(Goldsmiths College – University of London – October 2014)

Tracing the deeper genealogy of Accelerationism offers us a way out of the left/right political-economic impasse, as well as the impasse of the organic/machinic evolution of subjectivity. The primary limitation in Accelerationism today – left and right – is its foundation in materialism. The question of the evolution of spirit through the history of man was originally framed as action, negation, invention, and idea. Sovereignty offers a political stance to the end of history and the death of God which differs from that mapped out in Accelerationism so far, while Schizoanalysis offers a social and psychic praxis for this new world.

The return of Nick Land’s original nihilistic Accelerationism and the neoreactionary “right” politics affixed to it has spawned a “left” movement spearheaded by a new manifesto. I aim to trace the genealogy of Accelerationism in the work of Hegel, Sade, Nietzsche, Bataille, Deleuze & Guattari which sought a way out of the left/right divide. The question of the evolution of spirit through the history of man was originally framed by Hegel as an ideal state and read by Marx as a material revolution. Bataille’s Sovereignty offers an alternative political-economy based on an atheological inner experience in the practice of joy before death and a materialism of the sacred.

While the Accelerationist event has already taken place, its fidelity is only now finding itself articulated. We will look at how the psychoanalytic idea of transforming one’s symptom into a work of art – equally articulated by Lacan’s practice of the “sinthome” and Jung’s practice of the “magnum opus” – was extended by Deleuze and Guattari into the social and environmental field, making three ecologies of desiring production. By adding the missing fourth ecology of the physical body – supplied by Reich’s Orgonomy – we can construct a map by which to diagram Bataille’s General Economy of energy and information exchange on the globe and beyond, taking us far beyond dualistic politics, humanistic assumptions, and regressive neo-tribalism.