Text page

Simon O' Sullivan - Accelerationism, Prometheanism and Mythotechnesis

"Simon O' Sullivan - Accelerationism, Prometheanism and Mythotechnesis" belongs to the public history line where accelerationism is sorted into usable branches, slogans, and retrospective explanations.

Support page

Archive condition

The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.

Core idea

These pages matter because accelerationism is the archive's most overused public keyword. The site needs a cluster that distinguishes history, primer, and public explanation from the doctrine-like certainty that later reception often projects onto the term.

Primers and histories do the work by sorting competing branches, periodizations, and origin stories. They organize a noisy field into public maps that can be argued over, revised, or contested.

That matters because later debates about accelerationism often begin by flattening distinct projects into one thing. This cluster keeps the section anchored in branch logic, genealogy, and disagreement rather than slogan inflation.

How to read this text

Read first for what version of accelerationism the page is naming or periodizing before following its judgment about the movement.

Track how the page distinguishes origins, branches, or public uses. Those distinctions are usually more important than the headline verdict.

Representative extracts

Definition · paragraph 98

If reason and science are of the matheme, broadly construed, which is to say the Promethean impulse in its rational and technological form, then mythotechnesis might be a name for these practices that attend to a kind of vitalism alongside the more artificial constructs of the human, practices that involve an abstraction that is both formal and affective (or, to put this another way, mythotechnesis is a diagonal between the rational and the animal). Any accelerationism, it seems to me, will need

Definition · paragraph 96

This very partial and reductive schema (which leaves out any analytic philosophical precursors) also allows a more pointed reflection on the differences between an accelerationism positioned on the right of the diagram (again, between Badiou and Lacan) with that on the left, between Deleuze and Guattari (where we might place Land and Ccru more generally).

Definition · paragraph 11

I am also interested in what might be left out of this particular aesthetic (if, indeed, it can be called as such) – that is to say, the limits of philosophical accelerationism when it comes to art practice and the production of subjectivity.

History · paragraph 125

O’Sullivan, Simon, ‘Accelerationism, Hyperstition and Myth-Science’, in Tim Matts, Ben Noys and Dane Sutherland (eds.), Accelerationism and the Occult, New York, Punctum Books, 2015.

History · paragraph 124

O’Sullivan, Simon, ‘The Missing Subject of Accelerationism’, Mute, available at: www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/missing-subject-accelerationism (accessed 14 August 2015).

Appears in sections

Read alongside

Nearby texts

Records

Guides

People

Concepts