Depression seems now to represent the mental problem par excellence in the United States, disturbing an increasing number of people and encompassing a wide range of psychic and bodily symptoms. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, over 10 percent of the population currently suffers from some sort of depression, including major depressive disorder, chronic mild depression, psychotic depression, postpartum depression, seasonal affective disorder (SAD), and bipolar disorder. At some point in their lives, the NIMH predicts, most people have suffered or will suffer from depression. Reigning neurochemical, cognitive, and psychiatric understandings of depression emphasize function and dysfunction, but I would like to mobilize the idea that depression represents an affect that connects, mediates, and blurs the individual and the social. Indeed, the explosion of academic interest in affect, emotion, and bodily capacities --  what Patricia Clough coined "the affective turn" -- has not only supplied us with multiple and varied concepts of affect and affectivity, but perhaps more important signals its theoretical and political significance in thinking the history of the present. The numerous configurations under a broadly conceived heading of "the affective turn" have several antecedents (most notably in psychoanalysis and philosophy) and have been developed and debated over the last ten years in fields as diverse as literary studies, gender and sexuality studies, ethnic studies, queer theory, science studies, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies more generally. Some commonalities among the divergent theorists of affect will facilitate my thought here.