File:Edmund Berger Grungy Accelerationism.pdf

Edmund Berger :: Grungy Accelerationism (Rizosfera/The Strong of the Future, SF003, 2016)

This essay by Edmund Berger is already a classic! Out on 3rd October 2015 in Berger’s blog Deterritorial Investigations Unit, the essay immediately received a positive echo in the internet accelerationist blogosphere, tackling the international debate on the accelerationist philosophy and culture by consolidating the perspective of the post structuralist thought - Deleuze, Foucault, Guattari, Lyotard and others - in 70’s in America. Moreover Grungy Accelerationism amplifies the perspective of what we define as «quantic or pulsional accelerationism» that we offer in the series of book «The Strong of the Future» by Rizosfera.

One year after its first release, Obsolete Capitalism is republishing the essay for a wider audience than the one of the accelerationist followers. The reason is twofold.

First, Berger’s essay sharply connects the radical culture of New York in the 70’s - Semiotext(e), Lotringer, the punk and the no wave movements - with the revolutionary force proposed by Foucault and Deleuze’s reevaluation of Nietzsche’s work through Klossowski, Bataille and Blanchot’s approach. The same approach was confirmed by the same French philosophers thanks to the direct relationship they established with Sylvère Lotringer during the Schizoculture event held at the Columbia University in New York in 1975. The «aberrant nuptials» set between the two different ‘Atlantic’ visions and the ‘rhizomatic filter’ proposed by Semiotext(e) would produce a wild clash, deeply underestimated in 70’s and 80’s. Only after the passing of time this cultural approach and lifestyle emerged from the American underground soil, and from the clubs in Manhattan to become a ‘central’ cultural frame in Europe.