Robin Mackay

Armen Avanessian

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.

The Accelerationist Reader

#Accelerate

Aceleracionismo

Andreas Töpfer

This book presents fifteen books - from monographs and translations to collections of essays - that emerged from the research platform Speculative Poetics, conceived by Armen Avanessian in 2011. This book gives a somewhat different introduction to contemporary speculative philosophy, raising questions on how thinking works and how thinking occurs in drawings or illustrations. How does a poetic thinking work that's not about but with art?0Andreas Töpfer's drawings in this book are not illustrations of the texts. Rather it's the other way around: they need to be read so that the texts can start to refer to them. In this sense, this book does not provide a shortcut to the theories presented; it does not aim to build a representational relationship between a pictorially correct understanding and a correlative conceptual thought. Instead, the drawings provide an occasion to think about thinking - a speculative thinking and writing in concept and through images.

20112014

Speculative Drawing

James Wagner

Future Metaphysics

Ethics of Knowledgepoetics of Existence

Overwrite

Anke Hennig

A Poetics

Present Tense

Werner Boschmann

Karen Sarkisov

Oceanography

Suhail Malik

Genealogies of Speculation looks to break the impasse between the innovations of speculative thought and the dominant strands of 20th century anti-foundationalist philosophy. Challenging emerging paradigms of philosophical history, this text re-evaluates different theoretical and political traditions such as feminism, literary theory, social geography and political theory after the speculative turn in philosophy. With contributions from leading writers in contemporary thought this book is a crucial resource for studying cultural and art-theory and continental philosophy.

Materialism and Subjectivity since Structuralism

Genealogies of Speculation

Luke Skrebowski

Torn between a revival of aesthetics and the persistence of conceptualism, critical writing about contemporary art has once again come to focus on differing views of its aesthetic dimension. The context and character of these debates has, however, shifted markedly since the 1960s, with changes in art practices, institutions, political contexts, and theoretical paradigms—and in particular, with the global extension of the Western art world since 1989. This inter- and transdisciplinary collection of essays by philosophers, artists, critics, and art historians, reconsiders the place of the aesthetic in contemporary art, with reference to four main themes: aesthetics as “sensate thinking”; the dissolution of artistic limits; post-autonomous practices; and exhibition-values in a global artworld. The essays originate in talks given on the occasion of an international conference on “Aesthetics and Contemporary Art” (2008), organized by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Middlesex University, London, in cooperation with the Collaborative Research Centre “Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits” (SfB 626), Free University Berlin. Contributors Éric Alliez, Armen Avanessian, Art & Language, Luis Camnitzer, Sebastian Egenhofer, Dorothea von Hantelmann, Brian Holmes, Pamela M. Lee, Stewart Martin, Christoph Menke, Peter Osborne, John Rajchman, Juliane Rebentisch

Aesthetics and Contemporary Art

Fusing speculative realism, analytical and linguistic philosophy this book theorises the fundamental impact the experience of reading has on us. In reading, language provides us with a world and meaning becomes perceptible. We can connect with another subjectivity, another place, another time. At its most extreme, reading changes our understanding of the world around us. Metanoia- meaning literally a change of mind or a conversion-refers to this kind of new way of seeing. To see the world in a new light is to accept that our thinking has been irrevocably transformed. How is that possible? And is it merely an intellectual process without any impact on the world outside our brains? Innovatively tackling these questions, this book mobilizes discussions from linguistics, literary theory, philosophy of language, and cognitive science. It re-articulates linguistic consciousness by underlining the poetic, creative moment of language and sheds light on the ability of language to transform not only our thinking but the world around us as well.

A Speculative Ontology of Language, Thinking, and the Brain

Metanoia

The invention of the present-tense novel is a literary event whose importance is on par with the discovery of perspective in painting. From the first novels shaped by interior monologues and the use of the present tense in the tradition of modernism, the present tense has, over the course of its century-long evolution, changed the conditions of fictional narration, along with our conceptions of time in a philosophical and linguistic framework. Indeed, to understand the work of an increasing number of contemporary writers – J.M. Coetzee, Tom McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, to name only a few – it is necessary to both understand the distinct linguistic and literary qualities of the present tense as well as its historical transformation into a genuine tense of contemporary storytelling. For the first time in literary scholarship, Present Tense: A Poetics offers an account of a profound development in 20th- and 21st-century fiction.

