Critical Affect

A clear-sighted intervention into debates about affect theory and critique

• Addresses the important yet overlooked implications for critical methods in influential work on affect, non-representational, and actor-network theories
• Situates current debates within enduring ethical discussions about how to represent lived experience
• Foregrounds the contemporary, everyday purchase and pragmatic value of critical attention in both popular culture and social contexts
• Establishes kinships between the linguistic and ontological turns in theory

Critical Affect explores the emotional complexity of critique and maps out its enduring value for the turn to affect and ontology. Through a series of vivid close readings, Ashley Barnwell shows how suspicion and methods of decoding remain vital to both civic and academic spaces, where concerns about precarity, transparency, and security are commonplace and the question of how we verify the truth is one of the most polarising of our age.

Weaving together both the critical and affective dimensions of ‘paranoid reading’, Critical Affect opens crucial questions about the ethics of practicing theory and offers a new route into the critical study of affect.