What Is Nigel Farage so Angry about?

Resilience is a trait that ensures durability in the face of what erodes or undermines. It is obvious that parliamentary procedures and practices that ground a democratic society must be resilient, and absorb criticisms that question the institution’s very existence. As a number of writers have argued recently, emotions play a central part in political life. This observation, while true in general, must be grounded in order to generate analytic power; above all, we must ask, which emotion, in what context, and towards which group of interlocutors is the emotion directed. In my paper I examine the work that Nigel Farage’s anger does when displayed in meetings of the European Parliament.  This anger can be thought of in terms of a genre of emotional display whose goals are above all to short circuit the discursive conventions of patterned discourse of parliamentary debate, thus creating feelings of satisfaction in a small group of targeted listeners whose desire is the complete suspension of this discourse. I suggest that until now this discourse has quickly repaired itself after Farage’s statements, but also that the position of derision he expresses is emotionally seductive and represents an always present point of fracture within the practice of parliamentary democracy.  I conclude by reflecting on the complexity of the EP, in that it is constituted by members whose relationship to discourse is shaped by 28 different emotional cultures.