Utilizing a wide range of theoretical and creative texts, Phillips offers an examination of subjectivity as considered, enacted, and embodied, through the frame of minimalist aesthetics. Provocatively, he makes the claim that lived experience is capable of being refined according to the paradoxically rich parameters of a minimalist aesthetic.

Introduction 1. Stirrings of Discontent: A Theoretical Context 2. Becoming Fiction: Sarraute, Stein, Hemingway 3. Carver, Sarraute, Toussaint 4. Echenoz, Fabre, DeLillo 5. Lights Camera Action 6. 'Mark the Music': Microsound and Becoming-Silence 7. The Masochistic Body 8. The 'Somaesthetic' Turn: Becoming-Minimal 9. On Virtue, Verbs, and the Virtual Conclusion and Post Script: On Being Able