In this month’s session, we are reading two texts by Brian Massumi. The first is an interview with Massumi by Mary Zournazi titled Navigating Movements (published in Hope: New Philosophies for Change, 2002), in which he talks about the transformative and performative potentials of affect. In the second text, Fear (The Spectrum Said), Positions, 2005, Massumi writes about the affective power of fear. Read together, these texts represent two different aspects of affect: hope and fear. 

Brian Massumi is a Canadian political philosopher and social theorist, who writes extensively about affect. He specializes in philosophy of embodied experience, media theory, and political philosophy. He teaches in the Communication Department of the Université de Montréal, where he directs the Workshop in Radical Empiricism.