Overview

“I am the Chosen One!” With this exclamation Donald Trump crowns the national exceptionalism his base upholds with a claim of personal exceptionalism. He leaves no doubt as to the emotional note: “I am your vengeance!” He personifies reaction for the masses. Except, in today’s microsegmented social media environment the “masses” no longer exist. Fascism’s cultural conditions have shifted. In The Personality of Power, Brian Massumi retheorizes the conditions of contemporary fascism through the prism of Trump’s persona. Older theories based on identification of the masses with a charismatic leader no longer hold. Rather, an affective regime of reaction agitates bodies and orients lives at the molecular level. Massumi examines this agitation in relation to race, gender, personhood, and conspiracy thinking. The Personality of Power is a political treatise on fascism and its precursor movements, coupled with a philosophical inquiry into becoming reactionary as a collective process. Massumi calls the very concept of the person into question, asking what collective personhood means concretely. Nothing less than an alternative political logic is needed, turned to the task of thinking collective individuation.

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9781478028352

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Reviews

“By mobilizing and building creatively on Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual arsenal, Brian Massumi provides a new and convincing analysis of the political and affective logics of Trump and his followers, treating Trump as not an exception but a symptom of a general transformation of the nature and functioning of power. The result is an illuminating and sobering view on the contemporary political horizon.” -- Michael Hardt, author of * The Subversive Seventies *

“By mobilizing and building creatively on Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual arsenal, Brian Massumi provides a new and convincing analysis of the political and affective logics of Trump and his followers, treating Trump as not an exception but a symptom of a general transformation of the nature and functioning of power. The result is an illuminating and sobering view on the contemporary political horizon.” -- Michael Hardt “Brian Massumi theorizes the current subject of politics as an agitation of tendencies. Logics are not pathic and normative but speculative, prolific, and in solution. The substance of thought is not reason or cognition but the complexity and plasticities of potentia that saturate worldings generated by difference itself. A collective singular skims, churns, intuits, is lured and abducted by commotions in the intimate strangeness of impersonal, atmospheric, elemental forces speed-dialing reaction to threats before they emerge.” -- Kathleen Stewart “In this brilliant and timely book, Brian Massumi traces the shift from a fascist cult of personality to a fascist form of power that flows through the personality without taking the form of a coherent political position or being tethered to one charismatic individual. In this new arrangement of bodies and power, he demonstrates, the meanings of personhood, media, and politics are changed forever. Massumi’s theorizations of the treacherous times we inhabit offers both a compelling account of new machines of rule and desperately needed glimmers of the anti-fascist forms of life that can and must oppose them.” -- Jack Halberstam

Author Information

Brian Massumi is a Canadian philosopher and social theorist, and, until recently, Professor of Communication at the University of Montreal. He is the author of many books, including Couplets, Ontopower, The Power at the End of the Economy, and Parables for the Virtual, all also published by Duke University Press.

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