Posts

WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED WITH THE POLITICS OF ACCELERATIONISM?

Reading Ben Noys' recent note  on accelerationism, one gets the feeling that many are starting to return (some more reluctantly than others) to the original sources of accelerationism to discover that, after so much fucking with L/Acc and R/Acc, the real fun was in the original accelerationism.  Ultimately, perhaps we've been misunderstanding the "speculative turn." Why do we speak so readily of overcoming the framework of language and the framework of the subject (typical tasks of postmodernism and poststructuralism), yet struggle so much to talk about overcoming the framework of human politics? Why is it harder to imagine the end of human politics than the end of capitalism? Because, indeed, however many post-apocalyptic scenarios we may dream up (including the end of capitalism), none is as apocalyptic as the end of human centrality. This is the terminal station beyond the well-known ends of history, culture, civilizations, economic systems and so on. The end of h...
Post a Comment
Read more

XENOSOPHY

Philosophy, as it is understood in the West, is born of a fundamental misunderstanding. A strange inbred approach that has been hindering thinking the outside from the very moment of its conception. Many have been the philosophers who have dealt with the notion of the 'friend' of wisdom (the philos of sophia ), but very few, by contrast, have engaged with the 'alien' of wisdom (with the exception, of course, of some branches of occultural thinking). And it is precisely this cut, this suppression or barrier dividing inner space (what is known) from outer space (the unknown), that promotes a notion of the 'strangeness' as some kind of enemy to be annihilated, or at best to be tamed. Probably, if philosophy had not been based on the ph ilos we would have arrived much earlier to the transcendental understanding that the 'strange' (the  xenos ) was not a thing to be tamed, nor an object or tool to be used, nor a resource to be consumed and extinguishe...
Post a Comment
Read more

THE ANTICAPITALIST MACHINES MANIFESTO

No one looked askance at the idea that robots could be 'slaves', or even that machines could have a science-fiction 'revolution' of their own. These seem to be very comfortable literary tropes. However, no one seems so happy with the idea that a robot or machine could reverse this spurious Hegelian relationship, and become a 'master' in the real life.   Nowhere is this better seen than in the recent 'AI panic' triggered by the intrusion of generative tools into artistic work.   The milieu of financial operations has been ruled by bots for decades, but it is only now, when generative AI threatens art, that we see human fundamentalism appear.  Artistic work, supported by the legal fiction of the figure of the 'author', is the last refuge of fundamentalist humanism which now sees its supposed  uniqueness  −as the only creative and dominant force in the planet− threatened.   Many claim that taking a stand against generative AIs is a way of opposing ...
Post a Comment
Read more

THE 'NEW REALISM' OF FEMINISM

It seems to me that the current rejection of feminism is increasingly based on a spurious rejection of its New Realism, and a desperate restoration of the symbolic orders of patriarchy. If something characterizes current feminism since 2018 (both social and academic feminism), it would be the notion that there is a material and structural masculinism; that is, a masculinism which includes but is not limited to the performative order, nor to the order of signs, not even to the order of language or the much-loved appearances (as opposed to the essences) of patriarchy.    T hen we can talk of a true realistic turn in current feminism, taking off from the frequent accusations (mostly from the conservative reactionaries) of being only a ‘symbolic’ struggle. Needless to say, accusations of ‘symbolic' or ‘culture’ struggles are eminently obtuse, since they understand culture as something separate from the real life... -Kind of  Nature/Culture  metaphysical dualism resucited...
Post a Comment
Read more