Founding Moments and Founding Fathers

This chapter explores how sentimental affects become entrenched within institutions like the International Criminal Court and various popular postcolonial figures. It explores how both political figures and legal technocrats engaged in public performances of justice tap into prevailing emotional regimes that become institutionalized. The chapter begins with two brief examples to illustrate this process and then delves more deeply to analyse the different contours of affect that both structure fields of expression and are conditioned by history and individual affective responses. Taken together they illustrate how emotional sentiments are transmitted through the production of feeling regimes, and through affective transference their meanings travel and take root in various social fields, such as international justice. By mapping how the emotional affects are transferred within constituent publics—from person to person, leader to constituency—the chapter explores how they are deployed to make new historical lineages feasible.