Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (Technologies of Lived Abstraction)
"Semblance and Eventis a book about the smallest things, and the biggest. Brian Massumi effectively overcomes what Gilles Deleuze once described as the 'wrenching duality' of aesthetics. Massumi brings together action and contemplation; he finds the extraordinary in the everyday, and vice versa. This is a book about the life in art, and the art in life: a political aesthetics for the twenty-first century."--Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University; author ofWithout Critiera: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics"Brian Massumi practices an 'activist' philosophy indeed, as his writing craft produces an intensive indiscernibility between the abstraction of philosophical concepts and the activation of aesthetic experience associated with art. This amazing book induces a participative thinking-feeling that does not criticize but rather sweeps away the deadening disjunctions paralyzing the adventure of experience."--Isabelle Stengers, philosopher of science, Free University of Brussels; author ofThinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts