“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.

United States, United States of America

Frontmatter
Contents
Part 1. Trumping the Personality of Power
The “F”-Word
This Book
The Decline and Rise of the Personality of Power
Who Decides?
Collective Individuation
Beyond the Interpersonal
Accidents of Persons
Media Figure, Distributed Event
Along Comes Trump
Miraculation
Are You an Act?
The Reign of the Self-Knockoff
Ornamental Masculinity
Affective Adjunction
License
Man-Standard, Standard Man
Becoming-Away from Man
Freedom
Deciding in the Exception
Fringe Fluidity
Rallying Affect
Conditions for War
Free Indirect Discourse
The Expansive Collapse of the First Person
The Storm of Unknowing
Trump Machine
Part 2. Multiple Persons in Joint Possession
Personhood Revisited
The Piety of the Personal
An Individual Is a Wave
Character
Society All the Way Up (and Down)
Common Likeness, Reconsidered
A Person Is a General Idea
Index and Event
Word and Event
Genetic Element, Abductive Impingement
Machinic Synthesis
Spanning the General
Levels
Collective Singular
An Idea Is a Little Person
Class-Naming the Collective Singular
Corporate Persons
Multiple Persons in Joint Possession
My Non-I
Strange Intruders
Thought the Thinker
Commind
Recap
Why?
Part 3. The Full Body and I
The Full Body Retooled
Figuring the Full Body
Schizzing the Structure of Society
Point-Sign
Umbral Union
Body Matter
Individual and Person
Micrologic and Amplification
Individualization
Scale and Dimension
Dividuation
Overcoding
Figural, Figurative, Figure
Affect and Intensities
Emotion
Signed, Affect
Resonating Chamber
Adjunction/Induction
Differential Attunement
Media Figure
The Man-Standard Again (and Again)
The Personification of Capital
Recap
Why?
Part 4. Error Incarnate
The Personification of Capital, Reflux
Error Incarnate
The Literal
Optive Matter
Perspective
Recap
Why?
Part. 5 The Regime of Reaction
Passion and Reaction
Adequate Ideas
From the Singular to the Singular-Universal
Uses and Abuses of the General
The Sting of the Normal
The Politics of Logic
The Logico-Politics of Resemblance
Signs Behaving Badly
The Understory: The Belief from Below
Conspiracy Brewing
Desire
Generalization upon Generalization, Belief upon Belief
Vague Presences
Association Unbound
Note on the Imagination
Belief Trumps Intent
Modes of Capture
Accidents of Persons Predisposed
The Pathic Is the Pivot
Faciality
Ressentiment
Fascisizing Tendencies
Micro-fascisms
A Turning Point?
Fascism Proper
Diagnosing
Ur-Fascism and the Question of Typology
The Economization of Hate
Stupidity
Flash Agents
Relay Agents
Belief in the Event
Postscript. Distinctions of Distinction: For a Logic of Mutual Inclusion
Identity
Distinctions of Distinction
Modal Distinction
Real Distinction
Umbral Union
Mutual Inclusion
Modal Metaphysics
Formal Distinction
Duality without Dualism
Strategic Abstract Generalism
Bibliography
Index

2025-03-14