What Animals Teach Us about Politics by Brian Massumi

What Animals Teach Us about Politics Reviews

• 
  Stacie

  4 stars instead of 5 because I am not quite smart enough to follow Massumi's thinking the whole time, but he is brilliant.
• 
  Daniel Duarte

  Rico em insights que põem na roda conceitos de etologia, linguística, ontologia, política etc: o que é um instinto? como linguagem e brincadeira se compõem a partir de um mesmo jogo meta-linguístico? Como um excesso de vitalidade é parte constituinte do que é o vivo, embora o próprio autor não canse de repetir que as fronteiras (entre vivo e não-vivo, animal e vegetal, animal-humano) são sempre arbitrárias. Como o zoológico é um arranjo trágico de uma inclusão (do animal no humano) excludente (estão desde sempre recortados em uma moldura que compõem seu fundo próprio nas jaulas). Como o devir-animal de um escritor ou de uma criança reabrem as vias para a lógica do terceiro incluído (um animal, o humano e a mínima diferença entre eles), correlata de processos supernormais, onde o que está dado pode ser superado.
  Infelizmente, a prosa é bastante claudicante. Seu repertório de conceitos utiliza muito de suas próprias referências (Deleuze, Guattari, Whitehead, Bergson, Simondon, Ruyer etc.) e acrescenta variações a todo momento. Nem todas muito inspiradas. Exige um esforço de seguir de muito perto, para não perder o rastro dos argumentos.
  Seria o caso de perguntar: o que Massumi nos ensina sobre o que pensa?
  É um livro que se desenrola sob a constante ameaça de ruptura de qualquer apelo prático.
  Mas vale nem que seja pelas cutucadas nos neodarwinistas, nos praticantes de éticas normativas e naqueles que insistem em colocar o humano à parte.
• 
  Kris

  Massumi na základě Bergsona, Deleuze, Guattariho a taky Tinbergena [viz
  komiks s dinosaury] nabídne určitý (nový?) přístup ke člověku.
  
  Co zde najdete:
  - tvrdé jádro eseje je až na konci (v prostoru knihy uprostřed), je to 16 stran manifestu (moje slovo) zvířecké (nikoli ve smyslu surové či barbarské) politiky (pochopila jsem i ve smyslu jednati) sepsaného v bodech
  - mezi Zvířetem a Člověkem není kvalitativní rozdíl
  - žádné podpůrné argumenty pro vegany
  - podnětné rozšíření Bergsona
  - aplikaci Guattariho eticko-estetického paradigmatu
  - že instikt (intuice) je super
• 
  Thomaz Amancio

  Esse livro é um tesão: breve; sintetiza e resolve com elegância todo um campo de problemas; aponta pra várias outras referências e caminhos; ensina um jeito radicalmente efetivo de pensamento. Maravilhoso, maravilhoso.
• 
  Karen Ocana

  How to describe Ce que les bêtes nous apprennent de la politique. (Because I read the book in French. Dumb move?)
  -tough
  -theoretical, conceptual,...verging on didactic, verging on doctrinal. Some would say rigorous. Or maybe just philosophical.
  -technical and extensively explicatory, and meticulously foot-noted. Emphatically clear. Again, this is philosophy.
  -aspiring to be a paean to creativity, as opposed to normativity. Yet, let's be honest, philosophy is highly "regulatory" (or call it explanatory) if not normative, and this book is no exception: it repeatedly insists that "things" (usually relations) are one way, always always that way and never, never never any other way. There's a lot here that's black and white, even when relationality and grey areas are prized. But never confused. Kudos to you if you have the stomach for so much repetitive rigour.
  
  I didn't pick up this book by accident, but read it in the full knowledge of the author's style. I found it less intriguing than past books, although enlightening nevertheless. Unsurprisingly, it argues for a continuum of human-animality and animation, for vivacity and for vitality. But the style is about as vivacious as a driver's manual in drag, allowing itself to be light-hearted only when absolutely necessary. What you're learning to drive is a very specialized vocabulary pertaining to highly specialized logic (about immanence and expression, among other matters). Animals play. That much is clear. Human animals at their best are playful and creative. We'll agree on that. And play is another mode of combat. Modulatory combatesqueness if of the essence here.
  
