ONLINE FIRST
published on June 22, 2022
Ashley J. Bohrer
The Speed of Crisis: Slow Violence, Accelerationism, and the Politics of the Emergency Brake
This paper traces the history of accelerationism as a political philosophy, from its inception at Warwick University to its deployment by avowed white supremacists. Probing its philosophical commitment to a both a deterministic philosophy of history and a sacrificial logic of politics, I argue that even the initial elaborations of (non-race-based) accelerationism contained the seed of its development into violent white supremacy. The conclusion assesses a politics of deceleration as a strategy for countering accelerationism, ultimately arguing for the superiority of a Benjaminian politics of the emergency brake.