This book presents a series of studies in the aesthetics of negative emotions, examining their politically ambiguous work in a range of cultural artifacts produced in what TW Adorno calls the fully “administered world” of late modernity. 1 This is the world already depicted by Herman Melville with startling clarity in “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”(1853)—a fiction in which the interpretive problems posed by an American office worker’s affective equivocality seem pointedly directed at the political equivocality of his unnervingly passive form of dissent. What, if anything, is this inexpressive character feeling? Is Bartleby’s unyielding passivity, even in the polemical act of withholding his labor (“I prefer not to”), radical or reactionary? Should we read his inertness as part of a volitional strategy that anticipates styles of nonviolent political activism to come, or merely as a sign of what we now call depression? In Melvillean fashion, the following chapters dwell on affective gaps and illegibilities, dysphoric feelings, and other sites of emotional negativity in literature, film, and theoretical writing, to explore similarly ambivalent situations of suspended agency. They