Dark Deleuze (Forerunners: Ideas First)

French philosopher Gilles Deleuze is known as a thinker of creation, joyous affirmation, and rhizomatic assemblages. In this short book, Andrew Culp polemically argues that this once-radical canon of joy has lost its resistance to the present. Concepts created to defeat capitalism have been recycled into business mantras that joyously affirm “Power is vertical; potential is horizontal!”

Culp recovers the Deleuze’s forgotten negativity. He unsettles the prevailing interpretation through an underground network of references to conspiracy, cruelty, the terror of the outside, and the shame of being human. Ultimately, he rekindles opposition to what is intolerable about this world.

Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

• Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007
• The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism
• K-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher
• What Is Philosophy? (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism)
• Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism
• The Weird and the Eerie
• Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?
• #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader
• Intelligence and Spirit
• Sex and the Failed Absolute