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Brassier - Prometheanism and its Critics (Chapter from #Accelerate - The Accelerationist Reader)
A major Brassier page that clarifies the Promethean branch by defending scale, modernity, and the future against anti-modern retreat.
Archive condition
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Core idea
These pages matter because they state the Promethean and left-accelerationist branch in its most coherent public form. Accelerationism here is not raw intensification but a dispute about modernity, abstraction, planning, and what to do with the future.
Reader introductions and polemical essays do the sorting. They separate Promethean argument from both anti-modern localism and the darker Landian or reactionary trajectories that later came to dominate public shorthand.
That matters because without this cluster the section collapses into public caricature. These pages preserve the internal claims of the branch that most explicitly tried to reclaim abstraction for emancipatory politics.
How to read this text
Read first for how the page defines the future, abstraction, or planning before following the argument's immediate polemical targets.
Track where Prometheanism is contrasted with either folk politics, anti-modern retreat, or fatalist acceleration. That contrast is the page's conceptual hinge.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 4
Heidegger's critique of subjectivist voluntarism is echoed by Jean-Pierre Dupuy in his essay 'Some Pitfalls in the Philosophical Foundations of Nanoethics',1 in which he lays out what he thinks is wrong with debates about human enhancement and so-called transhumanism.2 The link connecting Dupuy's critique of techno scientific Prometheanism to Heidegger's critique of subjectivism is Hannah Arendt, who is Dupuy's chief inspiration. and whose thinking is directly indebted to Heidegger.
Definition · paragraph 18
But Prometheanism stands to be rehabilitated from the vantage of an understanding of rationality which views it not as a supernatural faculty but simply as a rule-governed activity-rational ity is simply the faculty of generating and being bound by rules.
Definition · paragraph 17
Dupuy proposes that what is genuinely valuable in Judea-Christian theology is the parallel it establishes between divine and human crea tivity. What is objectionable about Prometheanism is not humanity arrogantly claiming to be able to do what God does.
Definition · paragraph 4
Must we relinquish our ambitions and learn to be modest, as everyone seems to be enjoining us to do? I want to propose that Prometheanism requires the reassertion of subjectivism, but a subjectivism without selfhood, which articulates an autonomy without voluntarism.
Stakes · paragraph 2
We know that time will do something with us, regard less of what we do or don't do. So should we try to do something with time, or even to time? This is also to ask what we should do about the future, and whether it can retain the pre-eminent status accorded to it in the project of modernity.
Appears in sections
Accelerationism Branches and Debates Primary section
Left, right, unconditional, and popularized accelerationisms sorted into a cleaner research map.