Weaving Trust from Uncertainty: Judgment, Bodies, and Affects in Political Life

Abstract

This article examines the possibility of trust in political life under conditions of uncertainty, contingency, and inequality. Against rationalist accounts that derive trust from prior certainties or agreements, it argues that trust is not an epistemic precondition but an embodied political practice that emerges in action and speech in common. Drawing on an articulation of judgment theory, political phenomenology, and feminist theories of affect, it contends that affects are not irrational elements to be excluded but constitutive of political judgment: they are the force of concepts, while concepts give form to affects. From an Arendtian perspective of politics as world-building under conditions of plurality, uncertainty is understood as the condition of political freedom. Within this framework, trust does not precede collective action but arises contingently in interaction. The article introduces the notion of affective grammars of trust to account for the unequal distribution of credibility and vulnerability. Finally, it proposes that trust is sustained by an affective imagination that enables inhabiting contingency and sustaining the possibility of a common world.