 Psychoanalytically-informed projects use concepts such as trauma, mourning, melancholia, and abjection to analyze embodied experience (Irigaray 1974 [1985]; Spillers 1996; Butler 1997; Felman 2002; Oliver 2004; entry on  psychoanalytic feminism).  They frequently engage aesthetics as an aspect of social critique (Chanter 2008; Kristeva 1980 [1982]; Miller 2014). This allows a symptomatic reading of feeling to be interpreted back against the social order, as is seen in Judith Butler’s Frames of War. In this text, Butler analyzes what makes a life grievable and argues that the questions of who appears as a human, whose life should be protected, and who does not are all figured in advance of any particular political decision through a pre-reflexive manipulation of affect (Butler 2009 [2016: 64]). Supplementing democratic theory with Continental feminist interpretations, Noëlle McAfee deploys Kristeva and the resources in her thought, as well as psychoanalysis, specifically on the issues of affect and the notion of the “political unconscious” (McAfee 2000 and 2008).