The Minor Gesture

"I have been enthralled and held by this book! Erin Manning has given us a new theory of bearing, as well as a new elaboration of gesture, going beyond Balzac’s theory and Agamben’s interpretation of it. She doesn’t lament the loss of gesture but celebrates gesture's minoritization." - Fred Moten, author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition

"How can we voice the unsayable, unsettle the categorical, reach for that which lies beyond conceptualization? How can we enter that midstream of movement, becoming, and differentiation that courses between the banks of the given, yet from which all perceiving, doing, and thinking wells? In this passionate book Erin Manning answers: by heeding the wisdom of those whom the majority call 'autistic.' From their experience she derives a vocabulary—of attention, inflection, directionality, incipience, sympathy, and the undercommons—that carries forth the impetus of life in the minor key. This is a book for scholars, for activists, indeed for anyone in love with life."  - Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen

"Manning emphasizes a kind of affect that brings to the fore a feeling of being a part of a larger environment, something relational, something that helps people to see themselves as part of something bigger." - Karen Simecek, Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

"The Minor Gesture is a fascinating and intellectually challenging book that successfully problematises common-sense (neurotypical) understandings of perception, action and embodiment. In doing so it politicises mundane everyday experience and calls for sustained critique of normatively framed lifeworlds." - Ben Simmons, Disability & Society

"A wide-ranging and carefully argued book. . . . Now that we know just how much mental activity escapes our conscious awareness and defies standard and dialectical accounts of knowledge, reason, and agency, efforts like Manning’s to better understand neurodiversity and to mobilize that understanding for research-creation and political activism alike are invaluable." - Eugene W. Holland, Contemporary Political Theory