Matt Colquhoun's Blog, page 57

Cutting the Knot of Incompetence

For my sins, I’ve been reading a lot of Badiou recently. In fact, I’ve been reading him for most of the pandemic. After many years of tactical avoidance, I’ve found myself coming full circle, following a trajectory that I imagine is quite common — first, dismissing him out of hand for his unorthodox and heretical […]

XG Reading Group 2.0: Without Further Badiou

To view this content, you must be a member of xenogoth's Patreon at £2.5 or more - Click "Read more" to unlock this content at the source

The End of Trump or the End of History

I enjoyed Jehu’s blogged fragment from yesterday on Trump’s impending second impeachment. As far as Jehu is concerned, impeach him we must… Not because he incited an insurrection, but because he is, beyond all doubt, the most popular political figure in the United States today. Unless they impeach him, there will likely never be anyone who […]

一个无条件加速主义Primer I: Chinese Translation of the U/Acc Primer

The reach of my U/Acc Primer continues to astound me but its (partial) translation into Chinese is something I never would have anticipated. Google translate doesn’t like translating Chinese very much but, from what I can gather, the “anarcho-nihilist” blog Free Form Suite has translated the introduction to the reader here. Whether they intend to […]

The Philosophy of Salvagepunk: XG at the Association for the Design of History

On 16th January at 21.00 UTC+1, I’ll be giving a talk at the Association for the Design of History. I’ll be sharing some new research for this event, framing Evan Calder Williams and China Miéville’s concept of “salvagepunk” as the missing link between hauntology and accelerationism — two conceptual approaches to late capitalism that are […]

Covid Libertarianism and Capitalist Realism

Following on from yesterday’s response to a criticism of my Covid libertarianism post, I’ve only just noticed that Chris has weighed in with a very nice post of his own on Covid subjectivities. I had planned to go through Chris’s post but I actually find much to agree with here. Not that that is a […]

Covid Libertarianism and Molecular Freedom

Adam has written a response to my previous post on Covid libertarianism on his blog. It collects together the myriad misunderstandings that have followed my post from readers on the right but it is at the very least clearly constructed, and therefore the first argument against my post I’m happy to respond to. That being […]

Junk Capital: On the Anti-Burrovian Trajectory of Nick Land

In his recollection of his time at the University of Warwick, as a student studying under Nick Land, Robin Mackey describes how, then as now, Land’s reputation preceded him: Before I met Land, I already knew of him through the gossip of new undergraduates taken aback by what they had heard on the grapevine: Did […]

Peak Boring Dystopia: On the Legacy of FarmVille

“Boring dystopia” is a real Mark Fisher sleeper hit — an “anti-Facebook Facebook group”. In Roisin Kiberd’s evergreen report on the group for Vice, she describes what it was used for: Members shared pictures of an England rarely seen in the meticulously filtered world of social media: mundane, unlovely images of broken machinery and canned […]

DOOMscrolling

2020 was a piece of shit mostly spent doomsrolling and there’s a sick irony that I couldn’t tear myself away from obituaries for MF DOOM on New Years Eve. I tweeted about it, in the spur of the moment, initially remembering the disappointment felt at a gig where Madlib was playing and interrupted his set […]