It was with this in mind that accelerationism — a term coined by Benjamin Noys in his 2010 critique of post-May 1968 Continental philosophy, The Persistence of the Negative — was later seized upon by Mark Fisher and, perversely, affirmed. Noys’ book was, by and large, a critique of how Continental philosophy was obsessed with affirming the negative. Fisher, in deftly trollish fashion, then affirmed Noys’ negative critique. In hindsight, this may have been a mistake on Fisher’s part but, for better or for worse, the name stuck, straddling a bizarre confluence of competing positions.

Fisher arguably usurped the term to demonstrate that Noys’ seemingly benevolent position, looking down on this entanglement of negations and affirmations, was a fallacy. Whereas Noys attempted to untangle the mess, Fisher affirmed all sides, as if Noys’ project was itself a reification of the negative — extending the very problematic it hoped to critique. Fisher was nonetheless attuned to the ways that this negative feedback loop of affirmations and negations was the primary cause of the hauntological “stuckness” of the twenty-first century. Indeed, the online discourse surrounding accelerationism had emerged explicitly from the financial crash of 2007/08, following which the Left and its protest movements seemed wholly incapable of effectuating real change. Whereas Noys was concerned about the extent to which a philosophical negativity had persisted, Fisher was concerned about how this negativity was now politically in crisis. Its presence was not a concern, but its impotence was. His accelerationist writings sought to establish a practical strategy for how this crisis might be overcome.