Critical Affect forges a path across the current impasse between critical and post-critical methods in social and cultural theory. It explores the emotional complexity of critique and maps out its enduring value for the turn to affect and ontology.Through a series of vivid close readings, Barnwell shows how suspicion and methods of decoding remain vital to both civic and academic spaces, where the question of how we verify the truth is one of the most polarising and provocative of our age. Situating current debates within enduring ethical discussions about how to represent lived experience from the 'Two Cultures' debate to the Science Wars, this book opens crucial questions about the ethics of practicing theory and offers a new route into the critical study of affect.