cognition and intelligence. It takes a photograph of lynching as a tragic motif to interrogate the multiple emotions that are experienced by spectators based on their respective and differing emotional and political belief systems. The evaluative framework for emotions involving a thing of value that forms a part of the belief systems of the spectators and the consequent analysis of the belief system upon witnessing a tragedy in the form of emotional outlet is significantly discussed in the essay. Having sufficiently defended emotions as embedding cognitive judgment, the conversation orients towards emotions expressed by a lone spectator as being thickly political revealing the hidden political belief system of the spectator. Consequently, this unravels the unexamined belief system of the polity, breathing and operating under the veneer of a liberal constitutional framework. Having shown the centrality of emotions in shaping, denting or moulding the political belief system, the essay argues that citizens who express varying emotions upon witnessing a tragedy should consciously embrace ethical spectatorship which entails active seeing as opposed to viewing. Ethical spectatorship is a political obligation arising from individuals occupying the shared civic political space as citizens, thereby creating an imagination of a new polity based of duties of civility and felt politics. Through this essay, an avoidable tragedy involving loss of lives of fellow citizens is interrogated and rectified on the plain of belief system that has allowed such tragedy to become routine in a polity while opening avenues for alternative imaginations of shared community and political living.
About the authors
Satya Prasoon is an Assistant Professor, School of Law, BML Munjal University. He is currently a Visiting Faculty at NALSAR University of Law where he teaches Constitutional Law and elective courses on ‘Supreme Court of India and National Identity’ and ‘Religious Freedom for Minority Religions and Religious Denominations in India’. He has done his B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) from West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (India) and LL.M. from University of Melbourne (Australia). He can be reached at satya.prasoon@gmail.com
Shilpi Singh is an Assistant Professor, Division of Politics, School of Interwoven Arts and Sciences, Krea University. She teaches Political Philosophy, Political Theory, Indian Political Thought etc. She can be reached at shilpi.singh@krea.edu.in.
© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Constitutional Theory as Literature in the 19th-Century Anglosphere
- Focus
- Charles Dickens, Albert Venn Dicey, and Openness in the Anglosphere
- Rhetoric and Empire: Constitutional Thought and Literature in the 19th-Century Anglosphere
- Authoring the Nation: Madame de Staël and the Literary Origins of the State
- The End of the Victorian Era: Reflections on an Edwardian Viewpoint
- Illustrating the Indian Penal Code: Bigamy, the Victorian Novel, and the Formation of National Identity
- The Christian Year – Still Needed? John Keble on the ‘Co-Extensiveness’ of Church and State
- Research
- We Have Never Been Persons!
- A Tragic Photograph: Emotional Journey of a Political Spectator
- Thoughts, Words, and Promises: Fides and the Legal Significance of the Inner Sphere
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Constitutional Theory as Literature in the 19th-Century Anglosphere
- Focus
- Charles Dickens, Albert Venn Dicey, and Openness in the Anglosphere
- Rhetoric and Empire: Constitutional Thought and Literature in the 19th-Century Anglosphere
- Authoring the Nation: Madame de Staël and the Literary Origins of the State
- The End of the Victorian Era: Reflections on an Edwardian Viewpoint
- Illustrating the Indian Penal Code: Bigamy, the Victorian Novel, and the Formation of National Identity
- The Christian Year – Still Needed? John Keble on the ‘Co-Extensiveness’ of Church and State
- Research
- We Have Never Been Persons!
- A Tragic Photograph: Emotional Journey of a Political Spectator
- Thoughts, Words, and Promises: Fides and the Legal Significance of the Inner Sphere
