(…) As Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have shown, aesthetic critique will at the same time ultimately be used (by the neoliberal discourse of crisis) purely for the provision of catchwords for an ever new and seemingly faster “liberalization,” which is called upon from the other side as a means of deceleration and critical demarcation. Its formula would be: Aimless speed + Useless brakes = Nostalgic stagnation.
Acceleration + Direction = Progression towards a future, could be another formula. Progression can only be thought, can only be attained via acceleration, which stumbles beyond the re-territorialization drawn by both the left and the right. Perhaps that is why we rather need a speculative critique of Kant’s critical philosophy, which was initially a critique of speculative thinking (an anti-speculative critical philosophy that has been carried on and still remains powerful among the ever multiplying generations of the Frankfurt School). In light of the pervasive left miserabilism, Nick Land already speculated twenty years ago on the importance of a Meltdown that reveals the ridiculousness of the neoliberal and critical dance around the golden calf of crisis.
“Neoconservativism junks paleorevolutionism because it understands that postmodern climaxed-cynicism capital is saturated by critique, and that it merely clocks-up theoretical antagonism as inconsequential redundancy. Communist iconography has become raw material for the advertising industry, and denunciations of the speculative sell interactive multimedia. The left degenerates into securocratic collaboration with pseudo-organic unities of self, family, community, nation, with their defensive strategies of repression, projection, denial, censorship, exclusion, and restriction. The real danger comes from elsewhere.
{{}} Hot revolution. ‘[W]hich is the revolutionary path?’ Deleuze and Guattari ask”.