i started with this piece of a review of michael haneke's the seventh continent, then the post went it's own way... now i go back to it, because it's smart. 

    Michael Haneke’s masterful first film The Seventh Continent/Der Siebente Kontinent introduced concerns basic to the director’s art, principal among them the notion that the “death of affect”, a key fixation of postmodernity, should not be a subject of cynical concelebration (as it seems to be for many artists of the moment). Rather, Haneke views the end of affect, which is to say the acceptance of alienation as an inevitable and rather “hip” state of being, as a profound sickness that serious art no longer interrogates, the standard postmodern view being that its study is a naïve and dated preoccupation.

i've thought about this before in a more or less inchoate, dreamy or cinematic way, and remarked inwardly about the disaffection of art, and artists, like people generally, and who attempt to make it their own, to co-opt or appropriate the disaffection, the death of affect, the alienation, the cultural anomie, as a kind of hip pose struck in front of the abyss. when we should be mourning the death of affect, by bringing it back.