Markus Miessen

Lietje Bauwens

Wouter De Raeve

Alice Haddad

"Our decision to start the series of conversations with you is based on your implementation of the "xeno" in your perspective practices. Perhaps it is high time for a xeno-architecture to match aims to unpack the prefix xeno, probing what it entails -not merely rhetorically but also as a means of practice- in an attempt to bring the ideas it contains more concretely into the domain of architecture. It proposes to link the more philosophical discussions on the notion of xeno with the questions of instrumentalization and governance that are necessarily involved in the praxis and geopolitics of architecture. And it relates the significance of legal architectures and technologically driven transformations in the metaphysics of law back to the agenda of xeno-architecture."

Perhaps It Is High Time for a Xeno-Architecture to Match

How might we conceive of comradeship during a time that is increasingly predetermined by algorithms and governed by techno-politics? Austrian philosopher and political theorist Armen Avanessian chronicles his stay in Miami Beach during Art Basel as an experiment in writing about our times of individual optimization and digitization. An inventory of the self in the second personand a philosophers reflections in the infinity pool of the art worldthis book reckons with a new time complex as well as the aesthetics and infrastructures of the contemporary. Can we advance from conditions of financial feudalism and climate change to a progressive poetics of the digital? The city of tropical noir becomes a case study for a geopolitics and economics of the future: Miami vision, Miami vacation, Miami fiction, and Miamification. Avanessian is recognized for his teaching and fellowships at the Berlin free School, Columbia University, and Yale, among others. His work on speculative realism and accelerationism in art and philosophy has found a wide audience beyond academia.

Miamification

The triumph of technological rationality and of the sciences as a whole has by no means provided answers to humanity’s great questions. Instead, it has raised new and old questions and problems. To orient ourselves in the twenty-first century, we must take a new look at the central categories of philosophy that, often unbeknownst to us, continue to shape our everyday thinking. Future Metaphysics is an attempt at restating the importance of the great metaphysical categories for the present: how our contemporary predicament forces us both to reclaim them and to give them a radically new twist. Armen Avanessian re-examines and displaces categories like substance and accident, form and matter, life and death, giving them an unexpected twist. What if the idea of accident, for instance, had to take into account the many new kinds of glitches, crashes and crises – from finance to ecology, from technological catastrophes to social collapses – that permeate our culture and make everyday news? Can we keep on using this concept as it was traditionally meant to be used when risk and chance have become part of the very substance of our world, so rendering the distinction between substance and accident meaningless? The other concepts and distinctions require a similar interrogation, giving birth to a new metaphysical landscape, where the most urgent realities of the twenty-first century impinge on the most fundamental categories of thought.

Sophie Wennerscheid

Søren Kierkegaard's radical protestant philosophy of the individual—in which a person's leap of faith is favored over general ethics—has become a model for many contemporary political theorists. Thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou have drawn on its revolutionary spirit to position truth above the constraints of political systems. In Kierkegaard and Political Theory, contributors from a wide range of disciplines—including theology, sociology, philosophy, and aesthetics—examine just how crucial Kierkegaard's anti-institutional thinking has been to such efforts and to modernity as a whole. The contributors convincingly position Kierkegaard's radical philosophy as the starting point for contemporary political theory. They show how he pioneered a modernity defined as an argument— an experience—of the impossibility of rationally comprehending a system of thinking. They show how religious and aesthetic experiences function as a response to this impossibility, how their coherence in politics must always be questioned, especially in history's extreme example: totalitarianism. Engaging this and many other subjects, they provide a compelling new line in Kierkegaard studies that illuminates new contours of our political thought. Armen Avanessian is founder of the research platform Speculative Poetics at the Free University Berlin. Sophie Wennerscheid is professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Ghent.

Armen Avanessian

Books

Your next favorite book is out there