Content:

Pilsen Community Books presents
author Brian Massumi in person
in conversation with Matthew Goulish.

Presented in partnership with Every house has a door.

Free, no registration required.

“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.

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, What Animals Teach Us about Politics, and Parables for the Virtual, all also published by Duke University Press. He was instrumental in introducing the work of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to the English-speaking world through his translation of their key collaborative work A Thousand Plateaus (1987). With Erin Manning and 3Ecologies Project, he participates in the collective exploration of new ways of bringing philosophical and artistic practices into collaborative interaction.

Matthew Goulish is dramaturg and performer with Every house has a door which he co-founded in 2008 with director Lin Hixson. His books include 39 microlectures – in proximity of performance (Routledge, 2001), Pitch and Revelation—Reconfigurations of Reading, Poetry, and Philosophy through the Work of Jay Wright, co-authored with Will Daddario (Punctum Books, 2022), and Kingfisher (both are worse, 2024). He teaches in the Writing Program of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.