For the movement of thinking
The European Essay Award reveals to readers the best essays in all disciplines. It draws attention to authors whose work bear witness to and offer a fertile critique of current societies, their practices and ideologies. Awarded since 1975, it is the first literary prize devoted solely to the genre of the essay.
Chowra Makaremi is awarded the European Essay Prize 2026
© Charlotte Krebs
Chowra Makaremi is awarded the 48th European Essay Prize for her book Résistances affectives (Éditions La Découverte, 2025).
Why do some deaths move crowds to action? How can emotions and relationships become forms of resistance? From Baltimore to Tehran, from Buenos Aires to Delhi, this essay traverses contemporary uprisings through their visceral substance, unfolding their feminist legacy. This is the starting point for the question of affective resistance, questioning what our vulnerabilities, our angers, and our attachments do to politics. The aim is not to set emotion against reason, but to think of affects as a living memory, a foundation and a counter-attack against the politics of cruelty.
The bust of Nefertiti, the Great Pergamon Altar, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, the Sistine Madonna, the Old Summer Palace bronze heads, Watteau’s L’Enseigne de Gersaint, the Bangwa Queen, Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the Benin Bronzes: through the journeys of these iconic works, Bénédicte Savoy reflects on desire and domination, on rupture and restitution, and on the profound emotions evoked by beauty when it is laced with pain of historical loss.
Chowra Makaremi is an anthropologist at the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research). She is the author of