First & Last Emperors

the absolute state and the body of the despot

A slightly anomalous title for LBC, this book was written by two academics: Massumi, a canadian philosopher and political theorist (he also wrote Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation and A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari and translated Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition, Attali's Noise and Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus) and Dean, a professor of asian religious and ethics studies.

From the introduction:
From blinding light to disappearance, from the irruption of the State to the effacement of its subject. We return to late-capitalist America by way of ancient China following the self-dispersing body of the Despot. Our face, which we cannot countenance, is his. After all. Leave it to the bureaucrats. A history of the present for a leaderless future these eyes will never see. Do not ask us to remain the same.