BOOK LAUNCH
"The Personality of Power:
A Theory of Fascism for Anti-fascist Life"
by Brian Massumi
(Duke University Press, 2025)
AND
"Toward a Theory of Fascism for Anti-Fascist Life:
A Process Vocabulary"
by Brian Massumi
(Minor Compositions, 2025)
Doors: 6:30pm
Conversation: 7:00pm
FREE
Brian Massumi in conversation with Erin Manning will discuss his new and timely book, followed by a Q&A:
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.
In his companion book "Toward a Theory of Fascism for Anti-Fascist Life: A Process Vocabulary," Massumi compiles a glossary of the main concepts found in The Personality of Power.
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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.
Erin Manning is a professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is also the founder of SenseLab (www.senselab.ca), a laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. Publications include "For a Pragmatics of the Useless" (Duke UP, forthcoming), "The Minor Gesture" (Duke UP, 2016), "Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance" (Duke UP, 2013), "Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy" (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009) and, with Brian Massumi, "Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience" (Minnesota UP, 2014)
Copies of "The Personality of Power" will be available for purchase at the event.
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ACCESSIBILITY:
Rocket Science Room is on the second floor. There is a single flight of stairs off the main entrance with no wheelchair access, however there is a functioning elevator on the main floor. If you require assistance of any kind, please let us know! We'd be happy to accommodate any of your needs to the best of our ability.
Rocket Science Room est au deuxième étage. Il y a un seul escalier à l'entrée principale sans accès en fauteuil roulant, mais il y a un ascenseur qui fonctionne au rez-de-chaussée. Si vous avez besoin d'une assistance quelconque, faites-le nous savoir! Nous serons heureux de répondre à tous vos besoins au mieux de nos capacités.
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