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Kathleen Stewart. Ordinary Affects. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2007. $18.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-8223-4088-1), 144 pages.
Reviewed by Megan Savage
Just what is an ordinary affect? Is it a moment in which diner conversation is hushed by the entrance of a biker couple in rumpled clothing who have hit a deer on the freeway? Or is it the "string of serial fetishes" of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal that saturate the public imagination and then recede? Perhaps the simplest definition Kathleen Stewart gives is that ordinary affects are "public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but they're also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of." In an era in which the public and the private are increasingly commingling - seeping into each other or colliding with the signal of static shock - Stewart makes a metaphorical project of grafting these connections onto an inhabitable space. In her introduction, Stewart argues that her book "tries to slow the quick jump to representational thinking and evaluative critique ... to find something to say about ordinary affects by performing some of the intensity and texture that makes them habitable and animate." It is perhaps forgivable that one can...