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, the conditions of emergence, and the virtual in politics, poetry, music and digital culture. The volume also makes available an interview with Guattari which clearly restates the aesthetic paradigm that organizes both his and Deleuze's work.

A Shock to Thought brings together essays that explore Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy of expression in a number of contemporary contexts. It will be of interest to all those in philosophy, cultural studies and art theory. The volume also contains an interview with Guattari which clearly restates the 'aesthetic paradigm' that organizes both his and Deleuze's work.

A Thousand Plateaus continues the work Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari began in Anti-Oedipus and has now become established as one of the classic studies of the development of critical theory in the late twentieth century. It occupies an important place at the center of the debate reassessing the works of Freud and Marx, advancing an approach that is neither Freudian nor Marxist but which learns from both to find an entirely new and radical path. It presents an attempt to pioneer a variety of social and psychological analyses free of the philosophical encumbrances criticized...

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

Artist, psychoanalyst, and feminist theorist Bracha Ettinger presents an original theoretical exploration of shared affect and emergent expression, across the thresholds of identity and memory. Ettinger works through Lacan's late works, the anti-Oedipal perspectives of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as object-relations theory to critique the phallocentrism of mainstream Lacanian theory and to rethink the masculine-feminine opposition. She replaces the phallic structure with a dimension of emergence, where objects, images, and meanings are glimpsed in their incipiency, before they are...

Over the past several decades, Italian revolutionary politics has offered a model for new forms of political thinking. Radical Thought in Italy continues that tradition by providing an original view of the potential for a radical democratic politics today that speaks not only to the Italian situation but also to a broadly international context. First, the essays settle accounts with the culture of cynicism, opportunism, and fear that has come to permeate the Left. They then proceed to analyze the new difficulties and possibilities opened by current economic conditions and the crisis of the...

Although the body has been the focus of much contemporary cultural theory, the models that are typically applied neglect the most salient characteristics of embodied existence--movement, affect, and sensation--in favor of concepts derived from linguistic theory. In Parables for the Virtual Brian Massumi 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.
Renewing and assessing William James's...

In What Animals Teach Us about Politics, Brian Massumi takes up the question of "the animal." By treating the human as animal, he develops a concept of an animal politics. His is not a human politics of the animal, but an integrally animal politics, freed from connotations of the "primitive" state of nature and the accompanying presuppositions about instinct permeating modern thought. Massumi integrates notions marginalized by the dominant currents in evolutionary biology, animal behavior, and philosophy notions such as play, sympathy, and creativity into the concept of nature. As he...

Rational self-interest is often seen as being at the heart of liberal economic theory. In The Power at the End of the Economy Brian Massumi provides an alternative explanation, arguing that neoliberalism is grounded in complex interactions between the rational and the emotional. Offering a new theory of political economy that refuses the liberal prioritization of individual choice, Massumi emphasizes the means through which an individual's affective tendencies resonate with those of others on infra-individual and transindividual levels. This nonconscious dimension of social and...