Contributor(s): Professor Lauren Berlant | This lecture draws on two films of Laurent Cantet - Human Resources (1999) and Time Out (2001) - to engage the new affective languages of the contemporary economic atmosphere, languages of anxiety, contingency and precarity. Lauren Berlant is George M Pullman Professor, Department of English, University of Chicago. Sadie Wearing is lecturer in gender theory, culture and media at the Gender Institute, LSE.