This book is not an introduction to the emerging debate on accelerationism that has recently been taking place in fields such as continental philosophy, anthropology, aesthetics, and politics (Mackay and Avanessian 2014; Moreno 2013; Shaviro 2013; Wark 2013) but a discussion on the historical emergence of accelerationist political themes together with accelerationism’s dangers and dead ends. I want to assess two things in this review: the coherence of Benjamin Noys’s position regarding accelerationism and the potential of accelerationism in political theory that is either missed or dismissed by Noys.
Noys’s intervention has two undeniable good points. First, it reframes the debate on the Left in terms of process (acceleration, deceleration), and second, it recasts a “fragmented” story of the last hundred years of the Left in Europe. I qualify it as “fragmented,” since it is Benjaminian in spirit and modernist in form (montage)....