  If you've read Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson you'll have a clue. If you've read Ruyer and Whitehead you'll do better. If, like me, you've read most of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari you might think you're fine, but you might not be if you're missing Gregory Bateson. Massumi's is a complex and accomplished variation on distinguished precursors. (And specifically contra Giorgio Agamben (with whose work I'm familiar) and other anthropocentric philosophies.) So, if you're curious to revive your acquaintance with the philosophy of subjectivities without subjects, go for the whole deal.
  
  And if you're going to read only one section of What Animals Teach us About Politics because you're short on time or patience, make it the last section, Addendum 3: Six theses to avoid re: animals.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  Brian Henderson

  Massumi’s brief What Animals Teach Us About Politics is composed of a short essay (the last 17 pages of which are comprised of numbered propositions) with a series of even shorter essay spinoff addendas, the last of which, “Six Theses on the Animal to Be Avoided,” works as a kind of summary. In the primary piece he unfolds the idea that instinct is a ludic and improvisatorially creative act (rather than a rigid and mechanistic one) and as such participates in a lived immediate way (at an infraindividual level) in the spectrum of consciousness by “mobilizing the possible”. This is to be understood as an embodied “primary consciousness” -- “thinking-doings” without a subject.
  
  He slides slightly sideways to come at this from another angle by exploring the Deleuzian notion of writing as the becoming-animal of the human. Instinct not only participates in consciousness but has “an esthetic yield”. “Life itself is inseparable from the esthetic yield it continuously enjoys,” he states. And if this expressive value is not strong enough, the act retreats to “mere designation”. But each of these probes, writing (“To Write Like a Rat Flicks its Tail”) and instinct, opens up the “capacity to surpass the given” through deformations because there is no doer, only doing.
  
  In keeping with this notion, the structure of the work itself feels collaged, ad hoc and improvised, though it remains rigorous.
  
  The weakest aspect of the book it seems to me is the attempted link from these compelling analyses of primary consciousness to the political. He’s nearly at the point of endorsing an instinctual politics and so has to fight off mass movements such as Nazism. How can political action be embodied, primary and doing-as-thinking? It must start with sympathy (but sympathy is not identificatory) and a mutual inclusion that “interpenetrates without losing distinction”. Massumi relies here (as elsewhere) on Bergson and Whitehead which does help. Perhaps, as in evolution, a mutation appears that surprises and surpasses the given which we must feel the potential of, grasp and with “improvisational prowess” move “toward as-yet-unknown existential territories” which might “house that heralded people to come.”
  
• 
  Duke Press

  “For those ready and willing to navigate the complexity of What Animals Teach Us about Politics, Massumi is a brilliant thinker who has produced another incisive critique that is likely to elicit interesting scholarship and responses, both from his immediate interlocutors and anyone else looking for a way out of humanity.” — Liam Mayes Montreal Review of Books
  
  "[C]omplex, dazzling, and sometimes elusive central essay bolstered by various addenda (propositions, supplements, and lavishly intricate endnotes) — presents an intensely ratiocinative meditation on how animals play and what that might mean for people." — Randy Malamud Common Knowledge
  
  “Brian Massumi, in What Animals Teach Us About Politics, makes a case for us to claim our essential animality in order to ascend to an ethic that is still truly (which is not to say, exclusively) human: vital, creative, and expansive. He builds his argument as if laying a very elaborate trap. (I want to say that it is a harmless, non violent trap, but that would be a lie. The price of being snared is having to rethink everything.)” — Naisargi Dave Somatosphere
  
• 
  Joel Gn

  In his usual Deleuzian fashion, Massumi introduces us to some fascinating insights concerning animality, while re-working some of his earlier reflections on affect and emergence. His differentiation of categorical/vital affect and the reading of a child's animal imitation as a ludic expression taking animality into varying 'human' contexts were relatively lucid, but his prose as a whole was rather verbose and lacked the accessbility of his earlier work, Parables for the Virtual.