What do the Communist Manifesto, Douglas Sirk’s films, and George W. Bush’s “mission accomplished” spectacle have in common? All, Elisabeth R. Anker answers in Orgies of Feeling, employed the conventions of melodrama. Each example plays an important role in this acute, original study, but the last looms largest. Although Anker briefly recounts the genre’s history since the eighteenth century, emphasizing its ties to liberalism, and charts its steadily increasing presence in American politics after the end of World War II, the book focuses primarily on the United States from 9/11 onwards. The popular sense of that day as the moment when “the United States lost its innocence,” Anker argues, illustrates melodrama’s key elements and reveals its shaping power (p. 1). In elaborating that claim, Orgies of Feeling not only redirects scholarly studies of the genre but also transforms common understandings of Bush era politics, while contributing to contemporary theoretical debates on freedom, sovereignty, and the shape of radical critique.

Anker distinguishes melodrama in literature, drama, and film—the object of most other scholarship—from what she calls “melodramatic political discourse,” which she finds in Presidential speeches (from Truman through the second Bush), mass-mediated news, and citizens’ responses. Both varieties impose moral order on events and circumstances, heightening emotions in stories of suffering innocents, villains, heroes, and ultimate redemption; but whereas the former is typically preoccupied with intimacy and problems that can be resolved at the level of individual relationships, the latter casts the nation and its citizenry as the sufferers, locates evil outside the polity’s borders, and gives the state the hero’s role. In the 21^st century, Anker maintains, melodramatic political discourse has authorized state expansion, most fatefully through U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11. Furthermore, unlike its literary antecedents, this discourse promises to restore sufferers’ freedom, understood as sovereignty and unconstrained agency. By reframing melodrama and placing it at the center of recent American political life, Anker thus also challenges the received view that Americans under Bush were content to trade freedom for security: Orgies of Feeling argues that, however violent and constraining in effect, the national security state’s expansion was legitimated by popular desires for, not flight from, freedom.

Much of the foregoing becomes clear and persuasive by the end of Chapter 2, but the next three chapters form the book’s core. Melodramatic political discourse, Chapter 3 argues, enables undemocratic forms of state power by fostering “felt legitimacy,” Anker’s term for “an affective experience of authorizing state power” that may shape politics even when “nothing procedural or deliberative has occurred to instantiate that feeling” (p. 111). Why this development now? Anker provides a two-pronged answer. First, Chapter 4 deploys Nietzsche’s concept of an “orgy of feeling,” in which longstanding pains and disappointments, rooted in diffuse or opaque sources, are deadened by cultivating “spectacular, agonizing, and shocking affects” (p. 150). Melodrama provides the means for that affective alchemy, appealing to Americans whose ideal of freedom-as-individual-sovereignty (hard to realize under any circumstances) proves unsuited to grasping the powers and constraints of our neoliberal condition. The endless, melodramatic returns to the trauma of 9/11, Anker shows, unleashed an orgy of feeling that displaced enduring problems and anxieties onto the day’s attacks, binding the nation in a shared sense of virtuous injury and fueling the fantasy that “heroic mastery over terror” would restore national and individual sovereignty (p. 163). Second, borrowing from Freud, Chapter 5 explores how, “in the wake of spectacular mass violence,” individuals identify with the state in order to seek a restoration (p. 186).

Anker’s twofold argument is, I think, brilliant and compelling. Though the high point of the book, it is not the end. However reactionary the dynamics she has traced, Chapter 6 goes on to argue, melodrama’s roots on the radical left are at least as old as the Communist Manifesto and as fresh as the work of Giorgio Agamben (whose placement on the left strikes me as contestable), Antonio Negri, and Michael Hardt. Although Anker is sharply critical of this strand of contemporary theory, the book’s conclusion recuperates elements of melodrama. Emancipatory politics cannot dispense with the discourse of freedom, and some variants of the genre, Anker suggests, can refine our understanding of being free: Borrowing from queer theory, she explores what she calls “melodramas of failure,” which expose the conditions of our unfreedom, stoke the desire to live otherwise, yet refuse delusions of individual or national omnipotence (p. 228). After illustrating the claim with Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955), Anker closes Orgies of Feeling by re-reading Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” as a melodrama of failure, a “women’s weepy.”

The return to Bush provides a provocative ending to Anker’s study. It is not clear to me, however, when or for whom she believes his failure took the precise form she describes. That raises broader questions about the book’s approach to melodrama’s boundaries and place in American political culture. Early, Anker compares the genre to prophecy and what Lauren Berlant has dubbed the impasse (Cruel Optimism, 2012)—a discourse that, abandoning heroism and deliverance, focuses on adapting to precarity—but the distinction between the latter and Anker’s melodrama of failure never emerges clearly enough. More important, Orgies of Feeling gives one little sense of the position, force, or demographic and institutional bases of rival genres in American political contests. The lack of a more thorough comparison limits the assessment of melodrama’s potential as a critical idiom.

It also dulls the book’s otherwise sharp account of recent politics. Perhaps because melodrama speaks in the name of a unified “we,” Anker skims over the cleavages structuring American politics. Beyond the theorists canvassed in her critique of left melodrama, few oppositional or dissenting voices can be heard. Readers also don’t learn enough about empire’s internal casualties: Although she notes that melodramatic political discourse may be used to club domestic political foes, Anker’s examples are fleeting. Both partisan differences and racial dynamics in our era are underexplored, rendering too abstract her significant insight that the form of freedom promised by melodramatic political discourse ends up authorizing repression and oppression.

Orgies of Feeling’s core arguments also pose related historical puzzles. Making dubious promises of individual agency while urging identification with the state is a move at least as old as Hobbes, with few examples as spectacular as Leviathan’s frontispiece. How much is this like or unlike the recent dynamic Anker analyzes so incisively? At the outset, she stresses melodrama’s birth in liberalism, but how state identification in a neoliberal moment relates to her history’s longer arc remains opaque. The book’s other main historical frustration concerns the present: Barack Obama scarcely appears in Anker’s pages, and though she makes clear that orgies of feeling are by nature as short-lived as intense, I found myself wanting a better sense of how her argument bears on politics after Bush.

Finally, one might raise questions about the book’s analytical categories. Given her argument and its reliance on affect theory and psychoanalysis, it seems odd that Anker employs terms such as affect, emotion, and feeling more or less interchangeably, without theorizing or even defining them. And given both that emphasis on affects/emotions/feelings and her perceptive commentary on the interplay between sound and image in producing melodrama’s effects (most notably in a superb minute-by-minute case study of one hour of Fox’s afternoon coverage from 9/11), one might also wonder whether so textually-based a concept as “discourse” is best suited to making sense of mass-mediated politics.

None of my critical questions, however, should obscure the book’s considerable accomplishments. Important, imaginative, at times dazzling, it offers a major interpretation of recent politics and an inspiring example of what political theory can be now. In Orgies of Feeling, Elizabeth Anker has given us a work to think with and learn from for years to come.