The Treadmill Affect draws upon the work of three University of Chicago professors, each a former program director at the Center for Transcultural Studies: literary and cultural critic Lauren Berlant, historian and social theorist Moishe Postone, and linguist Michael Silverstein. Through this intellectual synthesis, Benjamin Lee demonstrates the critical possibilities of uniting a revived linguistic turn with Marxist accounts of affect and subjectivity, adding new dimensions to the treadmill affective structure of cruel optimism.
