&&& Journal, 0: Tachophobia // Tachomania (2015)
Filed under journal | Tags: · accelerationism, aesthetics, art, philosophy, speed
“Issue 000 accentuates and renders visible the divergences and unexpected overlaps between “tachophobia” (fear of speed) and “tachomania” (obsession with speed), in the ongoing debates over accelerationism that have followed the publication of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ “#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics”.”
With texts by Benjamin Noys, Ivan Niccolai, Tom McGlynn, Sam Sackeroff, and Chris Shambaugh.
Edited by Jason Adams, Mohammad Salemy, and Tony Yanick
Publisher &&& Publishing, Spring 2015
Benjamin Noys: Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (2014)
Filed under book | Tags: · accelerationism, capitalism, communism, cyberpunk, futurism, labour, machine, marxism, movement, philosophy, speed, technology
“We are told our lives are too fast, subject to the accelerating demand that we innovate more, work more, enjoy more, produce more, and consume more. That’s one familiar story. Another, stranger, story is told here: of those who think we haven’t gone fast enough. Instead of rejecting the increasing tempo of capitalist production they argue that we should embrace and accelerate it. Rejecting this conclusion, Malign Velocities tracks this ‘accelerationism‘ as the symptom of the misery and pain of labour under capitalism. Retracing a series of historical moments of accelerationism – the Italian Futurism; communist accelerationism after the Russian Revolution; the ‘cyberpunk phuturism’ of the ’90s and ’00s; the unconscious fantasies of our integration with machines; the apocalyptic accelerationism of the post-2008 moment of crisis; and the terminal moment of negative accelerationism – suggests the pleasures and pains of speed signal the need to disengage, negate, and develop a new politics that truly challenges the supposed pleasures of speed.”
Publisher Zero Books, 2014
ISBN 1782793003, 9781782793007
130 pages
EPUB, EPUB (updated on 2019-6-9)
Comment (0)Benjamin Noys: The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · accelerationism, affirmationism, capitalism, critique, desire, difference, event, multitude, philosophy, politics, resistance, theory
The Persistence of the Negative offers an original and compelling critique of contemporary Continental theory through a rehabilitation of the negative. Against the usual image of rival thinkers and schools, Benjamin Noys identifies and attacks a shared consensus on the primacy of affirmation and the expelling of the negative that runs through the leading figures of contemporary theory: Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Antonio Negri, and Alain Badiou.
While positioning the emergence of affirmative theory as a political response to the corrosive effects of contemporary capitalism, Noys argues that, all too often, affirmation is left re-affirming the conditions of the present rather than providing the means to disrupt and resist them.
Refusing to endorse an anti-theory position that would read theory as the symptom of political defeat, The Persistence of the Negative traverses these leading thinkers in a series of lucid readings to reveal the disavowed effects of negativity operating within their work.
Overturning the limits of recent debates on the politics of theory, The Persistence of the Negative vigorously defends the return of theory to its political calling.
Publisher Edinburgh University Press, 2010
ISBN 0748638636, 9780748638635
196 pages
review (Baylee Brits, Parrhesia)
review (Raphael Schlembach, Shift Magazine)