ABSTRACT
Like most forms of popular fiction, crime fiction is known to produce affective responses in its readers. Instead the affects typically master the protagonist and define the coordinates of the fictional world. Affect, as a category, has become increasingly central to contemporary work in critical theory. The Spinozan and Deleuzian genealogy of the concept emphasises incipience and ambience. The Spinozan genealogy of affect, then, tends to emphasise becoming and incipience more than fixity and being. Noir can thus be likened to a kind of dreamwork in the psychoanalytic sense. Noir thus does a kind of psychoanalytic work around repressed or disavowed materials, not just on the level of the individual protagonist but on a larger cultural level. In engaging negativity, death and dissolution, noir affect also insists that we tarry with the losers of the world. Instead, their representations are always distorted, displaced or condensed to a greater or lesser extent by the dreamwork of noir.
