Duke University Press, 2021 eISBN: 978-1-4780-2196-4 | Cloth: 978-1-4780-1373-0 | Paper: 978-1-4780-1466-9 Library of Congress Classification B105.E9M374 2021
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
In Couplets, Brian Massumi presents twenty-four essays that represent the full spectrum of his work during the past thirty years. Conceived as a companion volume to Parables for the Virtual, Couplets addresses the key concepts of Parables from different angles and contextualizes them, allowing their stakes to be more fully felt. Rather than organizing the essays chronologically or by topic, Massumi pairs them into couplets to encourage readers to make connections across conventional subject matter categories, to encounter disjunctions, and to link different phases in the evolution of his work. In his analyses of topics ranging from art, affect, and architecture to media theory, political theory, and the philosophy of experience, Massumi charts a field on which a family of conceptual problems plays out in ways that bear on the potentials for acting and perceiving the world. As an essential guide to Massumi's oeuvre, Couplets is both a primer for his new readers and a supplemental resource for those already engaged with his thought.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
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 Ontopower, The Power at the End of the Economy, and What Animals Teach Us about Politics, all also published by Duke University Press.
REVIEWS
“This collection of essays, perhaps more than any other of his groundbreaking books, shows Brian Massumi to be a profoundly political thinker. Its analyses of capitalism are startling, radical, and convincing. And its presentation of domination and violence as the curtailment of a more primary force that is life-enhancing and life-changing will alter the way you think about the political future. Readers will also find elegant accounts of many of Massumi's key concepts, including perception, the virtual, affect, aesthetics (as that which pertains to qualities of experience), sympathy, the outside, dividuality, and the supernormal. A fabulous resource for thinking otherwise.”
-- Jane Bennett, author of Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman
“Couplets is both an extraordinary speculative and political toolbox for thinking about our time and a magnificent introduction to Brian Massumi's own work, which is undoubtedly among the most original in contemporary thought.”
-- Didier Debaise, author of Nature as Event: The Lure of the Possible
"Valuable as an experiential introduction to the work of Massumi-Deleuze. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty."
-- R. M. Paddags Choice
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Note to the Reader vii Couplet 1 2019. Extreme Realism: In Sixteen Series 2 1986. Realer Than Real: The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari 15 Couplet 2 2000. On the Right of the Noncommunication of Cultural Difference 26 1998. Event Horizon 63 Couplet 3 2017. Becoming Animal in the Literary Field 72 2008. The Virtual, Double Capture, and the Urban-Architecture Manifold 94 Couplet 4 2009. Simondon's "Technical Mentality" Revisited 104 2012. The Supernormal Animal 119 Couplet 5 1997. Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible 134 2004. Not Determinately Nothing: Building Experience 158 Couplet 6 2014. The Crannies of the Present: On the Subject of Decision 177 2018. Dim, Massive, and Important: Atmosphere in Process 188 Couplet 7 2005. Going Kinetic: What Is Decision in a Post-Deliberative World? 209 2005. Barely There: The Power of the Image at the Limit of Life 232 Couplet 8 1995. Requiem for Our Prospective Dead: A Participatory Critique of Capitalist Power 286 2017. The Political Is Not Personal: Affect, Power, Violence 315 Couplet 9 2001. Tell Me Where Your Pain Is: Pointing to the Body without an Image 324 2015. The Art of the Relational Body: From Mirror-Touch to the Virtual Body 342 Couplet 10 2000. Parable of the Cave (Blind Version) 359 2003. Panoscopia 376 Couplet 11 2003. Urban Appointment: A Possible Rendezvous with the City 376 1999. Purple Phosphene 402 Couplet 12 2007. On Critique 406 2019. How Do You Make Yourself a Proposition? For a Whiteheadian Laboratory (with Erin Manning) 410 Notes 427 References 447 Index 461 Sources 485 Image Credits 489
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