"I am the Chosen One!" With this exclamation Donald Trump crowns the national exceptionalism
his base upholds with a claim of personal exceptionalism. He leaves no doubt as to the
emotional note: "I am your vengeance!" He personifies reaction for the masses. Except in
today's microsegmented social media environment the "masses" no longer exist. Fascism's
cultural conditions have shifted. In The Personality of Power Brian Massumi retheorizes the
conditions of contemporary fascism through the prism of Trump's persona. Older theories based
on identification of the masses with a charismatic leader no longer hold. Rather an affective
regime of reaction agitates bodies and orients lives at the molecular level. Massumi examines
this agitation in relation to race gender personhood and conspiracy thinking. The
Personality of Power is a political treatise on fascism and its precursor movements coupled
with a philosophical inquiry into becoming reactionary as a collective process. Massumi calls
the very concept of the person into question asking what collective personhood means
concretely. Nothing less than an alternative political logic is needed turned to the task of
thinking collective individuation.
