Books by Armen Avanessian

Future Metaphysics (Theory Redux)

by Armen Avanessian

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.

#Accelerate The Accelerationist Reader

by Armen Avanessian, Robin Mackay

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.

Overwrite: Ethics of Knowledge―Poetics of Existence (Sternberg Press)

by Armen Avanessian

Since the early 1800s, the institution of the university has promoted creativity, critical thinking, and independent research. The more it has yielded to the pressures of the economy, however, the more it has betrayed its ideals. This, in short, is the common critique of the plight of the academy. But the inverse might be true: the depression, feelings of insufficiency, and permanent pressure to innovate experienced by academics might be symptoms of these original ideals, which, along with artistic production and the regime of aesthetics, has shaped the spirit of neoliberal capitalism.
Philosopher and political theorist Armen Avanessian argues that the ethical dimension of knowledge can produce a new reality. Can the speculative poetics of collaborative writing, he asks, free us from the dominant regime of the academy and, by extension, the art world? And how does this independence differ from the principle of self-fulfillment on which the ideal of the university and current conceptions of artistic research are based?
Overwrite: Ethics of Knowledge—Poetics of Existence is about the desire to write differently to situate oneself in the world differently. It is a book about the truth that is produced when a subject takes responsibility for its thinking, its experiences, its conflicts; when a subject rewrites and overwrites itself to become an other, and transforms the world in the process.