Cover

Half Title

Series Information

Title Page

Copyright Page

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: once more, with feeling

Outline of the book

Notes

1 Thinking through feeling: critical theory and the affective turn

Thoughts untimely: critical theory in the twenty-first century

New materialism and the turn to affect

On the ‘post-critical’ and the exhaustion of critique

Critical theory after affect: one shudders to think

Notes

2 Feeling blue: melancholic dispositions and conscious unhappiness

Melancholies: medical and cultural

From mood to pathology: Freud on mourning and melancholy

Walter Benjamin: melancholy critique

Conscious unhappiness and critique

Notes

3 A feeling for things: objects, affects, mimesis

The critique of reification and the subjugation of objects

More post-critical fantasies: object-oriented ontology (or how not to think about objects)

Siegfried Kracauer and the ‘thicket of material life’

Adorno and the preponderance of the object

Mimesis

Notes

4 Expectant emotion and the politics of hope

A brief affective history of the left (I): on hopeless narratives

A brief affective history of the left (II): the exhaustion of utopian energies

Back to the future: a critical theory of hope

Notes

Bibliography

Index