We agree with Stewart that there is something utterly remarkable and incisive about Berlant’s approach, which attends to genre as a cluster of promises, a scene of feeling and sensing which sheds light on the organisation, the delight and difficulties of everyday living. 367) has observed, “Berlant’s legacy is a labor of attending to emergent forces in the course of the ordinary, attuning to the agitations of a subject troubled by the world’s potential for event, and culling the current precarity of life itself into a new object of analysis”.

Berlant’s work has tracked this drift as Stewart ( 2012, p. 84) has observed, “in everyday life the lives of others are neither here nor there they drift between their inexpressiveness and my inaccuracy in responding to them”. These are domains with which we are all fiercely concerned in all their uncertainty, urgency and capacity to surprise. She considers how these zones of practice fit together: for instance, how the aesthetics of embodiment and eating relate to the temporality of the workday and the debt cycle how what is unbearable or unclear in our fantasies and experiences of intimacy open onto modes of political discourses of nationhood, citizenship and identification how investments in the image of the innocent child across popular screen media and political rhetoric are animated by the fantasy of the unhumiliated citizen. One of today’s major theorists, Lauren Berlant, has explored the diverse cultural registers across which sense and feeling organise public and private life from sexual and aesthetic experiences to political participation and economic struggles.

A flat affect