Description
Book SynopsisIn
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 n
Trade Review“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 ContentsNote 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
