“We Can Hate This World With Love”. An Interview

Abstract

Philosopher Andrew Culp in this interview explains the main aspects of his dark Deleuzianism. Culp notes that his work owes much to the theories of Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thucker. He develops their ideas further, first among them the concept of asymmetry, which means that radical politics arises from a formal dissimilarity between the sides involved in a conflict. From Culp’s point of view, it was the idea of dissimilarity that made poststructuralist thinking attractive to many political philosophers because it allowed them to conceive of political power beyond the categories of power, hegemony, and domination. The philosopher explicates the main concepts that he has introduced, in particular productivism and connectivism. Culp characterizes the form as a specific consequence of cold war dynamics accompanied by maximization of productivity. He claims that the rejection of labor will allow us to pay attention to alternative aspects of social life. By connectivism Culp means the belief that communication can solve any socio-political problems. Culp criticizes this approach, which is associated especially with Bruno Latour, and argues that there is now no lack of information or communication. However, this has not facilitated solving urgent problems, most of which are political rather than technological or informational. Culp comments on the differences between his project and accelerationism. From his point of view, left-wing accelerationists try to retain the good aspects of technology and discard the harmful ones, which makes their approach similar to Proudhon’s. In discussing universal basic income, Culp points to the dangerous intersection of left-wing accelerationism and libertarianism. The philosopher also notes the fundamental divergences between his position and the techno-futurism of Nick Land. Culp goes on to clarify the political model of conspiratorial communism that he proposed in Dark Deleuze and also comments on the idea of hatred for this world as a form of utopian thinking.