Vol.:(0123456789) Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-023-09924-z 1 3 Anger and uptake Shiloh Whitney 1 Accepted: 29 June 2023 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2023 Abstract One of the narratives of anger as a pandemic emotion is not diagnostic, but celebra- tory: anger at racial injustice made a social and political breakthrough during the pandemic. What this breakthrough narrative celebrates is that people who had pre- viously been moved only to alarmed scrutiny of the anger itself and the project of quelling it began instead, not merely to approve of this anger, but to to be oriented and instructed by it, permitting the anti-racist anger of others to sensitize them to the insults and injuries that provoked it. The breakthrough narrative implies that anger is a moral sentiment that can be instructive, not only for the angry person herself, but also for others. This suggests a phenomenonological puzzle: under what descrip- tion of afective intentionality and its interpersonal and social triangulation would the breakthrough be possible? I draw on Marilyn Frye’s account of anger uptake and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body schema to give an account of the conditions of possibility for the breakthrough narrative. Along the way, I ofer an account of uniquely afective hermeneutical injustices, the uniquely afective variety of power at stake in them, and the reparative gesture required to remedy them. Keywords Anger · Uptake · Afective injustice · Body schema · Merleau-Ponty · Hermeneutical Injustice 1 Anger as a pandemic emotion After racial justice activist Kimberly Jones’s powerful video of righteous indigna- tion on the streets of Atlanta post-protest went viral in June of 2020, Trevor Noah interviewed her, pointing out that the reception of her video was remarkable. 1 He observed that her palpable outrage had moved people who were previously * Shiloh Whitney swhitney@fordham.edu 1 Fordham University, 113 W 60Th St, Lowenstein 913A, NY 10034 New York, USA 1 See Kimberly Jones, 2020 “How Can We Win”.