Bøker av Brian Massumi

There is no such thing as rest. The world is always on the move. It is made of movement. We find ourselves always in the midst of it, in transformations under way. The basic category for understanding is activity - and only derivatively subject, object, rule, order. What is called for is an 'activist' philosophy based on these premises. The Principle of Unrest explores the contemporary implications of an activist philosophy, pivoting on the issue of movement. Movement is understood not simply in spatial terms but as qualitative transformation: becoming, emergence, event. Neoliberal capitalism's special relation to movement is of central concern. Its powers of mobilization now descend to the emergent level of just-forming potential. This carries them beyond power-over to powers-to-bring-to-be, or what the book terms 'ontopower'. It is necessary to track capitalist power throughout its expanding field of emergence in order to understand how counter-powers can resist its capture and rival it on its own immanent ground. At the emergent level, at the eventful first flush of their arising, counter-powers are always collective. This even applies to movements of thought. Thought in the making is collective expression. How can we think this transindividuality of thought? What practices can address it? How, politically, can we understand the concept of the event to emergently include events of thought? Only by attuning to the creative unrest always agitating at the infra-individual level, in direct connection with the transindividual level, bypassing the mid-level of what was traditionally taken for a sovereign subject: by embracing our 'dividuality'. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

This collection of twenty-four essential essays written by Brian Massumi over the past thirty years is both a primer for those new to his work and a supplemental resource for those already engaged with his thought.

In this original theory of power, Brian Massumi explains how the logic of preemption governs U.S. military policy in the War on Terror and how that logic spills over from the war front to the home front. Threats are now felt into reality and power refocuses on what may emerge. The mode of power embodying the logic of preemption is ontopower.

In his latest book, the influential critic Brian Massumi offers a new theory of political economy that demonstrates how emotional, affective and nonconscious decisions work together with rational self-interest in the shaping of neoliberalism. Massumi's analysis shows the potential for a new anti-capitalist politics.

In this concise book, the noted theorist Brian Massumi takes up the question of "the animal." Treating the human as animal, he develops a concept of an animal politics, which he uses as the basis of an expanded notion of the political.

Explores the mass production and consumption of fear in contemporary American society.

'The capacity to affect and to be affected'. This simple definition opens a world of questions - by indicating an openness to the world. To affect and to be affected is to be in encounter, and to be in encounter is to have already ventured forth.

Views the body and media such as television, film, and the Internet, as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation beyond the reach of the reading techniques founded on the standard rhetorical and semiotic models.

This text brings together a collection of essays that explore the implications of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy of expression in a number of contemporary contexts - beauty versus modernism, reflection to postmodernism, sensation and politics, and the conditions of emergence.