Personality of Power

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.

“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

• Part 1. Trumping the Personality of Power  1Part 2. Multiple Persons in Joint Possession  74Part 3. The Full Body and I  111Part 4. Error Incarnate  148Part 5. The Regime of Reaction  175Postscript. Distinctions of Distinction: For a Logic of Mutual Inclusion  274Bibliography  301Index  317