Abstract

Afterword: Public Feeling, Ethical Entailment and the Poetics of Complicity

The varied explorations of "public feeling" in this volume all attend to the affective convergence of helplessness and guilt, injury and incrimination. This afterword tracks the mood of complicity through the collection, with the aim of elucidating how the co-implication of emotions and ethics brought to the fore in each of the essays seems also to require new ways of speaking about agency—even while reckoning with individual and collective powerlessness.