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