An apparently contradictory yet radically urgent collection of texts tracing the genealogy of a controversial current in contemporary philosophy.
Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies.
#Accelerate presents a genealogy of accelerationism, tracking the impulse through 90s UK darkside cyberculture and the theory-fictions of Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Iain Grant, and CCRU, across the cultural underground of the 80s (rave, acid house, SF cinema) and back to its sources in delirious post-68 ferment, in texts whose searing nihilistic jouissance would later be disavowed by their authors and the marxist and academic establishment alike.
On either side of this central sequence, the book includes texts by Marx that call attention to his own “Prometheanism,” and key works from recent years document the recent extraordinary emergence of new accelerationisms steeled against the onslaughts of neoliberal capitalist realism, and retooled for the twenty-first century.
At the forefront of the energetic contemporary debate around this disputed, problematic term, #Accelerate activates a historical conversation about futurality, technology, politics, enjoyment, and capital. This is a legacy shot through with contradictions, yet urgently galvanized today by the poverty of “reasonable” contemporary political alternatives.
Robin Mackay is a philosopher, Director of the UK arts organization Urbanomic, and Associate Researcher at Goldsmiths University of London.
Armen Avanessian is an Austrian philosopher, literary theorist, and political theorist.
Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes/Saint Denis. He published 25 books, including five in collaboration with Fé lix Guattari.
Félix Guattari (1930–1992), post-'68 French psychoanalyst and philosopher, is the author of
Anti-Oedipus (with Gilles Deleuze), and a number of books published by Semiotext(e), including
The Anti-Oedipus Papers, Chaosophy, and
Soft Subversions.Antonio Negri is a philosopher, essay writer, and teacher. A political and social activist in the 1960s and 1970s in Italy, he has taught political science for many years and has written numerous books on political philosophy, including
Marx beyond Marx, The Savage Anomaly, Insurgencies, The Porcelain Workshop: For a New Grammar of Politics (Semiotext(e)), and, in collaboration with Michael Hardt,
Empire,
Multitude, and
Commonwealth.
