This essay traces Fredric Jameson’s important early analyses of the waning of affect and disappearance of the depth psychological subject under conditions of postmodernism, arguments he developed over the course of several essays in SOCIAL TEXT – beginning, in fact, in the journal’s very first issue. This brief survey of Jameson’s argument launches a sketch of the multiple genealogies and political uptakes of the term affect in more recent scholarly work, some of it also in the pages of SOCIAL TEXT.
